Odd Jobs - Bookseller again

There used to be a large B. Dalton's on Geary and Grand or near there in San Francisco. It was time to go back to the big city. I got hired as the Shipping and Receiving Manager for the store, which as I recall, was the largest in the country: three stories. We had a good 4-5 people working in the cellar receiving books, sticking price tags (with computerized inventory numbers on them!) and shipping out the returns. I thought I could get into the Management Training Program if I did a good job. This is 1978. I inherited an apartment near the Haight from a painter friend who was off around the world. I was in the basement all day long.

We had one of these funky old metal freight elevators that came up from our basement and opened directly on the sidewalk outside. We had to go out and warn people off to open it and then pile it with boxes off some truck. Do the same routine when we had things picked up. I had a older guy working for me, who had been a professor of Slavic languages at a university in Ohio, who was going through a messy divorce and so he was working at the bookstore for pennies and doing cash under the table for translations of literature for some of the SF publishers. His wife was taking him for everything, or so he said. Anyhow, it was 100 degrees in our basement one summer day and he decided he was going to open the freight elevator to give us air. In his anxious guilty haste, he tripped a couple of people on the sidewalk above, got the elevator jammed and was ready to walk out in frustration with his life and the heat and the job. He got to go stand outside on the sidewalk to direct people away for two hours until we got the thing closed. No Management Training Program for me. My wife got pregnant and I had to go back to the hotel business because it paid better.