SOUND AND VISION MEMORIES 1973

 

I was 19, still living at home and working overnights at Kroger throwing stock. It was a rite of passage for baggers, to leave the front end and work night stock. A couple days a week after work, I would go to classes at LCC. This song was on frequent rotation on the station we listened to while we worked. One of the guys had a radio and he would tape down the on button on one of the intercom receivers and put it next to the speaker. I always liked the jazzy guitar licks and the lines "I'd like to remind you at four in the morning, my world is very still/The air is fresh under diamond skies/Makes me glad to be alive."

 

The job was a massive eye-opener for me. The North End where the store was located was a mix of established white and black folk, some Latino and later, as the Vietnam War ended, Vietnamese and Hmong refugees moved to the area. I grew up in the country, went to a rural district so white that the only minorities in my graduating class were a Latina girl and (of all things) a Hawaiian guy. 

 

The manager was a gruff old boy whose name was Bud. He had about a zillion years in the company and one day I overheard a couple of senior grocery guys discussing whether Bud would make it to retirement. "Why not?" I asked. They explained to me that Kroger (at the time) had a nasty habit of finding some reason to fire senior managers who were on the brink of retiring, presumably saving the company money. I was shocked. I thought to myself: you spend a good chunk of your life with a company, put up with all the bullshit that this entails only to be fucked out of a pension in the end? This was a watershed moment in how I viewed work and how I viewed my future. Good grief, how can Kroger get away with this and is this the prevailing attitude in most companies? To my mind, why then bother with a career? Now, I was awfully young and impressionable at the time but this stuck in my mind. I stayed with Krogs for 25 years, vested a pension (thanks Union) and left to do something different.