Loami Gilbert’s parents were evidently Bible readers; Loami is a Bible name. But evidently they didn’t read it too closely, because the name translates from the Hebrew as “not my people,” and the Loami in the Bible was the younger brother of “Unloved.” It’s all in the first chapter of Hosea.

When I was hired by Mr. Gilbert, I was sixteen, and he was somewhere north of 70. I wasn’t sure how far north, but he seemed very old to me. He was small and bent, and generally moved slowly, whether he was walking or driving his Pontiac. He had established Benson Drug Company in 1903, and I got there in 1955. I tried to convince myself that there was no judgment implied in my title: soda jerk.

My first day was less than auspicious.

That was the day after Hurricane Diane came through Benson. It hadn’t done much damage, but because Hazel had come through the year before—leaving a lot of wreckage in its wake—everybody took Diane seriously. For Benson Drug Company, that meant boarding up the big plate-glass windows.

My first official duty, directed by Mr. Gilbert, was to take the boards of the windows, and as the newest Benson Drug Company employee, I went about it with enthusiasm. As I was walking briskly through the drug store, the 2 x 4 on my shoulder, I used the leading end to crash through the swinging door that separated the front from the back.

There were two loud thumps and a thud. The first thump was when the board hit the door, the second was when the door hit Mr. Gilbert’s head, and the thud was when Mr. Gilbert hit the floor. He got up reasonably quickly for a man his age, and he didn’t fire me on the spot, a decision I still wonder about.

Mr. Gilbert had been in business for over 50 years, and he knew a thing or two about making a profit. After I finished taking the boards off the windows and returning the boards—very carefully—to the back, he told me to dip a dime cone of ice cream. Back then a dime cone was two scoops.

I went behind the fountain, swished the ice cream scoop in the eternally running fountain of water, and as neatly as I could, I put two scoops on a cone. Then Mr. Gilbert asked me to bring it to the pharmacy. He put a napkin on the balance scale, put the cone on the napkin, and weighed it, carefully writing down the exact weight.

Then I got my first lesson in business math. Based on the numbers he used, I would have eventually put him out of business dipping dime cones like that. He had me dip several more until I got it right—large enough to please the customer, small enough to make it profitable.

I learned a number of other things at Benson Drug Company, one of the most durable being the concept (if not the vocabulary) of aversion therapy. We had an old ice grinder in the back that probably hadn’t been completely dry since it was installed thirty or forty years before. The wooden floor under it squished when you stepped on it. It was activated by a large black electric switch, just a little newer than the grinder. If you were very quick, you could switch the grinder on and jump back before the electricity got to you. However, there was almost no chance when you switched it off. Three or four times a day I warily approached the grinder, hoping to get it on and off without getting knocked on my butt. But I don’t ever remember winning.

One day after I had been working for Mr. Gilbert nearly two years he called me into what he called his office, really a space created by the magazine rack on one side and the rear wall on the other. He was sitting at his big desk.

“Will Woodall wanted to know if you were a good worker,” he said.

I just waited, although I wanted to know what Mr. Gilbert had said, and why Will Woodall, who owned the clothing store across the street, had asked.

“I told him that you were pretty good and dependable.”

He hesitated, allowing me to digest this.

“You start to work for him on Monday.”

I had evidently been traded to Woodall’s for a soda jerk to be named later.

When the GOP went into spasms of self-righteousness when Barack Obama said, “…if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own,” I thought of Mr. Gilbert and a dozen or more other people that had figured into my growing up. They had all made an investment of time and money in getting me from one step to another, sometimes with a miserable return on their investment. Wherever I’ve gotten to, I didn’t get there on my own. And if others had to do it all by themselves, I feel sorry for them.