Summary:
Longtime owner and operator of Diablo Foods, as well as a prominent community leader, Ed Stokes has been Citizen of the Year and won many awards for civic involvement. In this interview, he talks about his early experiences in business and shares some of the management principles that have led him to be successful for over five decades.
Oral History:
Brenda Hepler: Tape recording is the interview being given by Ed Stokes to Brenda Hepler. The date is January 26th, 2007. The interview is taking place at his office at the Diablo Foods grocery store.
Ed Stokes: Testing one.. two.. three…
BH: Okay, Ed, where are you from? Where did you grow up?
ES: My original home is… I was born (?), South Carolina, but after I was one month old, we moved to Asheville, North Carolina up in the mountains because my father was gassed and wounded in the first World War and they felt the mountainous air would be better for him there than down in South Carolina so I was raised in Asheville, North Carolina, graduated school there in 1940, and after 1940 I went to the Marine Corps, and the war started in ’41, as you know, and I went into the United States Marine Corps and served overseas…
BH: Where?
ES: In the Pacific, and I don’t want to go too much about the Marines but that was a big part of my life that you just can’t forget, you know, but you do, so then after the Marine Corps I came out and I had a chance for the first time to on the GI Bill of Rights because we couldn’t afford it back there, it was a very poor background that I have because it was the Depression, I was born in ’22, the big Depression was in ’30, and I was selling papers on the street, and selling Liberty magazines, the Saturday Evening Post, try to make a few pennies, and I’d step away from the street, my mother would say when I got home at night, “How many paper did you sell?” I said, “I sold five, and I got two cents of profit, I had to pay three cents and I got two cents profit.” So she’d say, “You made a dime. Well, give me the dime,” because my father was always in the hospital and those days, I know that you could buy three pounds of pinto beans for a dime, you’d buy a two loaves of big ol’ bread for a nickel, and for fifty cents you could buy a hundred pounds of potatoes so that’s what we ate, beans, potatoes and bread, that’s what we had, but that was good, but that’s my background there, anyway, let’s skip again, I got out of the Marine Corps and I went to college, it’s a college, the second highest academically rated college in the United States, Pasadena’s number one, but I finished there with good grades and I enjoyed it very much but then I decided to go into the (?) business for four years, I was…
BH: And this was in North Carolina?
ES: Yeah, North Carolina, and I was there but I didn’t like it too much, and Betty and I were married in ’48, by the way, as soon as I graduated school, and we had two children, there was Connie and Daniel, were born in Nashville too, and they don’t have a Southern accent like I do, but anyhow, what happens is that I wasn’t happy there and Betty had had an uncle, owned a construction company here in the Bay Area, and he wanted me to come out and go to work for him, so I did, and there wasn’t a heck of a lot I could do, because everything’s union out here, so I had to work the labor crews, and so I rode wheelbarrows and all that, of course I didn’t like that but it was a nice experience building bridges, we built all the bridges between Castro Valley and San Lorenzo, all going across through there, so I was lucky enough to be accepted into the University of California Berkeley, I didn’t think I’d make it because in those days you had to have a “B” average, I didn’t think I had that in my freshman-sophomore year, but believe it or not, they accepted me, so I came home and told Betty we were accepted at Cal in Berkeley, she said, “Well how are we gonna live?” I said, “Well, I’ll have to go to work,” so I went to a supermarket on University Grove, in Berkeley, you might notice, about three blocks down from the main part of the campus down on University Avenue, there’s a supermarket, one of the biggest supermarkets, and I used to get out for a job in September, I said, I don’t need the money now, this is September, all the vacations were over and I just don’t have anything for you. So the next day, I went back and I asked them again, I said, “Hey, I want a job.” He said, “You were just here!” I said, “Yeah, I know, but I still don’t have a job.” So I went back there a third day and I told the guy, I said, “Pick out any two people in this store, your best people, and I’ll out-work ‘em and you won’t be sorry” and he threw an apron at me and he said, “Prove it!” So that’s how I got into the grocery business in California. When I finished Cal, he asked me to stay and manage his store, and I did, and then I become is head of seven stores, and then I became…
BH: What was the name of his stores?
ES: U-Save Centers. I had seven stores, and then later I become the general manager of the stores and I liked it, but my boss, U-Save Centers sold out to a company called Lee Brothers, and the Lee Brothers had six or seven stores so they wanted me to stay with them, and I ran twenty-one stores for them in this area mostly, and that was unfortunately a bad move because they went bankrupt. The grocery business is tough. Everybody’s gone bankrupt, and if I could tell you how many stores there were, then and now, you’d be shocked, I’m talking about independent stores, but anyhow, this store here we’re in right now, Diablo Foods, I helped build this store, I helped set it up, set the store up, because this was… no, as a U-Save, and U-Save was, like I was saying, was seven stores, and so…
BH: And what year is this?
ES: ’65, and this is one of the stores, and when the Lee Brothers went bankrupt, they closed this store, so I had the chance, getting a few leases, so I went to Mr. Percy Whitney here in town, he owned this building in this lot, and he said, “I’m not gonna rent this store to you because this is the big guys, what makes you think you can?” I went to his house every night after school, I kept knocking on his door, I’d say, “ I still wanna rent that store.” And he said, “Okay, how much money you got?” I said, “I don’t have any money.” He says, “How you gonna do it?” I says, “I’ll go out and borrow it. I’ll get it.” So he finally, after all that persistence, he said “Yes, I’ll lease you that store. How much you gonna pay me?” I said, “I don’t have any money.” So I got a deal with him, two percent of everything I took out was rent. So that was real good because if we weren’t doing much (?), we weren’t doing much rent, and if you had big high payments for a lease, it’d be terrible, but he was good enough to me to give me so I paid him two percent, and that’s the story of how we got started in 1968, I had a partner named Sal Vallalonga, I had to go out and get a partner because I wanted the best meat department in all the land, and his name was Sal Vallalonga, I don’t know whether you know him or not, but he lived in Lafayette and he was a good meat man, and he worked for U-Saves with us, and then he went to Park & Shop which is (inaudible), anyhow, he said, “I’m not gonna come work for you to run that meat market, I will if you give me half interest in it.” I said, “Okay, you’re gonna have to take half the liability.” So believe it or not, that’s how we started, and he opened the meat department, we wanted to be unique and have the best market around, we decided to go butcher behind the counter, old fashioned butcher shop, featuring USDA prime and choice meats and the best fish, we bought the both the very best fish and the best chickens that you could possibly buy and we still do, we don’t buy for price, we but for quality, so anyhow, we opened the store, and I think I checked, I got in the store, I checked the groceries, only opened from nine in the morning to nine at night, I was in the check stand, if I had to go eat or something, Betty would bring me something in the check stand, that’s how we started real hard, but today when you look back on it, you think, “Golly, that Ed’s got a successful story”, but it’s been a rocky, rocky road. I’ll just tell you a few of the bad things that happened. Six years after we went into partnership… see, went into the John Muir Hospital for a simple gall bladder operation, he never came out, so there I was, I didn’t have much money then, we had just drugged him, so I had to pay her half interest in the store, the widow, so I had to do that, which was what I was paying her off, and about a year later, this store burned to the ground, burned to the ground, there wasn’t anything here but ashes—you remember that, Barbara?—and it was terrible, everything was gone, and so I had deaths, and I had fires, I’ve had earthquakes, I’ve had floods, a lot of things have happened so it hadn’t been an easy road, it’s been exciting and we’ve enjoyed the ride. So that brings us square to… I don’t wanna talk too much about the past, but…
BH: Let’s close this for a moment, ‘cause that was wonderful to hear, right now, when you came to work here, when you started, what do you think you brought with you to work so hard and keep going? What do you think from your growing up in Asheville, North Carolina, what were some of the things from Asheville that you brought to this store?
ES: Well I think mostly, hard work and it’s been said that lucky is a four-letter word, w-o-r-k, and that’s what I guess you have to do, but we worked hard and we insisted on quality and that’s how we got started.
BH: Okay, great. What awareness of community did you get from living in Asheville and growing up? A sense of community?
ES: Well it was… growing up in Asheville, it was very difficult, like I was saying, I sold papers on the streets and later on had a paper route, and I learned the work ethic that there’s no free lunch, when we were young, like I was telling you, my father was a barber, and he didn’t… in those days, the first thing a mother did was buy some clippers at the ten cent store and they cut all the hair of their, the wife did, of their husbands, the kids, so it was very tough, so growing up, I respected him, I loved him, my father and mother, but he especially because he was sick, he’d go to the barber shop and stand there all day long, like I was saying because he didn’t have much business, and at night he got a little doctor bag and he put his barber tools in it and go to hospitals and he’d go around for people that haven’t been out of the hospital and shave them and give them a haircut and that helped a lot, too, so anyhow I admire my father a lot because he was a hard-working guy, he never gave up, but he died at sixty-one, too early.
BH: Did he get paid for going into the hospitals?
ES: Oh yeah, they paid him, yeah.
BH: …Or he just went out into the community and did what he had to do?
ES: And finally, the biggest hospital, they gave him another room, he’d come down there, it was really nice.
BH: How have you developed a store like Diablo Foods in Lafayette, and this kind of goes together with it, how do you think it’s different from other grocery stores in towns this size?
ES: Again, two words, quality and service. Quality, you have to have quality, and service, you got to give the ladies and customers, they don’t want to wait in the check stand, they don’t want to wait in the meat market, we don’t mind our labor costs, but we give service, service, service, and of course I think the quality, it’s just really, I’m so grateful to be here, you know and have the success we did, right now, what we have done, and I think that’s…
BH: All right, but then, why do you think it’s more than just a grocery store? In other words, you have quality and you have service, but there’s something else. What do you think that something is?
ES: Friendly, friendly, hometown people, and we have the best customers in all the world here and we want to treat them with respect and dignity, and we do that. People shop in our stores, they come in, and the aisles are always jammed up with… they’re talking to their neighbors and friends because this is a place to come meet, and it’s just been an exciting time to be in here and seeing that.
2nd Interviewer: Could I ask another question?
BH: Uh-huh.
2nd Interviewer: I talked to Judy Brown today and I told her what I was gonna do, and she said, you know, that man is incredible. I never once went in and asked him for something where a community project (inaudible).
ES: Thank you, yeah.
2nd Interviewer: And what an amazing quality, that’s wonderful. Do you think that came from Dad and the cast of Weird People?
ES: When you’re as poor as we were in those days, you always say, if I ever see a paperboy on the street, I’m gonna give him a buck, and I’m going to give to the community and never be selfish but a giving person, and I do that, I help all the schools and the churches and all the civic organizations, and anybody that comes around, I can’t give them a real lot, but I do help everybody. I love it, and I think that I help the store too, our reputation’s good for that, you know.
BH: Looking at the goals of the community as a place of welcoming, you know, mutual support, which you were talking about, people, you always give respect to the customer, service, our values, and addressing our needs, as you say with quality, how do you see… well I think you’ve said it in some ways, you meeting these needs, I mean you feel that the store meets really all those needs…
ES: I think so, yeah.
BH: ..and I think you’ve said it…
ES: We try to stress on five things– first is quality; second is service; third is selection of merchandise, we have the biggest selection, if you’ve ever noticed that, Balway Adams, vinegar, we got a selection of merchandise, and clain stores, and the last but competitive prices, our prices, people think we’re expensive because we’re independent. We are not, our meats are a little bit more higher because they are choice and prime, but our vegetables and our groceries are right in the ball game with all our competition.
BH: There’s just something else, and I don’t quite know, because I’m having a hard time putting my finger on it, friendliness, and I don’t want to use another store’s name, but let’s just say a regular store, people say “hello” and “goodbye” and “Can I help you?”, but there’s something different here…
ES: Yes, at one time, that competitor you talked about put a bulletin on their bulletin board, “you have to say hello, you have to be… I may be repetitious but what I was explaining to you is that they, our competitors, put signs on the bulletin, “You gotta say hello”, and they say it as an order, not with any warmth and loving feeling that they get from our store, we’ve had the best checkers in the world here, they come and go and we had one checker, that had, when she left, Ray Krok of Dreyer’s Ice Cream gave her a big party up there in his back yard, and that’s what the customers think about us, we’re just together with them, and it was really nice.
BH: Yeah, it was amazing. What kind of stories do you have to tell? Anything that are humorous or particularly poignant, you know, in the daily grind, any funny stories? Because I hear you’re a great storyteller.
ES: Well, er…
BH: One story?
ES: Well, I don’t know. One story that I like, I just heard, the guy went to the doctor, and he was kinda old, he went to the doctor and says, “My right knee is killing me. I got a real bad knee.” And the doctor says, “Oh, it’s just old age.” And he said, “What do you mean, old age? My left knee doesn’t hurt and it’s the same age as my right knee!”
BH: You don’t know how appropriate that is. My husband went today to the doctor for his right knee.
ES: Really? Well, my wife’s the left knee. Who do you do to?
BH: He’s out in Concord. Okay, so, but now, any stores like, yes, the party for…
ES: Elsie.
BH: Elsie, was amazing, and Gabe, you remember Gabe?
ES: Yes, we gave parties for him when he retired and parties for a lot of the people in management that’s gone and we’ve had fun, it’s just a Diablo Foods family, it’s not a bunch of guys working, we were close and respect everybody and I pay everyone in this store eighty-five and sixty-five cents an hour or higher than our competitors pay. Higher, so, I don’t think their service is better because of that, I just think they’re generally (?).
BH: Okay, that’s great. Now, looking at the idea of library, did they have a library in Nashville, North Carolina?
ES: I don’t think so, I don’t even think that… we had one in our school, in our high school, but we didn’t have a library.
BH: And how do you feel a library serves a community? What’s the value of the library?
ES: Well, when you say “community”, I think of Lafayette, that’s what I’m talking about. Lafayette has, as you know, the best schools in the area, I mean we’re always way up there, and we’ll continue to get bigger and better because of our library coming in, and I think our whole economy, believe it or not, is felt because of this library and our schools, because your home is worth more than anybody else just because of one thing, the school’s library, people here have elevated themselves up to the best, and that’s why it helps business to have a library, it helps business to have good schools.
BH: That’s an interesting way of putting it, I’ve never thought about it that way, because that is, my parents even moved here in their fifties because of schools, and that’s the way it is, but you always think of the bad, I didn’t think of the effect on business and how business effects…
ES: Yeah, everything works together there, I mean, we’ve been very community minded at Diablo Foods, my daughter was really strong in LASF, I don’t know if she’s the president, but she was the president of the PTA, and my son-in-law was running all the parks and recreation, in fact, they were the first man and woman to ever be chosen as Citizen of the Year, and that was several years ago, do you remember that? And we were proud of that because she’s really helped, she’s gone out into the community and met people and the schools and we got young people, now, we got as many young people today as do old people, because people, when they come in, if they just get exposed to us, they’ll come back.
BH: And what other community organizations have you been a part of?
ES: I have been I the Board of Directors of the State Grocers’ Association, I’ve been on the Board desk for that for years, I was the President of the Chamber of Commerce, I was president of the Chamber in 1972, I was president of the Rotary Club in 1984, I was president of the Lafayette Town Hall Theater and I’m still real active in that, and I’m on the Board of Directors for the Lafayette Senior Housing, that’s the Chateau Lafayette, I’ve been that for years and years, and not many people know this, but I was elected to go into the Grocery Hall of Fame…
BH: Oh my goodness! Congratulations! That’s a big deal!
ES: Yeah, this right here, that’s quite an honor because, mostly in California, I was the only one that’s ever been chosen for a little company like we do, it’s quite an honor. I was going into the Hall of Fame with a buddy of mine, Bob Piccinini, and Bob Piccinini had a hundred and twenty stores, and now he’s bought all the Albertson’s Stores, he gonna have two hundred and forty stores, but he’s a good buddy of mine, here I went in the same time he did, and here I’m just a little old guy.
BH: No, No, No.
ES: Then, I am also the honorary mayor of Lafayette, did you know that?
BH: The honorary mayor?
ES: Honorary mayor of Lafayette. Yep, there it is, right here. Anyhow, I was the honorary mayor of Lafayette, I’ve been chosen Business Person of the Year, I’ve been chosen the Citizen of the Year, so I’ve had every kind of honor that they could possibly honor me, and only because of this– I was out in the community, and I Lafayette Library’s such a big part of the community, that’s what makes it all worthwhile, you know? I was active and I wrote a lot of letters, trying to get people to contribute to the library, a lot of my friends, in fact, Ann Grodin’s a real good friend of mine, she’s running the thing, and Bill Ames next door was a big contributor, Rick Cronk, we mentioned a minute ago, former president of Dreyer’s Ice Cream, and there’s another guy… it doesn’t matter, I lost it, it’s okay. A lot of people I’ve known, and I’ve helped with letters saying you should, you know, in the paper and all that they’ve asked me to do, and I hope I helped a little bit.
BH: I’m sure you have.
ES: And I contributed to personally, and so we’re excited about it.
BH: Now, can I just ask you, you refer a lot of this back to the business, but I guess from my experience, I get this feeling it wasn’t just for the business.
ES: Well, that’s true, that’s true.
BH: What in you do you think, deep down, has made you or in… let’s see, what deep down in you, personally, has given you the initiative and the desire to go out into the community? Whay do you think?
ES: Number one, I think this is, I’m so proud and happy and privileged to live in a city like this, I love it so much and when we first came here they didn’t have Highway 24, but that’s how long it’s been.
BH: Rick Striden? Remember Rick Striden?
ES: Sure, and don’t tell me Barbara, are you this old?
BH: She’s actually two years older than I am.
ES: Anyhow, I was gonna say that it’s a beautiful city and I love it so much and it’s not work for me to come to work, I’m 84 years old and still enjoy coming to work and where most people are retired, but I kid people, they ask me, “Why haven’t you retired yet?” and I say, “Well, my creditors won’t let me retire!” But anyhow, any of the schools are so important to all these things and this lovely city we have, we have the best schools, and now we got, I made a note here, the library will enrich our community, the Lafayette schools have maintained a level of excellence, young families are moving here for the schools alone, and of course the library’s even gonna help them get more students. I think the library is the icing on the cake, it makes everything blend in because not only now, but we have everything in Lafayette that’s important, we have the arts, and the schools, and the churches, and now we’re gonna have a library that’ll be top notch. I’m excited because my four-year-old granddaughter is going to be going to this library, and we’re excited about that, can you believe that? I think because of the library, teachers will encourage students to check out a book and have a book in their hand that’s solid and tangible, and they can go get a book and then return it and it keeps the library going. Ann Grodin told me that right now, today, there’s seven hundred people that come into the library each day. Each day!
BH: The current library.
ES: Yes, so you can imagine what it’s gonna do with the other beautiful thing we’ve got coming.
BH: If you were going to give advice for the future of the community?
ES: What advice would I give to the future of the community?
BH: …Oh, Great Wise One.
ES: I would advise them to get involved, to get with the community, get with the service clubs and schools, and when they become involved, they’re part of it and I think that’s gonna be the success of this town, this continuing success is people stepping up to the plate. When I opened the store in 1968, the year that we became a city, the same year, and I’ve seen all the mayors and all the Board of Directors and everything, comes through the prolonged time, and it’s real strange that every one of them felt the same way, as what you’re saying, they loved the city and they wanna do it correctly rather than selfishly, ‘cause a lot of people give of time and money because their selfish enough to do it for themselves rather than for the community and that’s not what it is in this town, as you can know how much we raised, Somebody said, somebody told me, “You gotta raise thirteen million dollars in this town”, thirteen million, my first thought was, “That’s gonna be tough. How we gonna get that much money out of this old town? Because we’re not wealthy, we have well-to-do people here but not wealthy, and golly, we did it, and I’m so proud of the citizens of Lafayette coming through like that.
BH: It’s wonderful.
ES: It is, it is, people are giving here. When I was president of the Rotary Club, our national club, the Rotary Club, would have a Mune Hall, the children for polio, they said your quota is fifty thousand dollars, for our little teeny club. We raised seventy thousand dollars, but it just takes people who are willing to help and willing to work to make this thing happen. There’s no free lunch, you gotta get out and contribute to the community, and you can’t just sit back and let everybody else do it.
BH: I had an “Off the Wall” poster. Wasn’t Supersaver here originally?
ES: No.
BH: Let’s just finish up. This is the end of our official interview. Story addendum.
ES: A terrible setback occurred on May the ninth, 1976, and we were dead to save, of course, and it was completely wiped out, everything was gone…
BH: Because the fire.
ES: The fire, the fire started then and I got on the phone and called all my grocery managers all over the area and got everybody a job, and of course we were devastated, we had no money hardly to keep going, we did have a store in concord at the time, and we put an ad in the paper, “If you love Lafayette and you love Diablo Foods, please shop at our Concord store”, and we put a map in so they could get there, it was a long way, and our (inaudible) went up to twenty-five to thirty thousand dollars a week, everybody kept coming in there to get something…
BH: That’s great. Amazing.
ES: Well, the other thing, since we closed our Concord store, our business has jumped at least ten thousand people, they come from Concord, and Danville, I got people coming from Danville and Concord over here in the shop that was acquainted with our store over there, we sold, at Christmas Eve one day, this last Christmas Eve, we sold three tons of crab. Three tons of crab! That’s six thousand pounds, we had eight guys cracking crabs night and day, people would give the order and crack it for him and put it away, we couldn’t crack it if they didn’t order it, but can you believe that? Six thousands pounds.
BH: Amazing. You know, what we didn’t talk about was, what about family taking over?
ES: Oh, yes, okay. I think I’m gonna outlive everybody, but I’m not. My son, which you just saw, and me and my daughter Connie, they own twenty-four and a half percent of the business now, I just wanted to keep going at fifty-one, but eventually, I’ll step out completely, I’m just trying to slow down a little bit now, but it’s not going to work, it’s fun! It’s the people, I miss the people. I wanna go down there and solve all these problems downstairs and say hello to everybody, but…
BH: This is a good question, now, passing it down, the community, I don’t know your son, I know Connie and your adorable grandson…
ES: And you know her, too.
BH: No, him.
ES: Oh, him, Daniel.
BH: And in the same sense, obviously Connie has it, the same sense of community, how is that being passed down? How do you pass that?
ES: Well, like I was telling you, Connie was very active in the schools, LMYA, the PTAs and she’s good, she ran the Shop Lafayette for two or three years, the Chamber, and she did a real good job, she is capable of keeping it in the community and so is my grandson. My grandson, as you know, he’s twenty-five years old, here he is, graduating St. Mary’s College, and he made all A’s, he went to Wake Forest for two years, made all A’s, he got homesick and wanted to come here, the last two years he graduated at St. Mary’s with all A’s, and he had a lot of people who wanted him to go to work for them, and guess what? He said, “No, I wanna come back and work in the grocery store.” I said, “Boy, if that’s the case, we’re gonna have to structure this thing so you’re the third generation because it has to be that way,” and he’s capable of doing that.
BH: Well, right, you have to meet his capability, you can’t be a straight-A…
ES: He’s such a nice, not only is he my grandson, he’s my buddy. We play golf together, and we got to St. Mary’s basketball games together, and he’s a great guy. I love him, he’s twenty-five years old now though. Can you believe that?
BH: So that’s fabulous. End of our addendum, as wonderful as it was.
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