Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 27, 1995 TAG: 9503270020
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHARLES SLACK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ ``In 1970, when I was 17, I got married and moved out of my parents' place into a housing project. My wife, Verlyn, was 15. When we married, I had just been promoted from bagger to stock clerk at Southwest Super Foods. It was hard, tedious work. Each Friday night a truck pulled up with food to be priced and placed on shelves. Most of the stock clerks tried to get Friday night off, but I was always ready to work. By Saturday morning, all the cans and jars in my aisle were placed with the labels facing smartly out. I took pride in a job nobody wanted.
``'Quit wasting your time!' my friends kept saying.
``By the 1980s, after working at several stores and rising to stock manager and beyond, I joined Hudson-Thompson Co., a grocery chain. In 1983, the company sent me to manage one of its unprofitable stores: Southwest Super Foods - the very store where I'd started as a bagger 16 years earlier.
``Still, I dreamed of a bigger challenge. Within a year Verlyn and I gathered up every penny we had saved, got a bank loan, and persuaded Hudson-Thompson to sell Southwest to me.
``Today, Verlyn and I own eight stores with total revenues of $52 million a year. With each store we've added, we make sure not to forget the details that made us successful. Each Thursday, for example, I visit one of my stores and stand in my old spot, bagging groceries.
``My supervisors along the way told me that if I worked hard, I would get the chance to move up. Young people have learned to scoff at this notion. But, as my father taught me, each job is like a signature, and your name is only as good as the quality of work that you do.''
\ LarStella Parker, after receiving welfare for three years as a single mother, did the unthinkable.
``I moved a lot growing up because my father was in the Air Force. At each new city, I seemed to get into more trouble. As a teen-ager, I started drinking and taking drugs.
``After high school I moved away from my family to Los Angeles. By 21 I had become pregnant three times by three different men. But getting the government to pay for an abortion was as simple as flashing my Medi-Cal card.
``The fourth time I became pregnant, I decided to have the child. My first stop was the welfare office, because every unwed mother I knew was getting a check. I cheated the welfare system by working on the side.
``Early in my pregnancy I was hired as a receptionist at ICAN Advertising, a black-owned agency in South-Central Los Angeles. The owner, Ken Wilson, took an interest in me, asking what I planned to do with my life. He even encouraged me to attend church with him and others from the agency.
``I worked there only a few weeks before I quit. I figured they'd be horrified when they learned about my drug use, or that I was pregnant and living with a man who wasn't the father.
``But Wilson and his employees kept calling me. When I told them the truth, they didn't reject me. Instead, they offered to help me find my own apartment. After Angel was born they called again and again, urging me to go back to school. With Wilson's guidance, I enrolled at Woodbury University and studied marketing.
``I also began attending Sunday church services with people from ICAN. When the Rev. Fred Price spoke about drugs and drinking and having children out of wedlock, I began to feel he was speaking directly to me.
``'Some of you out there are living on welfare,' he said. 'What are you doing? The government is not your source. God is your source.'
``The next week I wrote the welfare office and told them to stop sending me checks. I found a job answering phones.
``I had an idea for a magazine for black Christians that would circulate among local churches. I typed articles for the first issue on a borrowed typewriter.
``Over the next eight years the magazine slowly grew. In 1985 I married Peter Parker, a minister, who joined the business. Many companies in South-Central Los Angeles advertised with us. But then on April 29, 1992, over half of the stores that sold our magazine, along with a third of our advertisers, burned down during the Rodney King riots. Our revenues immediately dropped from $18,000 a month to $2,000. We're still struggling.
``Some black leaders said the riots were caused by a racist society and called for more government money. But as the Rev. Price tells his congregation, when you depend on government aid, you wind up feeling nothing belongs to you. You don't have a stake in America, and so you don't have any problem burning it down.''
\ What did Greg Calhoun and LarStella Parker have in common? Not only a belief that anyone who works hard and keeps faith can have a piece of the American dream, but also a faithful mentor - a parent, a minister, a boss, a co-worker - who pointed the way. America sorely needs more men and women who care enough to do the same.
Charles Slack is a reporter for the Richmond-Times Dispatch. This is an excerpt of article he researched and wrote for the April issue of Reader's Digest.
Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service
by CNB