Sharkey’s Market

Bill Windsor was a big, burly guy, always wearing a store apron and always holding a cigar in his mouth. He had a round, friendly face and laughed often though he could be a little intimidating. He and his wife owned two stores in town, Sharkey’s Market and Windsor’s Grocery. Windsors was a typical small grocery store. Bill’s wife ran it. Sharkey’s was… different. The clientele was rough, blue-collar, and eccentric. It was the exact opposite from the friendly family grocery I’d just left. I worked there about six months and virtually every day was an adventure.

The store was very old. It had wooden plank floors, ancient shelves and fixtures, and cash registers straight out of the fifties. The floors were patched and weak in spots, making them a bit dangerous. There was a large fresh meat market in the back. There was a walk-in cooler with about a half-dozen doors. The A/C did not work very well. We took our breaks inside the walk-in cooler. There was one really ratty restroom. Along a back wall there was a row of produce coolers. Bill kept produce in them. On top. Once I looked into the space below. It gave me nightmares for a week. But the condition of the store was only part of the reason the store had a seedy reputation.

There was, of course, the nudie mags. Sharkey’s had the finest collection of porn in the whole town. Probably more than any place closer than Houston. I was sixteen. This was probably not the best place for me to work. OK, sure, I peaked on occasion. I read part of one of the black-cover paperbacks. Those were more than my young brain could digest.

The city passed a porno ordinance specifically for Bill’s store. Bill took them to court citing a violation of free speech. I don’t quite remember what happened to the law suit but Bill worked out a compromise. He had a special magazine rack built where only the titles of the magazines were showing. Everyone was relatively happy.

Sharkey’s Market sold a few other items not for the general public. The store sold airplane glue by the box but interestingly enough no airplane models. Vanilla flavoring, the natural kind, also went out the door in cases. A collection of old guys, some of them were cab drivers, kept Bill busy buying those.

The store had been open 24/ for many, many years, including all holidays. The year I worked there Bill decided to close on Christmas and had to have new locks installed. He’d lost the old keys long ago. It was the only store open all night in Lufkin. There were frequent robberies. One odd guy usually worked all the over-night shifts. We joked with him about all those robberies. Somehow handprints had been made on the dusty ceiling. Who knows how they got there but we all said it was the night guy reaching his hands up when he was robbed. That guy was, like I said, a bit weird. He would often sit in a chair at the front door with his girlfriend sitting in his lap.

Once a man who looked either stoned, drunk or just “special needs” came into the store and walked up to the counter. He asked where the restroom was. I pointed to the back corner and told him go in the little room, turn right and the bathroom door was right there. He went back there and was gone quite a while. When he came out he had a strange smile on his face. He pointed to his shoes. They were wet. As he trundled out of the store I had to go back and see what he’d been up to. Apparently he missed the word “door” in “bathroom door.” He had taken a piss in the floor in the corner of the little storeroom. There was, of course, no cleaning it up because the old wooden floor had soaked it up.

It’s interesting that the reason I got the job was because Bill participated in the DECA (Distributive Education Clubs of America) program, of which I was a part. Bill took in student workers to work half a day so he could “teach them retail marketing.” It was an incredible inside joke. We never learned marketing. Bill just participated so he could get high school kids working half a day in his store.

There was once when I and another student employee decided we should actually do some of the retail stuff at Sharkey’s since that was what we were there for. We put up some displays. Bill had us take them down, saying they blocked the aisle. We cleaned up a couple rows of shelves. We quit that when we began to pull old canned goods from the back of the shelves that was at least fifteen years old. It didn’t take long for us to give up the whole idea and to go back to running the register and meat market.

It’s really a wonder the store wasn’t robbed during the day rather than late at night. Bill kept a huge amount of cash on hand to cash payroll checks for lots of men, mostly men. He didn’t keep a fee for doing that but he got lots of business from those people. Back then there was Lufkin Industries and Texas Foundries where thousands of blue-collar folks worked, people who rarely had a bank account or any other option than Sharkey’s where they could cash a check.

Another thing Bill used to keep people coming in was charge accounts. Lots of the people who came in to cash their checks also had charge accounts. They’d show up before payday and get meat and groceries and we’d add it to their tab. When they came in to cash their checks they paid off the accounts. It really was a nice thing Bill did for lots of poor folks who ran out of things before payday.

Employees had charge tabs too. We’d be the same way, adding to our accounts and paying them off at payday. That way we lived on a steady stream of junk food while working. One day I came in and Bill was not his happy old self. He pulled my tab out and demanded I pay it off. In cash. He didn’t say why. A couple days later when I got a bank notice of bounced checks I figured out what happened. I’d sent my dad to the bank to deposit money for me. He says he did but didn’t get a receipt. Either way, the money did not make it into my account. I wrote Bill a check on that lost money and my check bounced. Instead of confronting me he had just folded it up and put it in his wallet. And he told me to pay up. When I figured it out I went to him and asked about the check. He grumbled and pulled my check out. I gave him cash for it. I’m not sure he believed my story.

There was on chore nobody liked to do. That chore was to fill up the dumpster with broken-down boxes and trash from a pile outside the “back” door of the store. The door was not in the back but in the side but we called it the “back door.” All our trash went out that door and then someone would have to go around and move all that trash from the pile into the dumpster. It was a very nasty job. We all hated it. There were huge roaches and rats and who knows what else scurrying about beneath the pile.

We figured something out. What mattered was that the dumpster look full. We got the brilliant idea to put empty assembled boxes in the bottom, taking up most of the space. Then we’d toss boxes in and the dumpster was full quickly and without us having to dig deep into the nasty pile. This worked until one day I came to work and Bill told me to go fill the dumpster, and, he said, DO NOT put whole boxes in the bottom. Ooops. After than Bill had the whole mess cleaned up for good. I think the city got on to him for that mess and he figured out what we were doing somehow.

Another interesting thing, Bill Windsor was the president or leader, whatever they are called, of the Little League Baseball program in Lufkin. He oversaw dozens of youth baseball teams. He did not have his own kids, as far as I know. He was a huge baseball fan. When there was an Astros game on the radio you can be sure Bill was standing in the back of the store listening.

In all, I think Sharkey’s Market was the weirdest place I ever worked. Everyone who worked there was either High School or college age. This was the fall that weird song “The Streak” came out. The college guys came back from Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches telling about students streaking on campus. SFA was the first of several colleges to have “streakers” on them.

The meat market was always a challenge. Bill started selling Head Cheese, a gross loaf of blobbed up insides of a pig head. It was sticky and smelled bad. For a time Bill had us slice it on our deli slicer but when we did we had to break the slicer down and clean it entirely. Bill decided we’d just cut portions off with a knife. It was still a nasty, stinky thing to do. We sold lots of deli sliced meats and cheeses. I don’t remember ever selling steak or chops or things like that. Maybe we did but most of our business was cold cuts. And of course we sold loads of turkeyfurters, wieners made from turkey.

The slicing equipment was dangerous. Once I was working the register while another guy worked the meat market. That guy came running up front with his apron wrapped around his hand screaming about his thumb. I called Bill who took him to the ER. The guy had sliced the end of his thumb off. I got to clean the machine.

There was one other item Bill sold by the case, to me. I was driving my old Ford Galaxie 500 at the time. It literally burned oil. Really it did. I’d bought the old thing from my brother-in-law. Someone had overhauled it. They put the piston rings in upside-down. Instead of keeping oil in the oil pan the rings pushed the oil up into the firing cylinder. I used a minimum of one can, usually two, per day. Sharkey’s sold some recycled motor oil called “Ring Seal” (it didn’t!) motor oil. Three cans for a dollar. I bought twenty-four can cases. Varoom!

Some time after the first of the year I had a conflict between a school thing (or was it a church thing? I forget) and my work schedule. I quit working there. It was about all of the grumpy-ass old Bill Windsor I could take. It tossed a cog into my DECA participation but such was life.