Elaine Matuszak Pasternak hardly saw it as a lifetime commitment. She was a teenager at Emerson High when a guy named Max Pohl, who ran a poultry and meat business at the Broadway Market, made this promise.
Starting as a child, Pasternak had gone to the market every week when her mom, Theresa Matuszak, did the family shopping. They’d walk there – first from their apartment on Gibson Street, where they shared a home with an aunt, and later from their house on Stanislaus Street.
“Look,” Pohl told Pasternak’s mother and sister. “When she gets old enough, have her stop by and I’ll give her a job.”
Pasternak remembered. Her first day with Pohl was in 1983, when she was a senior at Emerson. She signed up at school for a get-out-early-and-work-after-classes program that seemed, to a teen, like joyous liberation.
She’d go to school in the morning, then hurry to the market to work four times a week with Max, who’d bring in live baby chicks for little kids to admire each spring.
Forty-one years later, market Manager Kathy Peterson joins many regulars in saying Pasternak – now with Camellia Meats – is almost certainly the employee with the longest string of unbroken service.
The market, then and now, made Pasternak happy. It was near Corpus Christi, the church where she was baptized and had her First Communion. It was near such little taverns as the R & L Lounge, where her dad – who fixed washing machines as a side job and was nicknamed “Maytag Ray” – sometimes stopped for a cold Genny.
Even as a teen, Pasternak saw the market as home. Once she graduated from Emerson, she began working full time for Max. Before long, she was known as the “chicken lady” within a lineup of well-loved market regulars.
What she was actually becoming – through devotion and a giant heart – was more profound.
“She’s queen of the market,” said just about everyone I spoke with at the place, including Sheila Dombrowski, a colleague…
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