cashier

Betty Parker’s voice — pure Dolly Parton — and her hair — deep, bold red piled high on her head — belong in Nashville rather than behind the drug store counter. But she’s perfectly content at her post at CVS on Mockingbird.

“I tell you, all these wonderful people I meet where I work, the majority of them are my neighbors, and I just love ’em all to pieces. I look forward to them coming in. When they come in to say ‘hi’, I want to say ‘hi’ back in such a way that it lightens up their life a little bit and brightens up the rest of their day.”

After all, she has had her days in the Nashville limelight, where she lived and traveled as a country music singer, imitating Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline. She left that life when she met and married a “super guy.” The lifestyle was exciting, she says, but “my husband was more exciting.”

She still sings at church, but life as a songstress is history.

“Them days are long gone, but remembered fondly.”

Somewhere in the range of 70 years old now, the Lake Highlands resident has worked at Safeway at Mockingbird and Skillman, ME Moses at Abrams and Mockingbird and Drug Emporium in the same center. Each of those places closed, leaving Parker to wonder if she might be “a jinx,” she says.

But it wasn’t long before she heard about the new CVS opening; she was, of course, a shoo-in.

Says Danny Maywald, who hired her, “I knew that if I could find someone that had the job skills that Betty brought, who would get along with the customers and call them by name and have that one-on-one relationship with them well, that’s what I was looking for. The customers just love her.”

Though the stores have changed, she says, many of the customers have been a constant.

For her chronically cheery disposition, Parker credits “The Man Upstairs,” as well as her current managers and customers.

CVS managers Moses Beruman and Jason Hunt are super guys, she says. “When I am working with Moses, I know it is going to be a good day,” she says. And as for Hunt, she says she couldn’t ask for a better leader. “Some bosses are pushy, not my boss! He is just so wonderful I can’t even explain it.”

And though her stations have changed, many of the customers remain in her life. She says her relationships with people she met at work helped her get through tough times over the years, including the death of her husband.

“The people are still just the beautiful, wonderful people they’ve always been,” Parker says.