This is a continuation of the story I started a few days back. You can read part 1 here.

Along with purchasing the store, my parents aquired a couple of employees. Don and Pam were the 2 original employees that I remember.

Pam (At least that’s what I think here name was) - She was one of the cooks and I think she taught dad the ropes, not that he needed any help other than knowing what the products where and how they were put together.

Don - Don was the delivery driver and dishwasher for the store. He was a slow moving guy who once upon a time was a cook/chef in the Navy. Along the way he had received some financial advice from an uncle or something like that and was able to pack away a bit of money. However you would never know he had money because he would always be going to auctions and purchasing used cars and other crap. For doing deliveries he drove some sort of junker Caprice (it was probably something else). Somewhere along the line my brother and I started going on deliveries with him. It was a way to keep us from going crazy in the summer when we had to be at the store. Over time Don almost became family to…well all of us that worked at the store. I think part of the reason that happened was because he was a bachelor and all he had, at the time, was his mom (we later found out that he had been adopted and it wasn’t his real mom. Not sure if he ever knew who his real mom was. He also had a son from a quick marriage in Japan, but I don’t think there was any communcation between them.)

Pam didn’t last long, if I remember correctly. Perhaps it was the lies that she told my brother and I or Don made her mad by calling her a buffarila. Let me explain. Since Don was a bachelor he always kept an eye open for the ladies (despite apparently knowing all the hookers/easy girls in town) and when we would go out on deliveries we always had our eyes peeled for any good looking ladies that might be on the street (I’m sure my parents didn’t like this, but hey…). If they were good looking we’d give them a rating on the scale of 1 to 10. 10 being the highest. If there was a not so good looking lady (we weren’t very politically correct as you can tell) we would call them a buffarila. Which if you haven’t figured out is a combination of a Buffalo and a Gorilla.

After we got to know Don a bit better we learned he had a cabin out on a lake that wasn’t to far away from town. So on the hot summer days we would head out to his cabin and go swimming. It wasn’t a posh cabin like those that have been built since he sold the land, but it did what it needed to. It had a small kitchen and a couple of bedrooms. There was an outhouse as well. The dock had to be repaired every summer due to the spring break up of the ice. Don was more about the use of the area than spending a ton of time keeping it up. He also had a boat as well and I learned how to water ski out there. We tried knee boarding as well, but we never quite figured out how to stay above water on the take of.

In addition to the cabin on the lake Don liked to golf in the summer and had a membership to the city golf course with a cart. One day after work he took my brother and I out to the golf course. I think I was 12 at the time and my little brother was 9 or something like that. Any how I was the one that was playing and my brother was just along for the ride. One thing led to another and we were playing golf with Don quite a bit. Eventually my brother and I got golf clubs from Don and we also received a yearly pass to the golf course. It was a quick ride to the course from our house and we were soon spending quite a bit of time on the course when we weren’t working.