When thinking about the Grub Box being in existence for 50 years, since 1973, I’ve had to go back in history some 70 years, to the early 1950s, when I was in my teens. I had a part time job working for Mabel and Gilbert Jones at Jones’ Grocery, stocking shelves, burning garbage and delivery groceries to customers with a bicycle during the summer and on a toboggan throughout the winter months. I kept this part-time job all through my teens until I left The Pas at age 19, to join the RCMP.
After a few years of police work and a better part of a year on the RCMP Musical Ride in 1961, I got out of the force, got married and pursued getting into business to fulfil the entrepreneurial blood in my veins. Firstly, here in The Pas in the service station business, then to Saskatoon again in a new Esso service station.
In 1967, still living in Saskatoon, I received several phone calls from my previous employer, Gilbert Jones, who wanted to retire, but couldn’t find anyone to buy his grocery business. Initially he was told, ‘I don’t know anything about the grocery industry’. His reply was, ‘I will teach you’. I told him I didn’t have the kind of money needed to buy his business. He then told me I didn’t need any and that he would finance the purchase. With that my family was packed up and moving back to The Pas.