50 Years of Fridays: Kathy Schultz
Kathy Shultz started coming to DeLaurenti 50 years ago. She’d grown up on the east side of the state, and when she got married, she figured they’d move back. Her husband, a Seattle-born guy, said, “Oh no!” She missed the seasons. Someone advised her to find something that she loved and make it her own.
That started her weekly pilgrimage to the Market, something she has maintained with an almost religious devotion. It’s her good Friday. She brought her four kids as babies. Now they come with her. Sometimes the grandchildren come, too. “No one messes with my Friday day at the Market,” she says. “It’s not one of those ‘well, we’ll see’ things. It’s set in stone.”
When she told her kids she was going to talk about DeLaurenti, they laughed. “Remember, Mom, you always took us to DeLaurenti first, because they sold pepperoni sticks.” Not the sliced pepperoni you can get now. The sticks. One each was good for about an hour at the Market. “Instead of animal crackers, we bought pepperoni sticks.” Back then her list was meats and cheeses, pasta and tortellini. No wine, no olive oil. “I didn’t know very much about them.”
“I have learned about things that I never would have learned about before,” she says. She used to buy Wesson. It isn’t in her kitchen anymore. Elyse Hoang, our deli manager and buyer, helped her find a Nuñez de Prado organic olive oil she buys over and again. There isn’t a Friday she doesn’t try a new cheese. “They’re steering me always in directions that are really good.” When her daughter needed a wine without sulfites, Tom Drake, our wine buyer, found her one. “She loved it. It was a great gift.”
“They’re my friends,” she says of the people who work here. She could find a specialty cheese shop, or a specialty salami shop. “It wouldn’t be the same. The people here make it. They’re kind of my go-to feel-great-on-Friday-morning group.” She loves that they stick around for years, or decades. The appreciation runs both directions. Elyse will tell her, “Kathy, you’re not going to be impressed with this one, but you’re going to like this one.” So, she tries it. “That would not happen in another store,” she says.
At Christmas, Matt Snyder, one of our owners, is at the door with prosecco at 9:30 in the morning. “You think I’m kidding, and I’m not,” she says. “We all had it last year. It’s just a feel-good place.”
A few years ago, she told her sister Margaret and their friend Debbie, “Hey, I’m going on Fridays.” They’ve come with her ever since. “We come in and we’re loud and noisy.”
Fifty years of Fridays, and she puts it plainly. “I am so lucky to come every Friday to share time with my friends and buy great food.”
No Kathy, WE are the lucky ones!