When you’re young and in business, it’s not an asset. The first time I walked into a bank they didn’t want to deal with me. I used to be nervous. I’d look at the guy across the desk with a tie and suit and everything. You could see what he was thinking. You oughta see that guy now when I come in. (Laughs.) When I go into banks now, I feel I’m better than them. And they know it.
You’ve been noticing my Mickey Mouse watch? (Laughs.) I like something like this because nobody would expect me to be wearing this. No matter what I’ve done, it’s always been they never expected it. When I rented the Amphitheatre for the first show, they turned me down. I rented the Colosseum and had a success. The next year they were happy to deal with me.
It bothers them that somebody new should come in and be so successful. It wasn’t easy. When other people were going out and just having fun and riding motorcycles and getting drunk and partying, I was working. I gave up a lot. I gave up my whole youth, really. That’s something you never get back.
People say to me, “Gee! You work so damn hard, how can you ever enjoy it?” I’m enjoying it every day. I don’t have to get away for a weekend to enjoy it. Eventually I’ll move out to Arizona and make that my headquarters. I’m young enough. I’ll only be thirty-one in five years. I can still do these things—horseback riding, looking after animals. I like animals. But I’ll never retire. I’ll take it a little bit easier. I’ll have to. I had an ulcer since I was eighteen.
(Indicates bottle of tablets on the table. It reads: “Mylanta. A palliative combination of aluminum, magnesium, hydroxide to relieve gastric hyperacidity and heartburn.”) I chew up a lot of Mylantas. It’s for your stomach, to coat it. Like Maalox. I probably go through twenty tablets a day.
I guess people get different thrills out of business in different ways. There’s a lot of satisfaction in showing up people who thought you’d never amount to anything. If I died tomorrow, I’d really feel I enjoyed myself. How would I like to be remembered? I don’t know if I really care about being remembered. I just want to be known while I’m here. That’s enough. I didn’t like history, anyway.
KAY STEPKIN
We’re in The Bread Shop. “We’ve taught all sorts of people how to make bread. The Clay People are across the street. They teach people ceramics. The Weaving Workshop is a block down. They give lessons in weaving and teach people how to make their own looms. Nearby is The Printing Workshop. They teach . . . It’s an incredible neighborhood. Within four blocks, there’s every possible type person, every nationality.”
There are posters in the window and stickers on the door: “Peace and Good Will Toward People”; “Children of the New Testament”; “Needed: Breadmakers, Hard Work, Low Pay”; “We have bread crumbs and scraps for your birds.”
There are barrels of whole wheat flour. There are huge cartons and tins of nuts, vanilla, honey, peanut butter. Varieties of herb tea are visible. On the counter are loaves
—
whole wheat, cinnamon raisin, oatmeal, rye, soy sunflower, corn meal. “People come up with suggestions we love to hear. People will say, ‘Why don’t you make this? Why don’t you make that?’ We try it out. We average 200 to 250 loaves a day. We use any ingredient that’s in its natural state. We don’t use white flour.”
Among her customers, as well as health food stores, are conventional groceries, including a huge supermarket. “The stores pick it up. We don’t have a car. It’s about half-wholesale and half-retail. The retail part is the most enjoyable, because we meet people and talk to ’em and they ask questions.” A matronly woman who has just bought a loaf pauses. “I tried this soy sunflower bread about three weeks ago and it’s really great. Gave it to two people as Christmas gifts.”
There is an easy wandering in and out of customers and passersby, among whom are small boys, inhaling deeply, longingly, in comic style. It is late afternoon and a few of her colleagues are relaxing. She is twenty-nine years old.
I’m the director. It has no owner. Originally I owned it. We’re a nonprofit corporation ‘cause we give our leftover bread away, give it to anyone who would be hungry. Poor people buy, too, ’cause we accept food stamps. We sell bread at half-price to people over sixty-five. We never turn anybody away. A man came in a few minutes ago and we gave him a loaf of bread. We give bread lessons and talks. Sometimes school children come in here. We show ’em around and explain what we’re doing . . .
Everything we do is completely open. We do the baking right out here. People in the neighborhood, waiting for the bus in the morning, come in and watch us make bread. We don’t like to waste anything. That’s real important. We use such good ingredients, we hate to see it go into a garbage can. And it may be burned and go into the air some way.
We have men and women, we all do the same kind of work. Everyone does everything. It’s not as chaotic as it sounds. Right now there’s eight of us. Different people take responsibility for different jobs. We just started selling tea last week. Tom’s interested in herbs. He bought the tea.
We hire only neighborhood people. We will hire anyone who can do the work. There’s been all ages. Once we had a twelve-year-old boy working here. A woman of forty used to work here. There isn’t any machinery here. We do everything by hand. We get to know who each other is, rapping with each other. It’s more valuable to hear your neighbor, what he has to say, than the noise of the machine. A lot of people are out of work. Machines are taking over. So we’re having people work instead of machines.
The bread’s exactly like you would make it at home. You can make it sloppy or very good. If you’re into bread making, you know just when to start and when to stop kneading and how much flour to add. The machine just can’t do as fine a job. I started doing things for myself when I realized our food supply is getting more and more poisoned. I didn’t have anybody to show me. I just made the dumbest mistakes.
“It was about nine years ago. I would read books on it. But there was no one to talk to. I was doing different jobs. I was teaching. I was a waitress. I never did anything satisfying. About two years ago, I started realizing how bad things really are out here
—
on the planet. (Laughs.)
“I see us living in a completely schizophrenic society. We live in one place, work in another place, and play in a third. You have to talk differently depending on who you’re talking to. You work in one place, get to know the people, you go home at night and you’re lonely because you don’t know anyone in your neighborhood. I see this as a means of bringing all that together. I like the idea of people living together and working together.”
We start about five thirty in the morning and close about seven at night. We’re open six days a week. Sundays we sell what’s left over from Saturday and give bread lessons. We charge a dollar a lesson to anyone who wants to come. It about covers the cost of the ingredients. Each person makes three loaves of bread. We tell why this shop uses certain ingredients and not others. Just about everything is organic. We have a sign up saying what isn’t.
We try people out. We take them as a substitute first. You can’t tell by words how someone’s gonna do. We ask people to come as a sub when someone is absent. Out of those we choose who we’ll take. We watch ‘em real close. We teach ’em: “This is the way your hands should move.” “This is how you tell when your bread’s done, if it feels this way.” “Why don’t you feel my bread?”
We try to discourage people from the start, ‘cause it’s hard having a high turnover. If someone applies for a job, I tell ’em all the bad points. Some of ’em think it’s something new or groovy. I let ’em know quickly it’s not that way at all. It’s
work.
Each person’s here for a different reason. Tom’s interested in ecological things, Jo enjoys being here and she likes working a half-day . . .
I get here at six thirty. I stand at the table and make bread. I’ll do that for maybe two hours. There might be a new person and I’ll show him . . . At eight thirty or so I’ll make breakfast and read the paper for half. an hour. Maybe take a few phone calls. Then go back and weigh out loaves and shape ’em.
We each make seven dollars a day. At first we didn’t make any salaries at all. After two weeks, we each took out five dollars. It sounds unscientific, but most of us could get by. Everyone was living with someone. We all get help from one another. We also buy the ingredients at the store. We get our food real cheap. We can each take a loaf a day out of the store. The store pays all our taxes.
Our prices are real reasonable. I went into a grocery store and saw what they were selling bread for. Machine-made whole wheat was selling at forty-five cents. So we made it at fifty cents a loaf. It would cost fifty cents to make that bread at home using the same ingredients. We priced it that way on purpose.
We have about eleven different kinds of bread. All the other loaves are sixty cents a pound. If we were doing real good, we’d lower the prices. It’s been working out. Wholesale is a dime less. We put a resale price on the bread ’cause some people were selling our bread for ridiculous prices like eighty and ninety cents a loaf. Now they’re only allowed to sell it for a nickel more than we sell it here. We check the stores. I always like to see the bread and how they display it.
We started out real strict. We’d sell only what we
make.
Otherwise, we were middlemen, profiting off somebody else’s labor. But now we’re selling ingredients too, because there’s no other store around that has them available. We sell honey, oil, flour, nuts. We buy honey in sixty-pound tins, and we’re able to sell real dark good honey for about twenty cents less than the big supermarkets.
Our customers have to bring their own bottles and bags. We don’t have any bags around at all. We figure any penny we save here is passed on to the customers one way or the other. I don’t see how we’ll ever make a profit because of the nature of what we’re doing. There’s a limit to how many loaves of bread one person could make. As there’s a demand for more bread, there have to be more people here. We never have any money left over. We had thirty-five hundred dollars in loans. We put twenty-five dollars a week away toward the loan. We’ve paid back a thousand dollars already.
But we’re growing in other ways. We’re looking for ways to get our product to people cheaper without resorting to machinery. One way is to get the ingredients cheaper—without sacrificing quality. Right now, there’s only one distributor of organically grown grain in bulk in the entire Midwest. He gets all his grain from Texas. There’s an exhorbitant shipping charge passed on to us. Furthermore, we don’t know that these grains are
really
organically grown. So we’ve purchased a mill. It’s going to make big changes here.
We’ll grind our own grain. We’ll be able to buy organically grown grain right here in the Midwest. Buying right from the farm, it’s going to be maybe a third or fourth of the price. We’ll be able to go to the farm and see for ourselves. If there’s not one weed growing between these rows of wheat, you know they use chemicals. Even our customers will go to these farms and see for themselves.
We use about a thousand pounds of wheat a week. We can say to the farmers, “Stop using this chemical and we’ll buy your whole field.” His neighboring farmers will see that he can sell this for a profit and maybe they’ll catch on too. People can do anything. (Laughs.) It’s such a good feeling. Somebody’ll come in and say, “Your bread is delicious.” It’s like your making dinner in your own house and giving it to someone. People come in like guests. They have an idea and we might take their advice. One man, who had been to a baking school, worked here three months. He enjoyed it a lot. At first he was horrified by what we were doing. We don’t measure flour and he couldn’t believe it. Our bread rises at different rates every day, depending on the temperature. We don’t have automatic rising things. He taught us a lot. He taught us how to shape loaves better, in a more efficient manner.
We taught him a lot too. He found out you don’t have to measure the whole wheat flour. You can tell by the feel of it when the bread is done and you have enough flour. It also gives you more satisfaction than just doing it machinelike. You’re putting more of yourself into it somehow.
We try to have a compromise between doing things efficiently and doing things in a human way. Our bread has to taste the same way every day, but you don’t have to be machines. On a good day it’s beautiful to be here. We have a good time and work hard and we’re laughing. It’s a good day if we don’t make too many mistakes and have a good time. I think a person can work as hard as he’s capable, not only for others but for his own satisfaction.
In the beginning our turnover was huge. It’s slowing down now. I noticed as I was doing this tax thing at the end of the year, we’ve had only eleven people here the last three months, which is beautiful. That means only three people have left. In our first three months we had eighteen people. (Laughs.) The work was unbearably hard at the beginning. As we’ve learned more, our work has gotten easier. So there’s a big feeling of accomplishment.
I get the same money as the others. I don’t think that’s the important issue. The decisions have been mainly mine, but this is getting to be less and less. Originally all the ideas were mine. But I’d taken them from other people. Now we have meetings, whenever anyone thinks we need one. Several times people have disagreed with me, and we did it the way the majority felt.
I believe people will survive if we depend on ourselves and each other. If we’re working with our hands instead of with machines, we’re dealing with concrete things, personal, rather than abstract things, impersonal. Unless we do something like this, I don’t see this world lasting. So I really have no future to save money for. (Laughs.) I don’t know what this bread shop is gonna mean in a year or two or so. I’d say times are worse for this planet than they’ve ever been, so each tries to be the best he can, she can. I am doing exactly what I want to do.