Remember Woolworth's?

Remember Woolworth's that wonderful five and dime store that went out of business in the late nineties? I worked for them once. Here's my story.

I heard that Woolworth's was coming to our new mall and I wanted a piece of the action. And boy, did I get it! I walked over there one day to be interviewed for a job. The manager looked a lot like Robert Vaughn, the actor, and he invited me to sit down in his office and he said to me, "Sell yourself!"

Well, I was quite taken aback because I had never sold myself before. But I caught on and began to tell him how talented I was in the advertising business, having won a prize once for the best advertisement and did some other work in advertising. And I could draw!

I successfully sold myself and I was put on the payroll, as the only person in the advertising department. But the store was still closed and the merchandise was being labeled with prices and stocked where it belonged. They asked me if I wanted to help with this kind of work while I waited for my advertising job to materialize. I was not one to turn down a few bucks, so I said, "O K."

The people who were opening the store came up from Minneapolis and would be leaving when their work was finished, except for the manager. Here's where I learned what people from the big city could be like. I once heard the manager yelling at the new department heads, degrading and humiliating them in a horrible way that completely sickened and disgusted me. But then some of the department heads had their fun with the lowly help like me,too. Well, they didn't know that I was hired as the advertising person. One pale little male department head gave me and another lady orders one day to clean up after the workmen had finished working in the cafe. It was full of cigarette butts and we had to get down on our hands and knees and pick up the butts and put them in a container by hand. He looked a lot like Audie Murphy, the war hero turned actor, but a hero, he was not! Why we obeyed this nin-com-poop, I'll never know.

The personal assistant was a lady with a bad leg and she had it in for me, too. She would jump on me for no reason and let me have it with both barrels . I was bewildered because I wasn't doing anything wrong and didn't deserve to be treated that way. She later said her leg gave her a lot of pain and so she took it out on others. Bull! She enjoyed what she was doing.

One day I was summoned into the personal office and the lady with the limp asked me in a very unpleasant voice, "What are YOU doing here?" You know, like I had a nerve even setting foot on that holy ground. Then the personal director, a nice lady, said, "Annabelle is our advertising person."

Well, whatever her name was, Margaret, I think, almost fainted! From then on she greeted me very pleasantly every time she saw me, calling me Love or Honey.

And the pale little department head that had fun giving me demeaning jobs trembled in fear every time he saw me after that. I would glare at him hoping to see him shrivel up and die.

But there were other reasons why that job was not for me, so I left. I knew the man that took over for me, but by then I had moved to another town so I don't know how it went for him.

It wasn't terribly long before Woolworth's closed all its stores and became just a memory.