Charlotte
Good evening. My name is Charlotte Burch, B-U-R-C-H, and I am born abroad, but I've been in Rochester all my life, and I was raised on the northeast side of town the first five or seven years of my existence. Initially we lived, wow so many places, Conkey Avenue and Avenue D. We also lived in Hanover Houses I would say in 1972 going back to about 1968 or 69.
So you're in kindergarten at number six school. You are, first grade, number six. You progress to number nine school for third grade. In fourth grade, there were mixed classes. A lot of the students were, December babies, like myself. So I was not able to go to school at the age of four and three quarters, I turned five years old after September 9th. At that point with me being basically five and a half when I'm starting, I was still a five and a half year old brain in a classroom with kids that are four and a half or five. So I'm like a little bit older, but in the same grade.
The best thing that happened was that number nine school, had mixed classes. If you were a third grader you could be in a third grade classroom, but getting your fourth grade work. If you were five and a half years old, you got a six year old mind, but you're in the room with people with five year old minds. So it's two different levels. A five year old is not the same as a six year old, light years ahead—so I figured I was. {Charlotte chuckles} So it didn't bother me as much at all to be in a room that mixed grades. We had third, fourth, and fifth graders in the same classroom. Some students—there were actually six that hadn't passed out of the first grade, they could still be in a room with their sub peers, 7, 8, and 9 year olds in the same classroom.
By the time I got in the 3rd grade, I was doing my 4th grade work. And when I got into 4th grade, I was doing 5th grade work. The grade that the school has you in is the grade on that door. What's inside the classroom that the teachers would pass out to you would be on the level of your learning. So if you're thinking on a 5th grade level, although you're deemed a 4th grader, you okay.
So now we're going to progress to the 5th grade. I'm doing 6th grade work and I have a sister that's about 10 months younger than I am. So we're in the same age for a moment. She was dubbed a fifth grader and I'm dubbed a sixth grader. We're in the same classroom. So I loved school, I would do all of my own sixth grade work and then I would just double over and do her fifth grade work for her. And she'd go out and play and I'm doing both books, sitting in the kitchen.
Now we're progressing to 1976 and I'm going into the seventh grade and she's in the seventh, but I'm on an 8th grade level. So I go into the 7th grade room, the teachers know my history of giving me my work where I'm thinking, because I'm really of that age where I should be doing 8th grade work. Again, Franklin High School, they had a mixed class, 7th and 8th graders. So I really enjoyed that, and again, we're both 7th grades. I got my 8th grade work, but I'm doing her work when I'm done. So I'm spoiling my sister actually, that's another story.
A lot of the things that I liked about living on the northeast side of town was that they had bakeries. Yes. Boston Street Bakery, the white cream donuts, the glaze. Then Mangione's bakery had the pizza, behind our school at Franklin, and Norton and Hudson.
Almeta
Chuck Mangione's family.
Charlotte
Chuck Mangione's family. They had these beautiful pizzas. They made them by the sheet, and no pepperoni. It was just straight cheese and it was the best pizza in the world. Then for dessert there were pink cookies. Sugar cookies that were maybe five inches in diameter with this pink frosting on the sugar cookie, no sprinkles. Then they had the very fine apple juice and cherry berry juices. You know, the glass jar is very fine.
So I said, “One day, I want to have a register or run a store.” That's what really made me want to have a business, was that I saw small businesses being successful, and it smelled delicious. I was young, I was small. Even in Hanover Houses they had the health care center. Anthony Jordan was there in Building 30 Vienna, we stayed there. Then there was a corner store in one of the buildings. The projects were seven stories high and then the roof was the 8th floor, which you couldn't be on, but down in the basement was all furnished, made out like immaculate.
It's a corner store that's in the bottom of an 8th floor building, which kept the community together because the kids didn't have to leave out of off the premises of the projects to go out across the street and take a chance on getting injured or worse. You could just go get your candy in the basement of these buildings. And then you have people that you would meet at the store and you would exchange your,-- We didn't have, baby dolls. We had, books we could cut the dolls out of—paper dolls. And the little flaps on the end of the paper dolls, and we'd stand them up. You could put the little skirt, just take the little one dimension, and you would put the little skirt or the shirt over whomever, and there was a little tab, and you just bend the tab over the side of the doll on one, two, or three sides, and the clothing would stay on. And you could color the clothing. How about that? You could custom design your outfits. So I thought that was really nice. We would exchange that kind of stuff.
Almeta
And there was something about the penny candy.
Charlotte
I was just going to get to that.
Almeta
Please, please tell us.
Charlotte
Yeah, the penny was like 50 cents. If you had one penny and you went into the corner store, the guy or the lady would just take your penny and let you scoop a whole amount of whatever your hand could carry and put it in the bag. Two or three times for the same coin. So it was a lot of candy eaten laying in the bed. I have all my teeth. I think I may have acquired two cavities, and both cavities were on one tooth. So we had good hygiene, brush your teeth, don't sleep with candy in your mouth. Get your—
Almeta
I’d wake up with candy in my mouth dripping out the side.
Charlotte
Yeah we had to clear the mouths, we had to swish or something before we went to bed. But the best thing was that penny candy and the cookies. They had a whole tray of cookies, maybe 200 cookies in a box and you would give the person a nickel and they would reach and get like six inches of cookies and put them in the brown paper bag.
So I said, I definitely have to have a business, and at this point I'm seven or eight years old. I'm like, I really need to have a business. When I grow up, I want to exchange money for an item for somebody. Then, I ended up doing that. I wasn't a penny candy store, but I definitely became a merchandiser where I became self employed. I think my heart was on the self employment more than anything else, because by the age of 28, I had been through 30 different jobs: security guard, nurse aide, do live-ins I used to stay in people's homes from Tuesday to Sunday, I'd call them sleep ins out in Brighton, catch the bus. I worked for engineering firms, the ones that actually built the 490, 590. Yeah, they're out, on Saginaw Drive, out in Henrietta. I worked at the War Memorial, when it was called War Memorial. Now it's called the Blue Cross Arena. That's one of the 30 jobs. Yes, so that's just a handful—like your convenience stores. We had AM/PM, then it was Stop and Go, then it was Red Apple. And now, you see a few Red Apples, but I've actually worked behind the counter like that. And I was almost there. I'm like, I like the counter, but it's not the same. I want to have my own location and my own counter. And if you look behind me, I have a counter.
Max-Yamil
And a location
Charlotte
Exactly. A lovely location here.
Almeta
The last of many.
Charlotte
The last of many.
Almeta
Can you talk about your first location where we met?
Charlotte
I know! My first location, was that Main Street? Wow, West Main Street.
Almeta
And you had—
Charlotte
A 4x4 card table. Absolutely.
Almeta
Right out on the street.
Charlotte
Right on the street. And the idea was to be part of that thrift store. It was like a shopper's bazaar, as they would call it. You could come in and you'd see four or five vendors in there with different merchandise. I just seemed to be a little bit more assertive at closing deals than the other people that had their businesses there. I actually said, I'm going outside, help me pull this four by six table outside because people are walking past the store and I wanted to do what I knew, which was stick my foot out and they could trip over my chair and then I would sell them something, so to speak. That's one thing I did learn about when you are meeting that person, you are needing to be at attention and we are sitting here interviewing and we're talking but my regular posture is like the lens man here. {In reference to our videographer standing} I'm really a stand up type person. Cause you're halfway, three quarters, to the person that you're working with when you stand up. And I found that a lot of people in the businesses would sit behind the desk and it made me feel like they didn't want to interact with the customer. So I would get a bar stool and put it at the front of my table, and I would lean on my bar stool and act like I was doing something to the bottles. And they're like, what are you doing? I'm like, you want to smell good for free today?
Almeta
That's what she said to me. And I'm like, “Mhmm.”
Charlotte
So putting a dot of fragrance, essential oil, and letting the person go on down the street, knowing it's going to really wow them because of the quality. They would double back 99 percent of the time and come and get large quantities of stuff from me. So I said, this is it. This is that connection. This is how I felt when I was a small child on the northeast side. And those people were behind the counter, they weren't sitting in a chair and throwing it over the table or the counter. They would be leaning on the counter, reaching over to hand it to me. And I said, that's the posture, and I do find that. My business has been a success here in the southwest because of what I've learned over on the northeast side of town.
Almeta
And the old Midtown plaza.
Charlotte
Can't lose that.
Almeta
You had a small one around the side and then you had the big one.
Charlotte
Yeah I had outgrew a small store. Once I got open after the 30 jobs for other people—worked at Kodak, Xerox, I could go on and on about it. What I would do as admin assistant, or the person that typed the specifications for the drafting team. The engineers, I saw the YMCA, them too—I saw how they ran their management team because I had to make the copies of what they were gonna share at their board meetings. So they needed 13 copies, I made 14 copies, and I built my own library at my house. I knew that I was going to be completely self employed. If I couldn't get a grip on working for so many different places, then I'm going to start retrieving bits and pieces for these different places. If I got to keep working and working around and around and around, I'm going to take a copy of that, I'll take a copy of that, and then when I get a moment, when I'm laid off in between all the work I'm trying to do, I'm going to brainstorm and make it into, a customized type of, the facets that you have to touch down when you operate a business successfully.
Almeta
A viable business plan.
Charlotte
Yes. And believe it or not, I believe that a business plan was only if you wanted some money from somebody. So I wanted to start with my own $213 in my last paycheck. So that's what I did. I began a business out of my apartment with $213, before I got to Midtown Plaza.
I said I want to sell all natural fragrances for men and women. I wanted to be better than what Mary Kay was doing because when you order from these commercialized places, you part with $80, but you have to wait two or three months, or three or four weeks to get the product, and then when the product came it's not even the color that you've ordered. So, I spent the money on some items, that's it. A small amount, I had maybe 23 fragrances for ladies and six for men. And then I invited people that I knew through working the different businesses and seeing people place to place.
I hand drew the map of how to catch the city bus to my apartment out in Irondequoit cause everyone didn't have a car. So how am I going to get them there? There was no internet. There was WordPerfect. That program that did not show you anything except the pigment in the screen would turn pink if you're writing in bold and you would wonder why are my margins off? You have to choose the right color, it was called formatting. And I said I need a map. I'm out here in Irondequoit, Empire Blvd Highland Bay Apartments. How?
Almeta
Well at least it's a major bus line.
Charlotte
It was on the major bus line and I was able to draw a map for people that lived on the southwest side, how to catch what bus and get downtown. I drew a map and I used that multicolored pastel paper. Remember that paper that was the light blue, the light green, sort of like a dusty green, that old paper? Anything but white, because I wanted to create color. The manila paper—and I hand drew a map.
I created my own logo for the letterhead. I created a business card first, and I superimposed the business card at the top, I created my own letterhead in my apartment, and then would make 50 or 100 copies, put them in the old envelope, put a stamp, hand wrote, because we didn't have a typewriter. Remember now, typewriters were just becoming obsolete and I couldn't afford a computer, so I put it in the mail. And 50 people would be invited. You could expect half of that to show up, 25 people. $10 a bottle, $250 in one hour. I said, $250 an hour versus $7.50 an hour? I think I wanna stay self-employed. And you get the money right then in that instant rather than having to work two weeks to get the $213 bucks
Almeta
And it was word of mouth.
Charlotte
That's how that happened. But going back to the happiness that I felt on the northeast side of town, what I really liked about the northeast side of town was the fact that you could come outside and other people could look out their window and see that you were outside and come and start playing with you.
Almeta
Mm-Hmm. “You all right, baby?”
Charlotte
Yeah. And then you would actually meet friends because you wanted to play kickball. We had a swing set nearby at the school and the parents, the grownups, loved to cook food. They always had a five or six course meal going. You remember the days when your windows were fogged up because they were boiling pinto beans?
Almeta
Come on, baby. Come on with it.
Charlotte
Condensation on windows.
Almeta
And butter beans. I love butter beans. Those were my favorite.
Charlotte
Right. And they were friends with the local fish market, Jack's Fish Market.
Almeta
Jack's Fish market.
Charlotte
So he would often drop off the order to the house, or our parents would go and pick it up. We had a lot of fish, a lot of cookies, that was the best part too, and a lot of donuts. We ate really well.
And lastly, I liked that everything was in walking distance. I could walk from my house and get to the bakery by myself. Nobody bothering me.
Almeta
The furthest you would have to walk is what, maybe five blocks.
Charlotte
If that. You walk to the school, the school had the gym.
Almeta
So the elderly could get where they needed to go. They wanted to get a little exercise.
Charlotte
And there was Andy's Candies on Hudson Avenue, across from Miles Street.
Almeta
I love Andy's Candies!
Charlotte
So that whole idea of people, putting food out there. We had the lunches, the City of Rochester at the tot lot lunches. You could sit in the playground and the little vehicle, like we have food link now, they tot lot lunch for lot tots. Go sit in the pot for their lunch, sit in a big old sandbox. Open it up, fruit cocktails, your goober peanut jelly sandwich. Remember the two—the jar of the same flavor? I think that inspired me as well to want to present products to people. Because I don't see that stuff anymore. Even the Tootsie Rolls are too small. They were like as long as your middle finger. They had the super size ones.
Almeta
My god, I love Tootsie Rolls.
Charlotte
And the flavor was right. So the original flavorings for a lot of the candies, you don't have the flavors anymore.
Almeta
Remember Sen Sen?
Charlotte
Sen Sen?
Almeta
They were lavender colored, and you can use them for your breath, but they tasted…
Charlotte
Oh, yeah Sen Sen! Yeah, absolutely.
Almeta
Much better than what they have on the market today.
Charlotte
It's just interesting. What they don't have anymore, and what we can do today, we can maybe search out and try to find ways—and that's what keeps the community going too. But being self employed for, wow, I would just say 27 years. I'm going to put a number on it 27 years. My main inspiration is the way things started out. And when things started to change, I wanted to change, to try to make it continue to happen, so I won't let go of it. Sometimes you see things changing and you let it, “oh that's the way it was and it's just gone.” I'm not that kind of a person.
We have an event coming up, July 13th and it's going to be the official grand opening with a community carnival theme. And we're going to have some attractions for the youth, some things for every age group. And we're going to have it mostly out on the front lawn, and it'll be all about the property.
But the reason why I do, it's because I know that people do grow older and they move on or move away or whatever the case is. A single individual or a group of individuals just can't do it forever. So someone else behind them, the younger people, should pick the baton up and do it and I just want to be an inspiration and invite, younger people to pick up, cause my husband and I are creating an exit strategy. And this is the exit strategy.
Almeta
You always stay one ahead of the game.
Charlotte
Well, it's time to create an exit strategy. So the exit strategy is going to allow a place for people that need a start. And I'll still come through and say hi or, I can cook too. We have a full kitchen inside the property here. So as creative as you want to be, your teen empowerment, Y-Teen is not anywhere with the YMCA anymore, but there's teen empowerment. And I'm so grateful that you are here. And, Max here is on board with that network of youth too, and tied to Clarissa Street reunion type of annual street promotion as well. So we'll be there. I will be there in the fashion of Sensuous Satiables store, but this location is a business park and Sensuous Satiables is one of the businesses inside of this business park.
We want to create an environment that you can get everything you need, like a hub. You want to have a coffee, a tea event, invite some friends? You're the hostess. There's a deck out back. You're more than welcome to schedule, whatever you think you want to do. So with that said, I'm very glad to be part of this whole operation you all are a phenomenal group of young people and seasoned people. Thank you Sister Almeta, we've been dialoguing for decades and we are here. So thank you for fighting through it. And I would never have known that if you were ever under the weather, so I'm okay with that, that she's okay. So thank you for having me. Any questions for me?
Katie
I have one actually.
Charlotte
Yes.
Katie
How have you found new community since you started your business? And how is that community compared to the community you experienced while you were living on the northeast side?
Charlotte
Interesting. Okay. Well, the way that I connect with the community is that I'm actually president of the Thurston Brooks Merchants Business Association and it's made up of 80 different small businesses throughout the business corridor, Thurston Road, Brooks Avenue, and Arnett.
As president, I said, I want to make an impact. If I'm presiding over something and we're meeting every month, what can I do so that people that are driving through the corridor will know that we exist? So I do things like order, decorations—like the street, there's some decorations, music notes that are up. I had them put up by the City of Rochester's Environmental Services and I purchased with grant money for the Business Association. Some solar powered LED light strands, had to double them and triple them, but I hand wrapped the decorations. So when you drive through the corridor now, you'll see the saxophone up by the Y. There's 22. There's trumpets, there are saxophones, guitars, and a couple other music notes. And if the sun has been good enough during the day and you come through just when it's getting dark, they're flickering, they work. So in doing that, people ask, “Hey, what happened? How did you get that?” And people are referred to me. So now another organization or another community organization is to say, “Hey, can you give me that contact to get some decorations for our area?” Another thing I do is hosting the annual event for Thurston-Brooks called Ease On Down. I host that event and I invite small business owners in, and about, and around in the community.
You could live in Syracuse? I'm gonna let you be a vendor here between Thurston, Brooks, and Arnett. It's not restricted to just “Oh, you have to be a Thurston business.” I bring in outside businesses to Thurston, Brooks, and Arnett. The event used to be for a single day and because people move so slowly, I've extended it for a whole week. So the event is a one week long event that I put together called Ease On Down. You can go on your Facebook page and find Ease On Down 14619 and join the group. That's how I have increased the community ship from just this point here at the southwest. We have businesses in the Northeast—
Almeta
It's a huge footprint compared to when you started. And I do want to say that there are artists, there's face painting for the children, I do believe there's music.
Charlotte
Music, absolutely. And there's free prizes and giveaways. Yes, and keep sake things.
Almeta
If you go to the different vendors and you get 'em to punch in your card, you get a prize at the end.
Charlotte
People go from booth to booth. And every booth, every vendor will have stickers, and they put the stickers on the customer's cards, or the game goer's cards. When they get so many stickers, they come to the headquarters and pick up a free swag bag. And I do the graphics on the card myself. So I do a lot of it with these two hands so that it's done.
Almeta
And it's done to your satisfaction, because you are very exacting. Not only, are you a savvy business woman, you are very exacting in what you decide you're going to go for, and the goals. And you always succeed.
Charlotte
I acquired that skill set by working those 30 jobs. I'm the support system for your engineering firm, or your convenience store, or acting as a security guard, a toy cop, War Memorial, or being a live-in aide.
If I'm held to accountability, as a younger person, in my walk through this employment time, once I put my hands on something that's for you then I'm going to hold myself to that same standard. And when you team up with me, I'm going to expect nothing less from you so that when you go out, when you're away from me and we're not together anymore, physically, you still have that little seed that you can refer to and be as productive in this countryside, as anywhere you go in the world. And you can be small with one person, but you're big—it takes a team. So, with that said, yes.
Almeta
I wanted to say one thing. When we met, you read me and helped create Almeta's Blend. And Katie was wondering if you might do that for her?
Charlotte
Absolutely. You kidding? That's my skill set. I'm a medicine woman. I really am. You know that story? Where the guru or the shaman is in Tibet? And you have to leave the village? And you walk two years one way to get to them? And when you come back, you got all this stuff and you tell the whole village, and now you're helping to heal that whole village. I'm that person, that energy. When you walked up there and took you two years in that blizzard. And you come back down and it's sunny. You've been gone for two years and you open your blanket up and the village surrounds you, and you have something for everybody. And then they have what they need. You don't have to go back there anymore. But that's my position, I really believe that by the way.
Almeta
So, I want to ask Katie if you're okay with—If she's ready?
Charlotte
Whenever she's ready. Yeah.
{Charlotte continued on to mix a number of essential oils from her inventory to create a signature blend for Katie. This process is made available for watching in the footage of the story collection session.}