Friday, November 5 - The men in our store are all "afraid" to come back to work. The same ones who ran out the back door during the hold-up. I'm still having a ball. feel great about the whole thing.
Saturday, November 6 - Worked as usual. Came home exhausted. Bud went to the drive-in and got in about 12. I didn't sleep well.
Mom is dancing with the devil, and she's leading.
She's crossed the Meatcutters' picket line and gone back to work. This causes a fair amount of friction within the family as well as at work. Mom's sister, my aunt Jean - the mean one - is a meat wrapper and her husband Frank is a meatcutter, both of them working for A&P. Jean would be inclined to read mom the riot act for crossing the lines.
My uncle Bob is a Kroger meatcutter. He totally gets why mom wants to go back to work, and supports her decision.
Dad is concerned, and rightly so, that mom is in danger. The Meatcutters has the support of the Teamsters and has been putting sugar in the gas tanks of anyone who crossed the picket lines. Tires were slashed. Mom escaped from the violence, but was repeatedly threatened. It seems that in 1965, even rabid union members wouldn't intentionally hurt a woman. The men in the store know there are ball bats waiting for them, though.
We got phone calls at home at all hours of the day and night. They were not nice. A guy came to pick me up at school, claiming that my dad had been in a car wreck. My dad didn't have a car of his own in those days, so I made a beeline back into the school and called him. Bogus. My suspicions may have saved my life. They never found that guy.
Eventually, we changed from our old phone number, BE (Benton) 1-6111 to the palindromic BE 1-7132 (231-7132) It was an unlisted number, and my little heartthrob pal Patty thought that was the coolest thing she had ever heard of.
Mom was never too impressed with the courage of the men in her store. The year before, the day before my birthday, on a Friday, when the store had the most cash on hand, three armed, masked, men entered the store at 31st and Minnesota Avenue, emptied the tills, forced mom to open the safe, and pistol-whipped the women who were working behind the counters in the bakery and the deli. Every single solitary man in the store fled out the back door, and took cover in the fire station across the street, while the four women did battle with the assailants. At one point, two shots were fired into the ceiling. The silent alarms were triggered, and by the time the police arrived, the robbers were speeding away toward Missouri. They were caught just before they reached the Intercity Viaduct, and all three spent time in the Kansas Penitentiary in Lansing, Kansas.
After his release, the leader of the hold-up became a respectable businessman in Kansas City, operating a palette wholesale business. With her permission, he came to see mom a few years later, and apologized to her. They had lunch. She invited him to her church, and introduced him to the congregation. They prayed together. They stayed in touch for a number of years.
Ain't my mom something?
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