Most of the jobs I had as a teenager came and went. I spent some time at a golf course picking up range balls and cleaning golf carts for $3 an hour under the table. Later I worked for the small town I lived in mowing the cemetery and doing odd jobs for minimum wage ($4.25 an hour - which after taxes worked out to $3 an hour). Then along came Kowabunga.
Kowabunga is a job that has stayed with me my whole life. I spent the better part of my junior and senior year (1991-1992) working there, in some cases as much as 40 hours on school weeks. (I quickly realized the more I worked the more the government took from me) Anyway, Kowabunga stayed with me. To this day I have dreams about the owner suddenly re-opening it and asking me to manage it for him. I really have no idea why it had such a profound affect on me. Perhaps it was the amount of time I spent there during my transition from High School to College. Perhaps it was the fact that my first real dates came from women I met while working there. It was a major part of my life during my transition to adult hood. Anyway, I digress. Let's get on to learning more about Kowabunga!
Kowabunga was the concept of a man named Les Sloane, an old friend of my family. He had talked it up with my dad shortly before he started finding partners. According to my dad he was convinced he could make a killing on a pizza and arcade restaurant (ala Chuck e Cheeses). The games he said would make so much money that the food would be an after thought.
So Les got some partners together (If I remember right it was Les, a man named Cary Rubin, Cary's wife, and another man I only remember as Ed), and along with some investor capital he established Kowabunga Pizza and Arcade at the end of a strip mall in Englewood, Ohio. Ironically, the space had stood empty for years after the previous business - Godfather's Pizza - had gone out of business.
Thinking that they needed some sort of gimmick they decided to try to make a "kosher" pizza. A lot of the investors, and a lot of friends of the partners were Jewish, so maybe that was why they went that direction. Who knows. Anyway I had been looking for a job. I was offered a job at Kroger but turned it down for two reasons:
1. They required me to join the union, which automatically took money out of my paycheck to no benefit for me.
2. I had a chance to get hired at Kowabunga Pizza and Arcade.
So after being asked the question "are you going to WORK?" by Les to which I responded "yes". He had me in for an interview. The interview was mostly him spouting BS about how great the place was going to be. And oh, yeah, I was hired. I filled out a W2 and was told to report back for training in a week or so.
A week later, a Saturday afternoon if I remember right...
++To Be Continued++
2 comments:
I was hired to work in the office of kowabunga. Had to quit bc the guy (I believe it was les Sloan) wanted to take pictures of me and my friend in "bathing suits". When we told our parents, we had no choice but to quit!
Hi, I'm interested in anything else you can tell me about your time there. I worked there starting from when it opened to a few months before closing up shop and I'd heard stories like yours from others, but never believed them to be true...feel free to email me or post back here.
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