01/23/2024 & 01/24/2024 Kremer’s
In June of 1991, at the age of sixteen, I walked into Kremer’s Ben Franklin Five-&-Dime, 323 NW First Avenue, Grand Rapids, MN, to see if I could find a job. Eventually, I was escorted to an upstairs conference room to take a job placement test. I remember the test had lots of math, I assumed for operating a cash register. Fortunately, I failed the test miserably. I never would have enjoyed working at a checkout. If my memory serves me right, I met Mr. Kremer who actually looked like Ben Franklin:) Lucky for me, they had a freight/maintenance position open and they offered me the job! So began my adventure working at Kremer’s for $4.25 an hour:)
The department store had two floors and a basement. The basement contained a hardware department, offices, food pantry for the upstairs luncheonette, freight receiving and freight storage areas, incinerator, boiler-room, public bathrooms, employee workshop, and other employee areas. The main floor contained the majority of shopping spaces, luncheonette, and three checkout stations. The upstairs was the arts, crafts, and fabric department. Also, upstairs was a conference room, storage, and HVAC equipment. The building contained an elevator that serviced all three floors. There were also large staircases that went down to the basement and up to the second floor.
My primary duties involved sweeping, mopping, freight receiving, maintenance, and responding to dispatches via intercom to various locations to assist customers and employees. Changing ballasts in florescent light fixtures, cutting foam in hardware, stripping and waxing floors at night, replacing floor tiles from wear, cutting down boxes and burning them in the incinerator, assembling and disassembling shelving units, and sorting received freight in the freight room were all tasks I remember frequently performing. Some tasks supposedly required a license, I was asked for my electrician license while changing a ballast one day, I just laughed and thought it was a joke…
Dean Frater was the store manager and Kevin Johnson was the assistant store manager. The only other employee names that I remember are Arlene Johnson(she was in charge of the hardware department), Jerry, Nate Lane, & Dan Mann (fellow freight/maintenance workers), and Casey & Karla Salisbury who were friends that worked at the checkouts.
I really liked being a jack of all trades. I never knew what awaited me when I showed up for work. It was a big store and I liked being able to move around a lot. My favorite responsibility was maintaining the elevator. People seemed to get stuck in the elevator quite often and I would have to figure out what was wrong. I also had to occasionally maintain the elevator by entering the shaft and grease the rails and make sure everything was in order. I would always find money and other lost items that had been dropped within the elevator and then would fall to the bottom of the shaft. Another fond memory is that of riding in Kevin’s old dodge truck that had cement for running boards. We would drive around and use it to occasionally hauling shelving from of-site storage locations.
My shift was from the end of school, to closing. Some days they would have me skip school in the morning to help with receiving freight. They would contact school and give them some excuse as to why I wasn’t there…Seems like that was some type of child labor law violation:) The lunch counter was closed at night so when I took my break, I usually ate a bag of cheddar or pizza flavored Combos. When the lunch counter was open, I loved to have Kremer’s famous sloppy joes! So delicious. The sloppy joes were also the reason the lunch counter drains would constantly plug up. I would have to go into the boiler room in the basement and pour copious amounts of ST Drain Opener into the pipes to clear them.
Working at Kremer’s also had a fair share of sketchy jobs. I often had to replace florescent light tubes and instead of properly disposing them we burnt them in the incinerator. We actually burnt most everything in the incinerator. Speaking of that incinerator, occasionally I had to enter it and scrub the inside, don’t ask me why. I also remember being tasked with chipping asbestos off of piping…yep, I did that. Another notable incident involved me laying on my back in water underneath a set of air conditioning coils. I was holding a treble lamp while I attempted to use a long-handled brush to scrub the inside of the coils. I dropped the treble light in the water and the bulb broke. I then was immediately electrocuted; I distinctly remember feeling the wave of electricity pass through me! I lived. And as long as we’re talking about electrocution, we had an old metal jigsaw that I would use to cut pegboard for the shelving units. Nobody liked to use the jigsaw because it had a short that would randomly jolt you with a good shock.
Yet another incident occurred while we were receiving freight in the basement. A semi-truck would pull up alongside the building, as the freight would get unloaded from the truck, the freight was thrown down a chute that went down into the basement on a conveyer that contained metal rollers. Sometimes there would be a lull and you would be standing there with nothing to do. I decided it would be a good idea to run my gloved hand along the rollers. Unfortunately for me, I accidentally rolled my hand into one of the powered rollers which then immediately sucked my hand in-between two rollers. Fortunately, somebody stopped the conveyor before I lost my hand. They had to use a sludge hammer to knock out a roller to free my hand.
Christmas time was a fun time to be at Kremer’s. The store looked beautiful with all the decorations and light hung up inside and out. Although it did terrify me to hang the garland around the outside of the building. To do so, required working with a ladder on Icey sidewalks and it had to reach all the way up to the top of the second-floor roof. All the employees would draw names to exchange gifts with other fellow employees. One year Casey gave me a little squirrel Christmas ornament that has been one of my favorites!
Another busy time for all was during Tall Timber Days. I would have to set up and run electrical to our food cart. Kremer’s was located right in the middle of all of the festivities so it pretty much was a mad house.
An interesting fact about the pantry cold storage for the luncheonette which was in the basement, it was used to store dead bodies. There was paint around the bottom of the cellar that was supposedly there to hide blood stains. At some point there used to be a morgue/funeral home in the basement. During the winter when the ground was frozen, they would slide bodies down the freight chute and store them in the pantry.
In July of 1993, I resigned my position to attend the law enforcement program in Hibbing, MN. Unfortunately, Kremer’s was also in the process of going out of business. Walmart had moved into town and Kremer’s couldn’t compete. One of the last memories I had was Kevin Johnson collecting a handful of cash and giving it to me as a thank you. I don’t remember how much it was but I will never forget how much it meant to me. The following is the entry I had on my resume regarding Kremer’s;
Part-time Maintenance/Freight Employee-06/91 to 07/93
Supervisor: Dean Frater, Manager
Ben Franklin Kremer Company
323 NW 1st Avenue
1107 Pokegama Avenue South
Grand Rapids, MN 55744
Phone # 218-327-2387
Salary: $4.25 to $4.65 per hour or $340.00 per month (approximately)
End of blog. Thank you for reading!
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