Reflections: A eulogy for Julia Kotuba, my first boss

February 2019

After learning about the death of Julia Kotuba, my first boss, I posted this originally on Facebook (2019): 

I just found out Julia Kotuba died earlier this month. Julia owned Paul’s Market in North Sewickley Township, along with her husband Pauly, and she was my first boss. Working for her certainly shaped part of who I am. 

I was hired while standing in the checkout line behind my mother, shortly before my 16th birthday. Julia, of course, knew I was turning 16. She knew everything about everyone who lived in that township (and probably a few of the adjoining ones, too). As she rang up the items my mom was buying, she looked over at me and, in that gruff voice that could never be mistaken for anyone else’s, boomed: “Do you want a job?” 

My mom said yes for me without missing a beat. I walked out of the store surprised at what had just happened and more than a little scared of what was about to happen. 

Julia was not easy to work for. Everyone knew it. She ran the front of the house — the inventory and the money. Her son and husband managed the back of the house, everything, in other words, that had to do with ordering and carving up meat. It was tradition for her to hire the high school girls (and only girls) who worked the checkout counter and stocked the shelves and for the men to hire high school boys (and only boys) to man the deli counter and butcher shop. 

Eventually, I would become the first high school girl to break through that glass ceiling, chipping ham and hauling boxes of butchered deer out to customers’ cars, all to the soundtrack of Howard Stern. (An unexpected perk: A backstage view of the daily drama at the deli counter as the older women in the community flirted with Pauly Jr. and the high school boys.) 

But that “promotion” was a long way off. My first — eight? Nine? — months didn’t go so well. I struggled to memorize the prices of the produce and the milk and the cigarettes and everything else that we hadn’t stamped with the pricing gun. The cash register itself was a monster, refusing to let me easily correct mistakes, such as typing in $1,000 for a $0.10 piece of candy. To make change, I did the math in my head, often complicated by the customers who would give me an extra quarter or dime so they could get only dollar bills back. And I had to calculate it all fast because the store was a busy store and you’d quickly end up with a line 10 people deep, all of them trying to get in and out of the store in five minutes. 

The lottery machine was worse than the cash register. Customers took their numbers dead seriously. And the pros expected to rattle off the numbers for each of their tickets at auctioneer speed. When the pot was big, it would be dozens of tickets at a time. Mistakes in keying in the numbers cost Julia money. I cost her money. 

The high school girls also made the coffee, mopped the store floors, washed the windows, hauled the boxes of soup cans and cat food and spaghetti sauce from the back to re-stock the shelves. And we did it all with a smile. Because if you weren’t smiling, you’d be asked about it by nearly every man who walked into the store. 

The men and their insistent questions and flirting, however, were nothing compared to Julia’s criticism. Everything you did was the wrong way to do it. And if you didn’t quickly grasp it, she had very little patience with you. She thought nothing of scolding you publicly, and more than once I was the target of some very loud, very public dressing downs. Crying in front of customers was an inevitable part of the job. Many of my lottery customers would pay extra for the mistaken tickets rather than watch me face Julia’s wrath. 

By the end of the school year, I was done. Against my parents’ wishes, I quit. I used my last paycheck to buy myself a very fancy radio/tape deck from Walmart as a reward for what I had endured. And I spent the summer babysitting to earn extra cash.

Then, after a few months, Julia did an unexpected thing. 

She asked me to come back. 

She said nice things about me. She offered to work around my schedule. She asked, gruffly as always, but quietly, if I would consider working for her again. No raise. Of course.

I had car insurance and gas and Tae Kwon Do classes to pay for and babysitting wasn’t covering it and time may have softened my memories of the trauma, so I said yes. 

Our relationship changed then. I worked for her throughout high school and when back from college during summers and holidays. I watched other high school girls come and go in her employ quickly — some lasted only weeks, quitting while still being trained. I realized that her criticism was never really personal. She had expectations, she expressed them, and her manner was just how she was. You either figured out a way to work with it or it broke you.

And as her trust in me grew and she left me to manage things at the store for longer and longer periods and even, eventually, to lock it all up at night, I saw another side of Julia. I won’t go as far to say that it was a soft side. After a few years of increasing responsibilities, I dared to ask again for a raise. I was still making the minimum wage at the time, $5.15 an hour, and easily putting in 30 hours or more a week while still in school. She not only said no. She laughed as she said it. 

But well, OK, yeah, she had a soft side. She paid attention to her customers’ circumstances. Struggling folks in the community could always get groceries on credit with her. She took checks in exchange for cash and held them until they would clear the bank. She always asked people about the kids and grandkids and she remembered the details when they came in next.

She paid attention to me, too. Sometimes I’d startle at an observation seemingly made off-hand. She was so excited when my prom date and I stopped in at the store to show off our formal wear. After graduation, when I’d stop in to say hi, she’d encourage me to take a free pop out of the cooler. When I got engaged, stopping in to introduce her to my now husband was a mandatory part of the trip home. 

Julia and Paul opened Paul’s Market in the 1960s. It carried his name, but she was the force behind its decades’ long success. She was a businesswoman who ran the place like a businessman of her time. No apologies for it. Some of the lessons I learned under her watch were harsh. But so is the world, and she prepared me well for it. The best lesson, ultimately, was the most important: People are complex and interesting. People are human. And there is always more to the story than meets the eye.