You can’t get in or out of the 29th Street Rite Aid without a verbal salute from Buddy. That isn’t surprising. During the past 32-years, Buddy Hazelton has made welcoming customers to the Eugene, Oregon store his personal mission. In fact, he has elevated it to an art form, the practice of which he integrates seamlessly into his actual, far more mundane job:  store cashier. 

“Hi there.” Buddy’s salutation comes like a lobbed tennis ball, bright, bouncing and easy to return.  He is standing at his check stand by the front door. No one enters or leaves the place without a comment from Buddy. “If you need any help, let us know,” he calls after customers.  His voice is sing-song, his tone polished by years of delivery. He looks up to see a couple about to exit the store.  “Take care my friends, see ya again.”

“Hi ladies.”

“Thanks pal.”

“See ya, sunshine.”

What is surprising about the greetings is this: It’s almost impossible to get in the last word. Buddy’s habit of offering the final pleasantry is a compulsion. “Take care,” he’ll say to a departing customer. If she responds, “You too,” he’ll reply, “Always,” but then will tack on a quick, “Come again.”

If the customer says that she will, in fact, return, Buddy, scanning a bottle of shampoo, will cap the exchange with a, “We hope so,” or his classic, definitive, “Perfect.”

Some mischievous customers have been known to test the sequence out to four or five exchanges, until the electric doors close on their last volleys.

But Buddy is far more than a diversion for Rite Aid shoppers. While his salutations act as a shoplifting deterrent, and his chatter on customer’s purchases provides a sort of play-by-play for Rite Aid like the one radio announcers lend a baseball game, Buddy’s devotion to his job is legendary. In the most ordinary of roles, that of a chain-store clerk, Buddy has become an icon of unpretentious goodness. In addition, his prolific charity fundraising has landed him in the local newspapers.

Rite-Aid is building a new store to replace the cavernous, threadbare building it now occupies. Buddy explains to one customer that the new location is right next door.

“You aren’t retiring with the old building are you?” the customer asks.

“You can’t,” says another customer, an older woman, as she pushes her shopping cart towards the automatic door. “Buddy, you are Rite Aid.”

Check Stand Six, Buddy’s turf, is set apart from the other stands by 40 yards of open linoleum floor. On an aluminum pole, a faded yellow and orange sign marked “6” reaches towards the dingy, 40-foot ceiling, announcing the stand’s position just inside the main sliding doors. While Rite Aid check stands are normally uniform and unadorned, the trappings of Buddy’s charity work render this one unique, even festive.

On the wood-paneled back wall, beside the “We ID for Tobacco” notice, hangs a large, hand-drawn poster charting Buddy’s quest to shed 50 pounds in the name of charity. His gauge is drawn like a speedometer, with the red line at 220, the goal at 170 pounds and a recently scribbled a mark just below 195. A newspaper clipping highlighting Buddy’s weight-loss program is taped next to it. Hand-scrawled signs—three pieces of notebook paper taped end to end—hang from the counter, soliciting items for his annual sidewalk sale, while a shopping cart full of donated clothing and umbrellas noses in behind the counter.  Beside the register sits a plastic bubble gum jar with a slotted lid plastered with Children’s Miracle Network stickers.  It is stuffed with wadded dollar bills.

During the past four years, Buddy has raised more than $34,000 for the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of Sacred Heart Medical Center. Each year, Rite Aid awards a free Disney World trip to the top Children’s Miracle Network fundraiser. Buddy has won the trip three of the last four years, although he’s been raising money for Sacred Heart from this store since long before it was bought by Rite Aid.

Buddy has used a variety of schemes to raise those funds, from hawking coupons in the parking lot on his lunch break to shaving his head and legs in a spectacle at the customer service counter. His sidewalk sale brings in $4,000-$5,000 dollars each year, but mainly, people stuff their change into Buddy’s jar on the force of his personality alone.

 “Hi, kiddo,” Buddy says to a gray-haired woman a few years his senior. “Find everything?” She nods.

Buddy is dressed today as he is in the newspaper photo, as he is every day: A blue, button-down short-sleeved shirt, tie, black slacks and the royal blue V-neck smock that is the company uniform. His body, though trimmer since the diet, is soft and wide. What hair he has left is close cropped to a gray stubble.

He runs her purchases over the scanner. As she signs her charge slip, he holds up the bathroom scale she is buying: “If this thing doesn’t show you what you want, jump up and down on it a few times.” She grins, zipping up her purse. A pause. “What about my mirror?” she says. “What should I do if I don’t like what that shows?”

Buddy laughs, fitting the scale into the sack. “Don’t jump up and down on it,” he says, and gives a tiny bow. “Thanks so very much.” He turns to the next customer.

A young Korean woman puts a bottle of detergent and a 12-pack of beer up on the counter. Buddy announces, “The mixer and the chaser.” She smiles, combing through her purse.

When there is a lull in the action, Buddy gets on the store-wide intercom to drum up customers: “Attention Rite Aid shoppers: For your convenience, Check Stand Six is open at the front of the store. No line, no waiting on Check Stand Six.”

A mother and her four-year-old daughter are heading out the door. “Bye sweetheart,” he calls to the girl, who looks back at him as she trundles out. “Take care of Mama.”

A young man with glasses and a Fu-Manchu moustache is on his way out and calls, “How are ya Buddy?” His patented answer: “Everything’s a go.”

He scans the next customer’s pack of toilet paper rolls. “Hi guy. Did you squeeze the Charmin?” The customer shakes his head, missing the reference.

Buddy slaps a receipt up on the counter, “Sign that for me, one time, bottom line.”

He is Bob Barker, running Hi Lo on The Price is Right. He is a circus calliope player, pulling levers, punching buttons.

Only close observation reveals that Buddy favors his right arm, that in fact, he uses his right arm exclusively in performing the tasks of a clerk, from operating the register to scanning items to bagging them. Only then is it noticeable that his left arm hangs by his side. Though it is small from disuse, Buddy’s left arm is slightly plump and maintains a healthy pink hue. The fingers are permanently curled, and his thumb is tucked behind them like a meaty bud. When he steps between the counter and the register, the arm swings gently against his body.

When he was three, a car hit Buddy while he was fetching the mail from across the street. He was dragged beneath the bumper for 75 feet, and lay unconscious in the hospital for nine days. Because he was struck on the right side of his head, he lost much of the use of the left side of his body. At work, he only trusts his weight to the right leg when he pivots between the scanner and the register, performing a quick two-step. When he walks across the floor, he limps with the small, bobbing steps of someone who has just stubbed their toe hard.

The doctors predicted that he would never talk, much less walk again. When he speaks of his injury now, he mentions one nurse in particular who stayed with him for hours each day after her shift. Although he can’t remember his months in the Hudson, N.Y. hospital, his family remained friends with the nurse, and when she died a few years ago, Buddy cried when he found she’d included him in her will.

When Buddy was in high school in Oregon, his parents worried that he would never have a normal social life. He used to sit by the window on Friday nights and sing sad songs to himself. Asking girls out was too painful, he says. On the telephone, he could hear in their voices that they were making excuses not to go out with him. He blamed his arm.

Eventually, Buddy dated three women, the third of whom became his wife. They met in 1970 when Buddy worked in receiving at the University of Oregon bookstore.  One of Buddy’s coworkers -- a young college student -- asked him if he had a girlfriend. “No.” Any prospects? “No,” Buddy said, adding that there was this one gal who worked upstairs… “Why don’t you ask her out?” Buddy hemmed and hawed, but when his friend finally called him “chicken,” Buddy marched right upstairs and began chatting with Rita.

He asked her for a date. She agreed, and three weeks later, over a Coke at a picnic table outside the mall, he asked Rita to marry him. They have four children and plan to use this year’s Disney World trip to celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary.

When management at the bookstore changed, Buddy was let go. When he landed at the current store, then owned by Payless Drugs, it was as a janitor. He worked happily, but admits he was having trouble keeping up with the monstrous 60,000-square-foot facility. After a few months, his manager approached him and proposed that he take a turn as a clerk. If that didn’t work, though, the manager said he didn’t know where else to put him. As Buddy likes to say, “He took a chance on a one-armed cashier.”

Buddy has made it work by asking people for help when necessary: in scanning awkward items like large boxes, or when the rare squirrelly plastic sack needs pinning to the counter to fit in the first item. Mainly, though, he won customers over with his attitude and over-the-top professionalism. Buddy has been known to stop by other Rite Aid locations on his way to work to pick up items for a customer. He used to own a van, which he called the Buddy Express, and would fill it with lawn furniture or candy, anything his location was out of. He routinely shows up three hours before his shift, just to chat with customers in the café beside his check stand.

Even on his lunch break, sitting in the café, Buddy greets customers. “Thanks, folks. See ya next time.” Stabbing at a salad in a paper bowl, he calls out to people coming in and out of the store: “Hi, guys. If we can find something for you, let us know.” He can’t seem to help himself. It’s amazing that Rite Aid hasn’t featured Buddy in a commercial.

A heavyset woman stops by his table to ask what sort of stuff he wants for the sidewalk sale.  “Anything you want to get rid of,” replies Buddy, but then ticking off potential items on the fingers of his good hand, he says, “No wives, no husbands, no kids.”

*          *            *

A severely disabled young woman in an electric wheelchair rolls up to Check Stand Six. With some difficulty, she thrusts a 20-ounce bottle of Pepsi and three Almond Joy candy bars onto the counter.  Buddy begins to ring up the candy but pauses. He knows there is a special on the larger-sized bars. “Do you want the bigger ones?” he asks. “You’ll get two-for-one on those.”

“Yeah,” she replies in a slow, moaning yawn, her head turning away. Buddy’s expression grows softer. But he can’t leave his post mid-transaction, not with a line forming. He calls out across the floor to his wife, who is unpacking boxes at one of the other check stands. “Rita, can you get me six of the big Almond Joys?”

She looks up, a woman about Buddy’s size with the Blue Rite Aid smock and a crown of white hair. She raises her eyebrows and purses her lips, but then hustles off to get the candy. After eight years working alongside Buddy, these sorts of requests no longer surprise her.

A line has formed at Buddy’s stand, people clutching items, wondering about the hold-up. “Be right with you, my friends,” says Buddy. He stands still, glancing around, looking worried. When three or more customers are in line, policy says open another check stand, but Buddy has sent the only other clerk on duty, Rita, on an errand.

When he finally spots Rita making her way back through the aisles, he jumps out from behind the counter, parting the line of customers and limps quickly across the floor to intercept her.

“Four seventy-four, kiddo,” he says, back at the register. “That’s not a bad deal.” Buddy opens a stubborn plastic sack by grasping one corner in his teeth and then pulling with his good hand until the plastic unfurls. He places her items inside. She smiles broadly and then rolls her head down to search for the money in her purse.

Later, two teenagers lope toward the exit, white sacks swinging by their sides. “Take care, dudes,” Buddy calls to them. They glance back, nodding at the familiar ritual. They can’t remember a time before Buddy.

Early evening, a very old man comes through the line, leaning on his shopping cart as though it were a walker. Buddy places his purchases into paper sacks. “How’s Betsy?” Buddy asks loudly, about the man’s wife at home. She is sick and doesn’t get out much anymore. The old man’s reply is inaudible. “You tell her I say hello, okay?” Buddy says.

Just to be sure, as the man is counting out his change, Buddy leans across the counter and writes something on one of the paper bags perched in the wire basket. “You take care,” Buddy calls to him as the man pushes his cart slowly towards the doors. The note reads, “Hi Betsy,” in Buddy’s scrawled script. Then, descending diagonally in big printed letters, “from Buddy.”

FREDERICK REIMERS, a former magazine editor and an active freelancer, is a first-year student in the University of Oregon’s literary nonfiction program.