The short answer is the typical one. Privilege. Smith’s Men’s Wear had been a fixture on the first block of South Cochran in Charlotte since 1934. (Smith’s is on the right end of stores in the picture above.) They had always had a part-time position for a high school boy. The job was not exciting, but it was public. Sweep the floors, sweep/shovel the sidewalk in front of the store, wash the windows once a week, constantly polish the glass display cases, break down boxes, empty the trash. But once in a while, if all that other stuff was done and everyone else was with a customer, I got to work on the sales floor.

For several years, Smith’s had hired the high school “Mayor.” The Mayor was the equivalent of President of the Student Council. That was the job I had coveted since the eighth grade. I didn’t know it came with a cash-paying job too. But it did.

The election took place in the late spring. That should be a story of its own. I won. The guy who had the jobs (Smith’s and Mayor) before me was Val Nelson. He got ready to go off to college and he was the one who told me to go in and talk to Mr. Smith. I did and I was hired.

It paid 90 cents an hour. That was minimum wage in 1967. Actually, it wasn’t minimum wage. It was the minimum they were allowed to pay to hire a minor for less than 20 hours a week. Since I was working an hour and a half each day after school, four hours on Friday night and 8 hours on Saturday for a weekly total of 18 hours, I met the standards to pay a sub-minimum wage. I also got a 20% discount on anything in the store. That was the whole package.

I liked working there. Mr. Harold Smith (always Mr.), Dick Cooper, and Russ Last name I can’t recall (maybe Barnhart or Bernard, can’t recall) were the staff. Later, they would add a woman, Chris (Crystal) Taylor who brought a certain talent in dealing with women customers that the men didn’t seem to have. Every person on the sales floor could sell anything in the store except suits. Suits were sold by the men. I suspect there was a commission on suit sales for everyone but me and they didn’t trust the big sales to a kid.

I had a knack I discovered early. It was a narrow niche but no one on the floor could sell more men’s underwear to older women than me. We even had a contest one weekend. Starting Friday afternoon when I came in until we closed the store at 5 pm Saturday, I sold more underwear than everyone else in the store combined! I cannot explain this talent, but women, especially older women, displayed a moment when they were buying a present that seemed to say “but what else?” My immediate answer was underwear. And they almost always they said yes. We are a collection of weird talents. It got to the point that anyone handling an older woman customer always finished up by handing them off to me to ring them up and add some boxer shorts to her order.

I wish I could say I held that job through my Senior year of high school, that I passed it off to the next Mayor the following summer as I got ready to go to college. It didn’t work out that way. Instead I quit Smith’s to go to work across the street at some chain discount store. There I became a union member for the first time (much to the chagrin of my Dad) and made $1.40 an hour (the actual minimum wage). But I never felt a “part” of something at work again until I started teaching at Ithaca High School, eight years later.

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