I will tell you about my early career in the Heber Store. When I was about eleven or twelve years old, Uncle Donnie Porter bought the Heber Store from Uncle Thomas Shelley. He enlarged the store to about twice or three times its original size. When the store was finished and stocked, it was a nice place to shop. It was the largest store in the area. There were two stores in Overgaard (Weech’s Store and Zane’s), but they were not nearly as nice as Porter’s Shopping Center.
Uncle Donnie hired Terry to do the janitorial work and clean up the store each night after closing. I helped Terry as his assistant. I don’t know if Dad or Mom had anything to do with it, but we went to work. Terry would have been fourteen or fifteen at the time. Each night we would sweep the floor using the red or green colored sawdust sweep compound that was common at the time. The sweep compound was treated with oil so that it kept the dust down when you swept. The colored sawdust helped you know you had swept all of the floor. Before starting to sweep, you scattered the sawdust all over the floor and then you started at one end of the store and swept all the sawdust to the other end of the store. When you were finished, you had swept all of the floor. The oil also kept the floor shiny if it was waxed well. The compound kept the dust down so that dusting the shelves did not need to be done so often.
Our other jobs were to clean the bathrooms, take out the trash, and mop the floor about once a week. Every so often we had to wax the floor and buff it using a large rotary buffer that was about as big as I was. We learned how to put pressure on one side or the other to get the buffer to do what we wanted it to do. I don’t remember exactly how much we were paid but it didn’t matter—I was in the “BIG TIME” and I was earning my own money.
Terry was later moved to being a carry out boy and then a stocker and then produce manager. I followed right behind. When he was gone or when they needed extra help, I worked as a bagger and carry out boy and I also helped with stocking the shelves. Later when Terry graduated from High School, I took over his jobs and I did produce, stocking, checking, and about everything there was to do. I even worked in the butcher shop some of the time. I guess by the time I left to go to college, I was pretty close to being something like an assistant manager. I could do about anything in the store and knew how everything worked.
I didn’t work in Mesa while I was going to college but when there was a vacation or long weekend, I would return home and work in the Heber Store to get a few dollars to keep me going until the next opportunity to work.
I worked for and with a lot of different people while working in the Heber Store. Some of the ones I can remember are Uncle Donnie and Aunt Folvia, Lewis and Mary Tenney, Sheila Webb, Jean Porter, Chine Hagerman, Jo Riedhead Beecroft, Mr. and Mrs Wolfley and Mr. and Mrs. Eckhart (both managed the store for a few years), and Mr. Wilbur from Pinetop who owned the store when it became “Wilbur’s Shopping Center” for a few years.