My grandmother grew up poor, having lost her father when she was only a couple of months old. Indeed, the only way she was able to finish high school in the spring of 1929 was by spending her last two years of school as a live-in housekeeper for a family in town, with her pay going to support her mother.

Like I said, she graduated in 1929, only a few months before the stock market crash. She briefly went to work for one of the two stores in town -- working for my great-grandfather -- but then left to take a higher paying job when the other store in town went bankrupt and was taken over by a company, Watson's out of Knoxville, Tennessee, that liquidated such stores.

Here's where it got to be fun. My grandmother made only half of the salary the men made -- but her boss soon found that she was the most reliable employee in the store, and gave her a raise to what the men were making on the condition that she not tell anyone. Then the bookkeeper quit, and my grandmother was asked to take on the job at a rate that made her the second highest paid employee in town, since she would also continue her work as a clerk.

After a six months or so, the liquidation of stores in the area was over and the company prepared to pack up and leave. My grandmother was asked to come move to Tennessee and work in the offices -- but she didn't want to leave her mother or her new young beau, my grandfather. They married a few months later, and had four children, running the town grocery store and movie theater for much of their marriage.

Fast forward six decades. A new department store came to open in the area where she lived, selling primarily discount apaprel. The name? Watson's. She checked with the manager, and sure enough, it was the same company that she had worked for sixty years before. He called the main office, and they confirmed that my grandmother had worked for them -- and that she was the oldest living employees of the company! They had her make a video on customer service for their training program, and it was shown until the company was bought out in the late 1990s. Funny, isn;t it, how things in life sometimes go full circle?

Posted by: Greg at 12:58 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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