REVIEW POTPOURRI: Looking back, Part 5

by Peter Cates

(See Part 4 here.)

Continuing with memories – the heat of very early morning during July 1973, in Boston, Massachusetts, was at bestial blast furnace levels. I remember walking from 23 Wyatt Street, in Somerville, at least a mile down to Central Squar, in Cambridge, to catch the Red Line air-conditioned subway to Washington Street, in Boston, for two days worth of morning classes in how to write up sales slips, cash out customers, approve checks with two pieces of legal identification and push the cranks on those dinosaur cash registers.

Before I moved to Boston, I was taught to believe that 95 percent of grown-ups would listen to reason. After I moved there, that belief was obsolete.

At first I was selling 45s with three other colleagues behind a booth with two registers, as those top 40 discs were the biggest, non-stop sources of revenue. The record department was divided into three areas – the pop music LPs and 45s, classical and cassettes, only the LPs in open browsers with racks on the outer walls of new releases.

One area that attracted my interest was the watchful eyes of department store detectives on potential shoplifters, either through closed circuit cameras by the second floor office they worked from near the entrance from the street to the record department or through pretending to be customers.

One of the detectives was a popular radio disc jockey and talk show host during the day and arresting shoplifters on the evening shift. Unlike some of the other detectives who effected auras of mien even to regular store employees – one rather insolent character admitted, “I don’t trust anybody, especially you sales clerks!” – the disc jockey had a very pleasant personality.

A somewhat hilarious incident in which a shoplifter who may have been spotted on previous occasions but still had to challenge the law – the disc jockey was pretending to be a blind man with a walking stick and a couple of albums poking his way to the sales counter.

When the thief with albums underneath his winter coat was making a beeline for the exit, our ‘blind man’ made a quick gesture with his arm to a couple of other detectives and they grabbed the thief on the street.

More next time.