A Christmas Memory by John Marek.
Over the winter of 1985-86, I had a six-month marketing/management internship with Wendy’s International. I was assigned to a group of 10 stores in north central Ohio and basically performed a lot of busywork tasks related to community relationship building for the fast-food chain. A few of those experiences made it into my book, “Secrets of Neighborhood Marketing,” but the best anecdote of all did not.
On that Christmas Eve morning, I was planning to spend some time in the Norwalk store talking with the manager about radio spots for the new year, then head for my parents’ house about an hour away for our annual family gathering. It had been snowing on and off for the previous 24 hours, as it tends to do in that part of the state in late December, and I was a little concerned about road conditions, especially crossing the Sandusky Bay Bridge, so I was hoping to get on the road mid-afternoon.
Just about the time I was wrapping things up with the manager, one of the employees interrupted and said that he couldn’t get the walk-in freezer door to lock. The walk-in was a stand-alone unit located behind the main restaurant. Wendy’s beef is fresh, never frozen, but many other things in the store are frozen and there was always a couple of thousand dollars of product in there, so being able to lock it was a priority, especially over Christmas.
The store was running on a holiday skeleton crew, so the manager asked if I would mind running to the hardware store and picking up a new lock. Thinking that this would be a 10- minute drive across town, I agreed, only to find out that the only hardware store which carried the special lock the door required was in Monroeville. I was familiar with the town, as it was on Route 20 between the oft-visited Norwalk and Bellevue stores, and I knew that the round trip would be nearly an hour.
As I drove through town toward the highway, the snow picked up and by the time I parked in front of the hardware store a fresh blanket of white covered everything. The store was located in an older building off the main street and was identified by strings of multi-colored lights framing the plate windows on the facade.
My shoes were muffled in the gathering dusk as I approached the door and peeked through. There sitting in the middle of the store next to a wood-fired stove were two aging men in plaid flannel shirts. They were across a small table from one another playing checkers. I must have stood there for a full minute just taking it in. It was like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life.
The rest of that Christmas was forgettable. I don’t recall what gifts I might have received or given, what we had to eat that evening, or what songs we sang at Midnight Mass, but I remember those two old men sitting by that stove like it happened yesterday. Funny how the mind works sometimes.