My Long Time Part Time Job

1965 - 1970

When I joined Ohrbach's at their California flagship store on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles in April 1965 the chain was among the best brand names in retail. They had started life as a discounter in New York in 1923. In the mid sixties there were about 10 stores around New York and three in the Los Angeles area.

The store was mainly women's fashion and had minor departments for costume jewelry, children and toys. If there was a men’s department I don't remember it.

               

I was seventeen when I started just a couple of months before graduating from Fairfax High School. Ricardo Montalban was among the famous graduates before me. We also shared November 25 as our birthday.

My first job at Orbach’s was to count cars coming into the parking lot at different times. I sat on a lawn chair at one entrance with a manual counter in my hand. I was never able to figure out what the purpose of this work was. The lot was usually  full but it wasn't like the executives didn't know that. I don't think they were going to add a second deck. Maybe there were property tax implications.

While doing my counting job I met another new employee who was doing the same job. Kathy Elliot. We started dating. She was also a recent  migrant to LA but from somewhere close by,  maybe Bakersfield. And she was already living away from home, about to start Junior college. Her father was in prison. Nothing my Ashkenazi background was familiar with.

On May 5, 1965 after work I caused a car accident at the corner of South Curson Avenue and San Vincente Blvd when I left too early from a red light. Kathy’s ankle was broken. OK, it was my fault. A consequence of ADD I think. (And it’s happened at least twice since. Carpool anyone?)

Once I was finished being a parking lot car counter I was given a job as a salesman in the children's department. There were full time employees in the department. I had never worked with people who had life sustaining jobs before. Previously my experience was in an amusement park and at summer day camps with other students. I'd like to think that working with full time retail employees taught me something. My best guess is ‘stay in school’.

I met and dated Carole Hartman while working in the children's department. She lived in the Holmby Hills area of West Los Angeles. That’s where Beyonce lives now some of the time. Carole had a certain je ne sais quoi which made her fun to be with. I remember she had heavy eyelids so her eyes seemed perpetually half closed. It wasn't like she was stoned all the time but something was up when she wasn’t.

The toy department was next door to the children's. Not much to see there except the manager had an interesting second life. He was a failed professional magician. That explains his day job in retail. I remember him looking like the person you would cast in a movie as a failed magician selling toys.  He was fiftyish with unkempt greying hair and always dressed in a rumpled suit with a red tie. He was a devotee of the Academy of Magical Arts at Hollywood's Magic Castle. It was a club for professional magicians successful and otherwise. He did  magic tricks from time to time but I don't remember crowds of kids coming to see the magician of Ohrbach’s.

The featured social time for the teenaged part timers I hung out with was Friday evening after the store closed. A bunch of us would head to what was essentially the backyard of the nearby Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Part of the world famous LA Brea Tar Pits were in that backyard. We would sit on the rock formations that had been built up as part of the museum landscaping.

It was here that I got to know Erica Berk who was a year older than me and had the elevated status of being a cashier in the store.

I fell hard for Erica. It was not mutual. She liked me well enough to date in spite of me being younger and unstructured.  She had her eye on marrying a lawyer. There was a guy in our circle who she also dated who was in law school or on his way. He was like the opposite of me. For some reason my mental picture of him is in a three piece suit. We were friendly while acknowledged rivals.

My unrequited situation was depressing and drove me into group therapy for the crime of being unhappy. I don't know what happened there but I graduated quickly. My memory is that the others in the group had much better reasons to be unhappy. I didn't fit in.

My relationship with Erica was off and on for four plus years. We were close sometimes until school and my job ended and I moved back to Toronto. We corresponded a bit afterwards but I'm not persistent in long distance relationships so we've been outta touch for almost half a century. Does it sound like I'm over her?

Thanks to my relationship with Erica I got promoted to being a cashier. This was my all time favourite job and it's something I'd like to do even now in my semi-retirement if a cashier job where I could sit landed in my lap.

Ohrbach’s on a Saturday was extremely busy. There were probably 20 cash registers throughout the store and for the most part they had a steady line up all day long.

The great thing about me as a cashier was that I was able to develop a brief relationship with almost every person as they were paying. “Hi. How are you doing today?” was an easy way to start a conversation that was destined to end before a reason for conflict would surface.

The price tag system at Ohrbach's was such that each item had a computerized tag. Actually it was a ticket with two halves each being a small punch card that could be machine counted. One part of my job was to take one of the mini punch cards and keep it on a spindle for processing later and the other card stayed with the garment. Since the Ohrbach’s processing centre was back in New York someone collected all spindles full of tags and they were packaged up and flown back to New York each day.

After a year or so as a cashier I got the job of collecting the ticket spindles at regular times during the day. These were boxed up in the cashiers back office and then driven to LAX, the airport, at day's end for shipment to New York. That was part of my job as well.

I was pretty much my own boss as the spindle collector except for my buddy Isaac who had the same job. Two collectors were needed because we were both in college so not full time and the store was so busy sometimes that we both had to be there.

We also needed two collectors some days to have someone to go the beach with. On those days we'd both clock in around noon, do a quick sweep of the stores to collect the mostly still empty spindles and then go the beach. Without clocking out, of course. Then we'd return from the beach to collect the, by then, overflowing spindles from the full time daytime cashiers who for no good reason thought little of us.

Our long day would end about 11 pm as we got home from our run to LAX. 11 hours at $3 bucks an hour including four at the beach. And, oh yeah, an extra 5 bucks to cover the run to the airport.

It was while I was a spindle collector that I met Brooke Frieden. She was a part time cashier. She didn't need the work. Like many part time college jobs it was a great place to meet people before the days of Tinder.

Brooke lived in Bel Air.  Her father was a surgeon. I never met him. And her mother if I remember correctly was a stay at home shopper. They lived in a beautiful ranch house with a pool and a Hollywood Hill in the back. Brooke and I were together for about two years. Off and on because she was theoretically studying at the University of Arizona. And Erica was still in my life from time to time.

After I moved back to Toronto in 1970 Brooke took up with my friend, co-worker and beach friend, Isaac.  They got married. I guess she liked a certain type.

The last piece of this memory came in the spring of 1970. I was offered a full time job in the credit department at Ohrbach's. I thought about taking the job. It was a nice compliment. And while I had many reasons to stay in Los Angeles I wasn't going to fall into a career that seemed perfect for the Adam Sandler role in many movies I've seen.

At the same time my student visa was expiring because I had dropped out of graduate school. I was destined to return home to Canada. I could have stayed in the US but only by becoming draft eligible. Not a good idea I thought at the time.

So in June 1970 my time at Ohrbach’s came to a skidding end. 5 years. Many memories.

And more than that, experiences that brushed me up against real life for the first time. Luckily I bounced off each time. I didn't end up in retail sales much as I liked it. I never have been a cashier again much as I loved that job. And most importantly I left myself free to always take a more difficult option when it presented itself.