Arrelia, the one and only

Customers did not file in Arrelia Callins’ checkout line when she first manned the cash register at the grocery store on Euclid Avenue.

It was sometime around 1970 — Callins doesn’t remember the exact year — and she was the first black cashier at what was then Winn-Dixie.

“After the Civil Rights era, people would not get in my line,” said Callins, now 70. “It would hurt my feelings so bad. I would pray and pray, and little by little they started coming into my line.”

Decades later, Callins’ line at the Crestline Piggly Wiggly, which is scheduled to close Nov. 2, is often the most popular. Seldom does someone pass through whose name — and family tree — she doesn’t know.

“You have to live in Crestline to know why Crestline is so special,” she said. “[The people here] showed me what Christianity really was. It’s about giving, caring and loving.”

To Callins, the Pig has become more like a family than a grocery store. She has watched shoppers run into friends and proceed to talk for an hour, and she has overheard groups of friends coordinate to deliver dinners to a neighbor who has experienced tragedy.

Callins might be tired on a Friday night, but she stays up to be sure Mountain Brook High School won its football game.

Crestline resident Mary Mellen said Callins sat with their family at both her daughters’ weddings. Mellen and Callins were both pregnant with their children at the same time, and today, 40 years into their friendship, they discuss their love of Auburn football, swap updates on their children and grandchildren, and share prayer requests with on another.

“I can’t imagine not seeing her once a day,” Mellen said.  “She’s been through so much with losing her mother and going through a divorce, but she always has a smile on her face and never ever complains.”

Indeed, Callins has attended weddings, bar mitzvahs, memorial services and more of her customers-turned-friends.

 “When I haven’t seen someone in a while, I look up their address in the phone book and send them a card,” she said. “I want to let them know I care about them and am praying for them.”

Before starting work at Winn-Dixie, Callins attended Eleanor Goff’s School of Dressmaking at night and worked as a housekeeper and babysitter for Crestline families by day. Callins would sew her bridesmaids’ dresses and her children’s clothes, but through the years she became a mother and now grandmother, she never wanted a job that wasn’t cashier.

“I have never had a bad day at work,” she said. “I have never been stressed out at work. Isn’t that something?”

After 15 years working for the Crestline Winn-Dixie, the store closed, and she moved to another location — one she said was nothing like Crestline. She eventually made her way “home” as a cashier at the Crestline Pig in 1988.

William E. Bailey, who ran the store at the time, later offered Callins a new position scanning for the store. The new job would offer a pay increase but entail working in an office and not seeing customers, so she turned it down. 

 “I was happy being a cashier doing what I love to do best, and that is to talk,” she said.

After Callins had a hip replacement and two knee replacements in recent years, Crestline came knocking on her door with cards, flowers and meals. She still has a large stack of the cards and will go back and read them, just as she does her collection of customers’ birth announcements and Christmas cards from over the years.

These days people ask her how she stands on her feet all day after her surgeries. She said it might bother her when she gets home, but when she’s at work it’s not on her mind at all.

“Being here is like being at home,” she said. “I get so involved laughing and talking that I forget about everything else.”

And now she said she hopes working as a cashier at the Piggly Wiggly in Homewood after the Crestline store closes will eventually feel like home, too.

To Crestline, from Arrelia:

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you for allowing me the privilege to be a part of the Crestline Village family. I have served here for over four decades, and I have enjoyed every minute of it. When I say that I have never had a bad day at work, I mean every word. It has been a joy to be a cashier and to have the opportunity to wait on many of your parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.

The influence and outpouring of love that I’ve experienced over the years as I struggled through surgeries and the passing of family members has touched my family and me in ways that words cannot express. It has been a great journey, and I thank God for it.

I love you, Crestline Village. I will keep your love and share it with whoever has the time to listen. May the Lord bless you and keep you.