SODA JERKS AND 40cent PAY

                                                   Photo courtesy of Diana Metreaud

         Vanilla milkshakes ? . . . have all you can drink; hot fudge sundae ?... whenever you want; ice cream cone ? . . .  which flavor do you want ?  Oh, and soft drinks or freshly squeezed lemonade ? . . . help yourself !  All of this . . . a teen ager's dream.  At least it was for me  when I was hired as a 14 or so year old 'soda jerk' (a antiquated term) at Mrs. Pegram's  drug store.    Her 'logic' for this policy retrospectively was "spot on". After a short time, the desire for the 'goodies' waned. Probably because it was not 'forbidden fruit'. After our family moved and Dan McCrimmon hired me for after-school and rotating Saturday's, his attitude about 'refreshments' mirrored those that I had known earlier.

  Those 'fringies' were add-on's to my pay. Keep in mind that this was the early-mid 1950's when I mention that my monetary compensation at the first store was a whopping 40 cents per hour and Dan paid me and my classmate, Herbert Leslie, $15 per week, pre-taxes.  By the time my younger brother worked at Dan's ten years later, his pay was  the same as mine had been. In 1962, at age 14, he had obtained a 'worker's permit' and earned 50 cents per hour at another local soda shop before his 'promotion'  to Dan's. He recalled that one week when his coworker was on vacation, he worked 9 hours daily for six days and earned what he thought was a unheard of  $27.

  Drug stores at the time were vastly different than today's  cookie-cutter, seen-one-you-have-seen-them-all CVS's, Walgreen's, etc. There were Rexall Pharmacies around but these usually had their distinctive  local 'personalities'. In addition to  prescriptions, stores stocked various patent medicines, gift items, cosmetics, along with sundry personal items.  (As an aside, while many patrons would eschew acknowledging the consumption of 'alcoholic beverages', a common ingredient in many patent medicines was a high alcoholic content.) A necessary feature of stores that I knew was the 'soda fountain' or sometimes just 'fountain'. Those of us (usually high school kids) working there were called 'soda jerks'. [see Wikipedia for the origin of the moniker]. 

  Most had a few tables or booths where customers  could sit to enjoy their refreshments. The stores often served as gathering places for socializing. High school students living in town typically gathered after classes and were often  referred to as  "Drug Store Cowboys" (for reasons I do not know). As regularly as the sun rises, as Saturday night closing time of 9 p.m. arrived and outside neon lights extinguished and I had begun to sweep and carry out other end of the business day tasks, invariably two older women who had arrived earlier for their traditional soft drinks would continue to sit and talk until there was usually no subtle way to communicate that it was time for them to leave.( After nearly seventy years, I still remember their names and faces but shall go unnamed here lest there are still relatives there.)

   My brothers and I had also worked in the local version of a grocery chain. But to land a drug store job was a kind of creme de la creme  work spot.  Spring of my senior year, when faced with a choice of being a  'soda jerk' or playing my last season of school baseball, I opted for work and reluctantly told the  Coach that I would  be unable to play any longer.  Within a week, the store's schedule changed and I was allowed to rejoin the  starting  team, although the Coach benched me for the entirety of the next game.

      But, 40 cents an hour ?!1?  

            Satchel