When I was fourteen, I got my first job working at the Hatfield Pharmacy, a block from my house. This was before companies like Eckardt, CVS and Rite Aid bought out all the mom and pops. The Hatfield Pharmacy was still a family business back then and the owner was your typical entrepeneur. He was into a little of everything. His father had, I believe, owned quite a bit of real estate, and he had inherited not only the building that the Pharmacy was in, but several of the buildings to which it was attached. Directly next door, and in fact attached by a back hallway, was the area's first video store. This was long before Blockbuster and the whole concept of video rental was new. The video industry had not yet discovered the idea of "sell-through" and so the cost of movies on video was close to $100 a piece. No thought of buying videos. You rented them.
But first you had to make sure you had the right kind of technology. VHS was not yet the dominant format, and Beta was still a presence. Beta was the higher quality, but more people were buying VHS format players. Laserdiscs were supposedly even greater quality but almost no one had those.
Hatfield Video actually began as an arcade. Again, this was at the start of the video game revolution and things like Atari, Nintendo, and Intellivision was just coming on the market. The highest quality games were still only available at arcades, and they demanded a constant diet of quarters.
I can't remember how exactly I got the job, but it probably entailed walking in and asking. I might have even tried to get a job next door at The Trolley Stop, a place where I eventually also worked and which the Pharmacists owned a piece of. They may have sent me to Charles.
Charles was the son of a pharmacist. He had followed in the family business and had taken over the pharmacy some years before. So what does a 14-year-old do in a pharmacy? Mainly I dusted the bottles of overstock drugs. Often in the upstairs storeroom of the pharmacy. Looking back, I have to wonder what the shelf-life of some of these drugs actually were, and whether or not I was a mercy hiring. I remember finding bottles so old, I was half expecting to find the words "miracle tonic" on them.
Because pharmacies stock dangerous and addictive prescription drugs, they can be targets for drug addicts and criminals. Anything from people with fake precriptions, to outright armed robbery, the pharmacist had to be ready. Or so I was told as to the reason for the number of loaded handguns lying on back counters. Charles, who looked like a pharmacist, as opposed to a member of the NRA, did not carrry a handgun so much as keep a little heat handy at all times. Being fourteen, I didn't think twice about it and went about my business in the precense of serious fire power.
I don't remember how long, or how often, I worked in the Pharmacy, but it seems it wasn't long before I moved to the video store/arcade, which was connected to the pharmacy by a back hallway.
The video store/arcade, commonly known as Hatfield Video, was half video store and half arcade. The front half, or two thirds to be more exact, was an arcade of 25¢ video machines like DigDug, PacMan, Star Wars, Centipede, Galaxian, Frogger, Defender, Donkey Kong, Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Missle Command. They even had several "machines" set up to play the latest Atari, or Intellivision game.
The back section was reserved for video rental featuring VHS, Beta and even a small selection of laserdics. We had classics, and new releases, but the selection was fairly limited as not that many titles had been release on video. Back then, a video had to be out of the theaters for several years, not several months, before it was released on video. But in addition to the selection of new releases like Airplane, 9 to 5, Friday the 13th, The Shining, and Xanadu, we had Hatfield's first collection of porn.
The adult titles were in a case on the back wall and were in plain view of the general public, but were not in their original boxes. Each tape was in a generic case with the title written on the spine. Oddly enough, the porn industry likes to spoof popular movie titles, so at first glance they appeared to be mainstream movies. In fact, one day my mother was in the store and began looking at the titles until I informed her that she would probably not be interested in those titles. Now that I think of it, it's amazing that she continued to let me work there.
But that wasn't the only porn available in the place. In the bathroom, located in the back hallway that connected the video store to the pharmacy, was a casual assortment of magazines for your viewing pleasure. They weren't in plain view, but they were never hard to find. After Charles' nephew and I got caught watching "Debbie Does Dallas" one night while we were minding the store, the magazines dissappeared.
Not long after, I changed jobs when I moved over to The Trolley Stop, a combination deli, hoagie shop, and convenience store that Charles was also part owner of. I made a lot more money, got more hours, and was busier, but it never quite lived up to that first job.
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