According to my grandmother’s self-published autobiography, she and her fourth husband, Anthony, found jobs at the Montgomery Ward department store in Phoenix in the winter of 1941. Anthony was the window dresser; my grandmother, the store detective. They struggled to make ends meet while living in a motel room with two children, my mother and her brother.
My grandmother wasn’t store detective for long because she never recovered enough stolen merchandise to meet the store’s four-hundred-dollar-a-month quota. In her book she describes herself as “too compassionate” with shoplifters. She stopped poor Mexican children inside the store and whispered for them to drop the lifted goods and run home as fast as they could.
