Tempo is your store with more at lowest possible prices. Doo doo doo.

In light of the latest HORRIFIC school shooting, I have been remembering my own encounter with potential gun violence. I was a college student working in the office of “your Tempo store” (I did cashier too) in Sault Ste. Siberia.

I dealt with all kinds of things there. People paying their utility bills (yes really). People returning things (we’ll talk about the town pimp some other day). People returning things (we’ll talk about the people who were trying to return things they had stolen some other day).

Tempo was a discount department store kinda like KMart. It sold a lot of stuff. Including sporting goods. Which included firearms, mostly hunting rifles if I remember accurately but I knew nothing about guns.

So one day I was working in the office and a guy came up to the counter and laid a RIFLE across it like pointing it at me. Yikes! I was like 20 and my dad owned rifles but I never saw him shoot one of those or any other gun. So. All of us in the office kind of freaked out. Until I asked him why he wanted to return it. The guy humbly told us that he had lied on his application to buy a rifle. What did he lie about? He had checked “NO” next to the box asking if he had ever been diagnosed with a mental illness.

We didn’t freak out at that. This was in the early 1970s and people were not regularly blowing up schools and churches and stores and things. The guy’s MOTHER was with him (I think she made him come in to the store with her). Mr. Drysdale got involved and I believe he decided to let the mother own the gun. Something like that. No schools were blown up after that and we went on with life at Tempo.

This is just a story from my life. It was scary until it wasn’t but I think nowadays he might have been shot on the spot.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 25th, 2022 at 6:33 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.