CYANMAGENTAYELLOWBLACK

C6 Herald-Banner Saturday, MarcH 31, 2012

THE FUTUREH e r a l d i n g

B u S i n e S S & i n d u S t r y

By Jim HardinHerald-Banner Staff

It’s likely that Robert McCutchen will be a part of your shopping experience at Brookshire’s Food Store in Greenville from the time you enter the store until the time your groceries are inside your car and you‘re ready to drive away.

As you enter the store, he may greet you with, “Hey buddy.” You may get a handshake with that greeting. And he will smile.

While you’re shopping or standing in the checkout line, McCutchen may give you a one-thumb-up sign, which he said means, “Cool, man.” And he will smile.

If you’re a frequent customer and he delivers your groceries to your car, you may not have to direct him to your car, or describe your car, or tell him where you’re parked. He already knows.

As he is carting your grocer-ies to your car, he’ll talk to you. He may even pull his latest Special Olympics medal out of his pocket and show it to you. And he will smile.

As a courtesy clerk at Brookshire’s Food Store on Wesley Street, the 49-year-old McCutchen will bag your grocer-ies and cart them to your car. But he doesn’t believe he has completed his job until he has seen each customer smile.

“I like to smile,” McCutchen said recently while sitting at a deli table in the store. “People like to see my smiling face and it puts a smile on their face. I like that.”

The store director and cus-tomers said he is good at what he does.

He’s been doing it for 22 years.Henry Ellis, a longtime cus-

tomer, said McCutchen is

“always up.”“He’s always smiling,” Ellis

said. “I believe he smiles even when things are not going so good for him.”

“I like my job and I like the people,” McCutchen said of the reason he’s a smiling employee.

Store Director Joey Akin said McCutchen knows the custom-ers and the customers know him.

“In the community, he talks up Brookshire’s. He praises Brookshire’s,” Akin said. “He believes in doing a good job and he treats customers like he would want to be treated.”

McCutchen agreed with Akin and several customers who

described him as a good employ-ee, a hard worker.

And why does he have that type of work ethic?

“I want to keep my job. Yes sir,” McCutchen responded.

He also has an explanation regarding how he has managed to stay on the same job for so long.

“I keep my nose out of peo-ple’s business. That’s how I keep my job,” he said. “And I try to do a good job.”

He wants to keep his present job as long as he can.

“I want to do good work. I want to work hard,” he said. “I don’t want to go anywhere else.”

McCutchen said he learned

how to sack groceries at the old Safeway store in Greenville. When he went to work for Brookshire’s, he said, somebody wanted to show him how to sack groceries.

McCutchen responded: “I know myself and I will show you. Cans on bottom, boxes on top.”

Special Olympics also is a pas-sion in McCutchen’s life. He’s been a Special Olympics com-petitor for more than 20 years and is a champion bowler.

He’s one of the state’s top bowlers, said longtime Special Olympics volunteer Rick Kohn of Greenville. In recent competi-tion, he said, McCutchen won the bronze medal for his third place finish in state competition.

“He is everything you look for in an athlete,” Kohn said. “He exhibits great sportsmanship and he has compassion for other competitors.”

McCutchen refers to many customers as “buddy,” but Kohn

said, “he is my buddy.”“He’s one of my best friends.

We hang out together,” Kohn said. “And if I’ve had a bad day and I’m down, all I have to do is spend 20 minutes with Robert and I’m back up again.”

The people of Greenville love McCutchen, Kohn said, and they want to show him -- even with anonymous acts.

Quite often they will go out to eat, Kohn said. And many times somebody anonymously has already picked up the tab for their meal before they get a chance to pay.

He’s been married to Sandy for more than 14 years and has three step-children and four grandchildren.

While he smiles at customers all day, he has a “smile for the Lord every morning.”

McCutchen said he was hit by a car in 1987.

“But I was not ready to die,” he said. “The Lord gave me a second chance.”

JiM Hardin / Herald-Banner

robert Mccutchen wheels two shopping carts of groceries out of the Brookshire’s Food Store in Greenville. Mccutchen has worked at the store for 22 years. Store director Joey akin said Mccutchen knows the store’s customers and “everybody knows robert.”

JiM Hardin / Herald-Banner

this is the winning smile of robert Mccutchen, a courtesy clerk and sacker at Brookshire’s Food Store in Greenville for 22 years. Mccutchen said he likes to smile because it makes customers smile. He’s also quick with a “Hey, buddy” greeting to most customers and a thumbs-up sign, which means, “cool, man.”

PrOFile On

RobeRt Mccutchen

By Carol FergusonHerald-Banner Staff

Most Hunt County readers know Evault “Bosie” Boswell through his weekly birding col-umns in the Herald-Banner, but writing books was a late-in-life career move.

He published his first book at the age of 70, and 10 books later at the age of 83 he says he’s still “piddling around” with another project.

Boswell has actually had four career stages in his life, he explained — working for the F.W. Woolworth Company for 18 years; 20 years of “knocking around” with various jobs in building, real estate and news-paper work; 17 years managing a Baptist encampment in south Texas; and last of all, writing books.

Born in Farmington, Mo., he attended Flat River, Mo., Junior College studying journalism, but instead of going into that field he went to work for Woolworth’s. The company sent him and his wife, Jackie, all over the Midwest, and finally in 1959 to Greenville.

In 1967 he resigned and went into home building and real estate. “I was working for Ken Davis and at a planning session for promotion on the Turtle Creek area I had a meeting with someone in the ad department at the Herald-Banner,” he said. “Matt Sheley (the publisher) called me the next day and said they had an opening in the sports department.

“I became sports editor, and wrote six columns a week,” he

recalled. “I did it part-time; I was still in real estate and we had Boswell’s gift shop down-town so I worked from 4 to mid-night at the paper. I’d cover 12 different football games a week — junior high, freshman, YMCA, Little League, and I enjoyed it.”

Boswell said he had volun-teered for 20 years with Baptist Men and had worked with Royal Ambassadors, the youth program, and “because of that I was recommended for the posi-tion at Zephyr Baptist Encampment near Corpus Christi.

“It was a complete life change,” he said. “We had a two-story home in Kellogg, and we sold the home and our car — burned all our bridges — and went down there. We both felt it was where I was sup-posed to be. Everything I did until I went to the camp pre-pared me for the job. Construction, property manage-ment, retail — they were all skills I could apply to the camp. This was the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done. We didn’t do the young people’s pro-grams, but we were involved in providing the food and hous-

ing.”He resigned in 1997 and

worked as a fund-raiser or advi-sor for several camps in north-east Texas. On the basis of his experience, he also wrote three manuals on camp management, covering safety, fund-raising and operations.

Back in Greenville again, Boswell started writing books and eventually his Sunday col-umn, “Birding With Bosie.”

“My first book was ‘Texas Boys in Gray,’” he said. “I had found a 1912 book, ‘Reminiscences of the Boys in Gray,’ and I took that book and edited it into ‘Texas Boys in Gray,’ writing an introduction to each man. I picked out the more interesting stories, several hun-dred of them, and did chapters on what they had to eat, what prisons and hospitals were like, etc. It was more an editing job than original writing.”

His second book was on bird-ing. “The publisher that did ‘Texas Boys in Gray’ was a regional publisher who had a series on things to do with chil-dren. So next I did ‘Birding Texas with Children.’

“I tell people that book sold from coast to coast, one in New

York and one in California,” he joked.

Early on in his birding experi-ence he asked a friend who was a birder the name of the bird in his back yard that kept saying “kiskadee.”

“It’s a kiskadee,” his friend replied. “It’s trying to tell you its name.”

A grandson also picked up on Boswell’s interest in birds.

“We had green jays nesting in our back yard, and my grand-son wrote a paper on it and got a bad grade. His teacher said

there was no such thing as a green jay; they were blue jays. He had to bring a book to school to prove there were green jays.”

Boswell’s third book was “Quantrill’s Raiders in Texas.” His intense interest in the Civil War era followed his discovery of Bruce Catton’s “This Hallowed Ground” (an account of the war from the Union per-spective).

“It intrigued me, so I began to

PrOFile On

‘bosie’ boswell

We ask:

What does the future of birding hold?“The downside of birding’s future is that we’re destroying

the birds’ habitat with all the developments. However, as for interest, the big change in recent years is that more young people are becoming interested in birding so I think that will continue to grow.”

We ask:

What does the future of your industry hold?“I want to keep doing good work and working hard.”

carol FerGuSon/Herald-Banner

”Bosie” Boswell prepares to load one of the bird feeders in his back yard, where he and his wife often enjoy watching their feathered visitors.

>> See ‘BOsie’, paGe c7

local man makes new career out of writing books

Courtesy clerk loves to make customers smile

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