by Brian Doyle
We are in Iowa. We are near the Raccoon River. It is snowing gently. It snows more months than not, in Iowa. A girl and her brother are hiding behind a tree on the corner of Caulder and Seventh. She is ten years old. This is on the south side of Des Moines where most of the Italians live. Her parish is Saint Anthony’s. Her grandfather is Anthony. Her brother is Anthony. Her family is from Tuscany. She and her brother Anthony are making snowballs. They are plotting to attack cars and one particular car comes into view, a pristine meticulous beautiful 1967 Ford Mustang owned by a hot-tempered boy whose family runs the local Dairy Queen. His name is Francis. His family is from Sicily. They hear the car grumbling faintly through the snow and they take up their positions and when Frank Renda’s car thunders past they pelt it with snowballs and then Tony and Larree Moro take off running as fast as they can from the burly boy who leaps roaring out of his car, not ever imagining that someday, amazingly, incredibly, this girl sprinting into the whirling snow will be his beloved wife, the mother of their beloved children; but amazingly, incredibly, this will come to pass. More things are possible than we ever imagine are possible.
…
She went to Abraham Lincoln High School. She was a terrific athlete, a sprinter, a hurdler, a softball star. She was a terrific student. She thought about the University of Iowa. She would have been admitted in a heartbeat. She probably would have earned a scholarship. She thought about being a doctor. But her dad withered and faded and died. Cancer ate him from the inside and by the time he died he was half the burly sinewy man he had been. He never stopped being the gentle cheerful man he had been, though. She remembers that. Cancer could not kill the man inside the broken body of the man. She remembers that. He was buried on her sixteenth birthday. Her mother was gone. Her stepmother was cold and dark. Her stepmother sold the family house out from under the brother and sister. She graduated from high school at seventeen. She never went to the prom. She worked furiously to afford an apartment. She baby-sat and shoveled snow and raked leaves and worked at the Iowa State Fair frying chicken fourteen hours a day in the hot dense thick blanket of high summer in Iowa. One day she walked down Ninth Street in Des Moines knocking on doors and asking for work. I am a hard worker and I could start today. First stop: Dairy Queen. No. Second stop: Bing’s Stationery. No. Third door: the Safeway grocery store. I am a hard worker and I could start today. Answer: Yes. You can start tomorrow.
…
She bagged groceries for two days. Eggs on top. Fragile things on top, where the customer can see them and register that they are fragile. On her third day she was promoted to checkout girl. Four-hour shifts, eight hours on the weekends, Sundays too. Then she was promoted to the booth, handling checks and money. She stocked shelves. She mopped floors. She cleaned the windows and the toilets. She wrote orders and checked inventory and changed prices and flagged shoplifters. I am a hard worker. She was promoted to manager of the produce department. She was eighteen. Her friends went off to college. She was promoted to assistant manager of the store, and then store manager of her first store in Des Moines. I am a hard worker. She was twenty-one. One day she fell in love. He was dashing and handsome and amazingly, incredibly, he was Frank Renda, the boy with the Mustang, and the girl who had pelted his car with snowballs was now a very alluring and accomplished young woman and they laughed about those snowballs for the rest of their married life.
…
At age twenty-two she was promoted and sent to manage a store in Houston. Then she was promoted to a “show” store, and then to a gleaming new store, and then came The Test. You do not advance to district manager at Safeway unless you pass the grueling draining strenuous Test. Three days of judgment, decisions, grace under duress, behavior patterns, management style, knowledge of industry, intelligence, creativity. The woman who never got a chance to go to college nailed The Test. She earned the third-highest score in the United States. I am a hard worker. She was promoted to district manager. She and Frank married. They had three children, each one born in a different Safeway district. At thirty-three she was a vice president. Then she was in charge of 120 stores. Then she was a senior vice president. Then she was the executive vice president. Then she was named president of Safeway Health. And along the way, she founded and chaired The Safeway Foundation and right here is where Larree Renda’s face lights up and she gets passionate and tears come to her eyes, and the girl who walked down Ninth Street knocking on doors so that she could eat and pay the rent at sixteen, the girl who was the first woman ever in several different positions for one of the biggest and best corporations in America, the girl who dreamed of being a doctor but never got a chance to chase that dream — that girl starts to talk about what she is proudest of in her glittering career, what she truly loved, what would have made her dad proudest, what might help make cancer a faint dark bleak memory, something that you have to find in dusty history books. That might happen. More things are possible than we ever imagine are possible.
…
“It started because we felt we had a responsibility to help our employees be healthier,” she says. “Then the idea grew. We were not just selling groceries. We were in the community business. We were in the social responsibility business. You are a stupid company if you are not socially responsible. It saves money. You make more money. People want to work for you. The best people want to work for you. And we went for it. We pushed the whole industry. I am very proud of that. Free-range chickens, non-caged eggs, betterraised pork, fresher and more local produce and producers, smaller carbon footprint — we really pushed, and we changed for the better, and we changed the industry for the better.
“And we pushed in so many other ways. We started a jobs program for veterans. Incredible employees, smart and honest and disciplined and incredibly hard workers. Why do companies not leap to hire veterans? Stupid. And we were raising money in all sorts of ways for all sorts of causes and charities that meant the world to our employees. We raised money to fight cancer, and money to fight hunger. Why are there so many hungry children in America? That’s sinful. That’s not acceptable. As a food company we were responsible to fight that, I thought, and fight we did. We raised money for education, and to work with people with disabilities, and for health and human services. We raised over a billion dollars. We gave away $250 million a year. Those are good numbers. Believe me, after forty years of studying numbers, I know good numbers. But it’s the money we raised for cancer that makes me the most proud, I think. It meant the most to me. My dad died of cancer, and my husband Frank died of cancer, and I was going to be a doctor to fight the cancer that killed my dad, but I never got the chance. That didn’t happen. But I played the cards I was dealt. I got a chance to start a foundation that changed a lot of lives, that meant a lot in healing, that might play a key role in beating cancers. My dad would be proud of that. Frank was proud of that. You know what’s worse than watching your husband die? Watching your kids watching their dad die. That was terribly hard. That was awful. All I can do is hope my work made that a little less possible for others someday…”
…
The girl who whipped those snowballs through the swirling snow, the girl who walked down Ninth Street desperate and brave and knocking on doors, the girl who never got to go to college, the woman who rose faster and higher through her company than any other woman ever, the woman who married the man of her dreams, that woman retired from Safeway last year, at age 56, after forty years of hard and creative work. I am a hard worker. She earned pretty much every honor her industry awards. She serves on several boards, among them, rivetingly, the International Speedway Corporation — “honoring my dad, who raced cars on dirt tracks on Friday and Saturday nights.” She might —might — take one more job running a big company, if the right one appears. Her children are out and about — Tommy (who pitched for the Pilots) with Safeway, Kristina (who also earned a degree on The Bluff) teaching third grade at the family parish school, and Tony playing pro baseball in the New York Yankees’ system (where he was the Carolina League’s batting champ in 2014). She’s building a new house. She’s figuring out the next steps. But she was on campus in May 2015, not only as a University regent (since 2008), but to receive an honorary doctorate, and to give a terrific Commencement speech to the Class of 2015. She was nervous before the speech. She had never given one like this. But she wrote her own — I am a hard worker — and she delivered it with eloquence and passion and tears, and when she finished there was a thunderous roar, and she got a standing ovation from the students and their families, five thousand people standing and applauding the girl from Iowa who never got to go to college. But that girl now has a doctorate, and from the way she clutched that document to her heart as she resumed her seat on stage, it may never leave her hand ever again.
“The girl who wanted to be a doctor,” reads her official citation, “the woman who was forced to watch as her father and her husband died from cancer, used every bit of her relentless energy and creativity not only in her profession, not only in her whirlwind of volunteer efforts, not only as a beloved wife and mother, but to better the lives of countless thousands of people. That is holy and remarkable work, and that is a prime reason the University today confers the degree Doctor of Public Service, honoris causa, on Larree Renda, of Hillsborough, California.”
Amen to that.