After I returned home from wheat harvest, I went to work for Browne’s Market and Butcher Shop in El Dorado. My job included stocking grocery shelves, and sacking and carrying groceries for customers. Also, on Tuesdays, I worked in the slaughter house. There were four of us slaughtering about twenty hogs and my job was to pick everything up that was on the floor and put them in their designated places. I picked up the hearts, livers, and kidneys then hung them up on hooks and washed them off. That left just the guts on the floor, which I gathered and put into five gallon buckets then carried outside and dumped them into fifty five gallon barrels. Every Tuesday when we butchered hogs there were two couples that would be going thru the gut barrels and cutting out the stomach and what ever else that they could use. The slaughterhouse butchered cattle on Wednesday but I wasn’t involved with that. The store also had a baker and two sweet ladies did the baking. One’s name was Bea Hammaker, but I’m sorry I can not remember the other lady’s name. They made sure I got a warm doughnut when they baked a new batch.
While I worked for Browne’s I had a room at the Butler Hotel, just a half block from where I worked and across the street from the Butler County Courthouse. Pat was living with Marilyn, which was about a mile or so from the hotel. I would walk to her house and back most evenings. Later on, I bought a 1929 Model A Ford which we rode around town in. Pat and I started going steady about December 1954.
I worked for Mr. Joe Browne until the end of February 1954, then my coworker Jerry Hayes and I both joined the Air Force.
