Bye-bye, Buddy

Maybe someone will give the man born Wilson Paul Hazelton 66 years ago today a medal during his retirement party Saturday at the Rite Aid store at West 29th Avenue and Willamette Street.

They should.

A medal for 40 years of outstanding customer service.

A medal for always doing the next right thing and acting the way we all should act 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

A medal for perseverance.

“This guy is amazing,” said Derryl Willis of Seattle, after giving Hazelton, who everyone has known as “Buddy” since the day he was born in Hudson, N.Y., one hug after another at the store last weekend.

“One of my inspirations. And he knew every single person who came through the door. And through his actions, he taught us all how to engage in customer service — always.”

Willis, 51, worked with Hazelton back in the early 1980s at the former Pay Less drugstore that used to occupy the spot where Market of Choice and Rite Aid sit. He just happened to stop in Rite Aid last Saturday looking for Hazelton, whom he had not seen in nearly 30 years.

Willis, who worked in the store’s camera department in the years before the Rite Aid chain bought Pay Less in 1996, had no idea his former co-worker was two weeks away from retirement.

Hazelton, who started at Pay Less as a janitor on Dec. 11, 1973, and became a cashier four years later, will work his last shift at Rite Aid on Dec. 14, almost 40 years to the day after he began.

From noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday, the public can attend a retirement party at the store for Hazelton and his wife, Rita, who recently retired from Rite Aid herself after 17 years.

Goodwill ambassador

“What a wonderful coincidence,” said Willis, now a regional bank manager at HomeStreet Bank in Seattle, throwing his arm around Hazelton once again. “You’re beautiful!”

“Well, you are too!” a somewhat stunned Hazelton said.

This is how Hazelton talks. Emphatically. In italics.

This is how he has been talking to customers since the day Pay Less store manager Don Warner took another chance on the store janitor who lost the use of his left arm, who has walked with a permanent limp since a car barreled into him in Hudson in 1951 when he was 3½.

Warner, now deceased, told Hazelton that the store was getting too big for him to handle as the janitor.

“But I don’t know where else to put you,” Hazelton recalled him saying. “The only thing available is checker.”

“And he wasn’t being rude, but he just said, ‘I don’t know if you can handle it one-handed.’ ”

Besides working a cash register, part of the job included folding the flaps on paper bags and stapling them shut.

“And I could do it a little bit, but occasionally I asked customers for help,” Hazelton said. “And everybody was so generous. They would hold the bag, and I would staple it shut.”

Well, Hazelton not only made it as a cashier. He became Pay Less’, and later Rite Aid’s, unofficial ambassador of good will.

The guy who always greeted you when you walked in the store, his voice direct and whole-hearted — “Hi my friend. How are you!” — from half a store length or farther away.

“I can do anything …”

It all began by happenstance after Hazelton walked into the former Emporium clothing store, in what was then called Willamette Plaza, looking for a job.

The Emporium told Hazelton, then in his mid-20s, to check back the next day.

Frustrated, he looked up at the Pay Less sign and thought, well, why not?

But, as Hazelton would discover as he walked up the stairs to the store office, Pay Less also was not accepting applications.

“And I turned around and was just getting ready to walk down the stairs and … (Warner) comes over and he says, ‘Hey, let’s you and I talk,” Hazelton recalled. “He asked me if I wanted to be the janitor.”

Kevin Hodges, 54, a supervisor at the Rite Aid store, grew up in Eugene and remembers as a teenager seeing Hazelton at the Pay Less store.

“I don’t think he had to be told (to be friendly),” Hodges said. “That was just built into him. I’ve just never seen anybody who greets people coming through the door like he (does).”

Where does this abundance of good will come from? Doesn’t a man whose life was almost ended before his fourth birthday have a right to some bitterness?

“Everybody can do it if they want to,” Hazelton said last Saturday before the start of his noon to 5 p.m. shift. “But you’ve got to want to do it, and you’ve got to feel it within your heart, and it’s got to be sincere. It can’t be something where the manager said, ‘We’ve got to greet everybody, we’ve got to be friendly.’ You know, that’s phony.”

His exuberance, however, has not gone over well with everyone over the years.

“A gentleman one time said, ‘You don’t know who I am. Don’t ever talk to me again,’ ” Hazelton recalled. “And a lady one time was holding a baby, and I just happened to say hi to her and the baby, and she says, ‘You don’t know who I am. Don’t ever talk to me again, you fat moron.’

“That really hurt me deeply. But I have overcome everything. If somebody doesn’t want to talk to me — it still hurts a little bit — but I just have to let things go.”

In his childhood, Hazelton lay unconscious for nine days and was in the hospital for six weeks after being struck in the head and dragged 75 feet on the bumper of the car that hit him as he tried to make his way back across the street after retrieving his family’s mail.

“I was 99 percent dead,” Hazelton said. “And they told my folks, ‘If this kid lives, he’s never gonna walk or talk.’ And here I am, 63 years later.

“And I’m just like everybody else. You can see my handicap,” he said, looking down as his atrophied left arm, “but I can do anything anybody else can, and don’t say I can’t, because I’m going to prove you wrong …”

This from a man who makes $12.60 an hour, who never made more than $20,000 in a single year.

The measure of a man

But Buddy Hazelton’s life is not one measured in dollars and cents.

His life is a success story measured in friendship and love and the overcoming of odds.

“He’s just always been so happy and cheery,” said customer Linda Cossey, the manager for 29 years at the nearby Glenwood restaurant on Willamette Street, as she pushed a full shopping cart out the door. “It’s just not going to be the same without him. For years I thought he was the manager. He doesn’t let anything affect him.”

Shy with girls because of his disability while growing up, Hazelton never could muster the courage to ask anyone out while attending west Eugene’s Willamette High School in the mid-1960s.

Three years after graduation, though, he had his eye on a co-worker at the University of Oregon bookstore where he worked for a few years in the receiving department until one day in 1969 when he was let go abruptly. Rita was five years older and worked on the second floor, as a clerk in the art department.

Down in the basement, where Buddy worked, he told a co-worker about his dilemma.

“We were just talkin’, and I said I’d like to ask her out,” Hazelton recalled. “And he says, ‘Why don’tcha?’ And I says, ‘I’m afraid she’ll turn me down.’ And he says, ‘You chicken?’

“So I went upstairs, and we just got to talkin’, and I asked her — as a matter of fact, it was August 22nd,” he said, closing his eyes for a moment and trying to remember the date — “and I asked her if she’d like to go to the (county) fair. And we went to the fair, and 16 days after that we were engaged.”

Buddy asked Rita to marry him while the two were sipping sodas at the JCPenney store at Valley River Center just a month after the new mall had opened that summer. They married in July 1970.

“The consummate teacher”

Today, Buddy and Rita have three grown sons — Paul, John and Matt — who all live in Eugene, and a daughter, Robyn, who lives in Providence, R.I. They also have six grandchildren.

Today’s party will include sheets of cake, and customers will be encouraged to sign something for both Buddy and Rita. And you can be sure you’ll here exchanges like this one from last Saturday:

Buddy: Are you doin’ OK?

Customer: I’m good, thanks.

Buddy: Atta girl.

Customer: Thank you.

Buddy: You bet.

Customer: Have a great day.

Buddy: You, too. Enjoy that sunshine!

Willis, the Seattle bank manager, considers Hazelton “the consummate teacher. And now… I’ve got 13, 15 branches underneath me, and I teach them customer service — and I teach them ‘Buddy style,’ ” he said, breaking into laughter and causing Hazelton to crack up as well.

But only for a moment, as Hazelton soon spotted some bag-toting customers walking out the door.

“Take care , my friends. Have a great weekend.”