Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Your Father's Work History

It's Saturday Night -

time for more Genealogy Fun!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to:

1)  Sunday, 19 June, is Father's Day.  Let's celebrate by writing a blog post about our father, or another significant male ancestor (e.g., a grandfather).

2)  What was your father's occupation?  What jobs did he have throughout his life?  Do you know his work history?

3)  Tell us all about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook Status post.

The majority of the time, my father worked in supermarkets as a produce clerk or produce manager. He worked for several different stores but the longest were for LoRay Market and Safeway.

The LoRay store in Walnut Creek was only a few blocks away, but he always drove, primarily because he started work at 5ish. This gave him time to put out all of the produce that was removed from the shelves and put into cold storage refrigerators. I think this was before they created display cases with refrigeration. Today, they are kept cool and have automatic watering systems. I remember my father using a small, narrow, hose to wash down the vegetables while in the displays.

In high school, my friend Beth and I would stop by the store to get an apple to eat for a snack. Sometimes we bought day-old donuts from the bakery for 5 cents. By this time, I think he was the produce manager.

He also brought home tired fruit and vegetables for us to eat. My mother would make jam from old strawberries. We would get the outer cuttings from lettuce and old shriveled carrots and celery to feed our goat and rabbits.

One of the things he did for the store was make the weekly ad signs that went in the front window. He had large Magic Markers in black, blue, and red, and would write up the various items that would be on sale and its price, such as Corn Flakes 4 for a $1, or Lettuce 2 for 29¢. Remember when stores all had large windows in front?

Later, he became a buyer for the store and left the house even earlier (like 3 am) to go to the produce market in Oakland to make purchases. He worked in the company office in Concord and I remember visiting there a few times. LoRay was bought out by Ralph’s Market and he worked for them for a few years and then was let go.

Once he had a fruit stand in Hayward. He would get the produce from the markets in Oakland and then sell them at his stand. When I was locked out from my job at BART in 1979, I worked some with him. I don’t know how long he had the stand.

Luckily, he was able to get a job with Safeway Stores and rejoined the Retail Clerks Union. He worked for them until his retirement in 1990. Here is a photo of my Dad from an ad for Bon Appetit, an upscale store that Safeway owned.

Bill is on the right

From an interview I did with my dad, I learned about his early jobs working at Mel’s Service Station (Flying A) in Concord, as a gofer for Fitzpatrick Chevrolet also in Concord, and on weekends as a “push starter” for midget racers at the race track in Pacheco.

I always thought that the produce displays where my dad worked always were so neat and orderly--just as he was.

Copyright © 2020 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.