The year is 1995. It's 3:21 AM on a chilly September morning, and I am
standing on the corner of Union and Laguna in San Francisco's Cal Hollow
neighborhood. I am making a career change.

Penn graduate and White House policy wonk-come-street walker? It would make
for a fabulous and juicy posting. And it would not be true.

What delivered me to that corner and time was an odd series of events that,
in hindsight, seem perfectly natural. A month before I was sitting in the
(barely used) office of Noah Alper, the undisputed King of Bagels west of
the Mississippi. I had been delivered to Noah via the mesh and web of Bay
Area Yiddishkeit, and, as luck would have it, he hired me.

You don't learn bubkus about bagels here at corporate headquarters, he
explained to me. You need to embrace the experience at its very pith. You
need to get baking flour on your hands! "Retail," quipped Noah, "is
details."

So, on that September morning, I reported for duty. . . as an Assistant
Bagel & Bialy Baker. Over the next three months I would come to know and
understand the intricacies of dough. Rising, proofing, steaming, baking and
busting bagels became soulful for me. It was my white picket fence in a Tom
Sawyer-meets-the-schtetl kind of way.

I never fretted about the early starts, and I always enjoyed the High-C's of other bakers. Bern Katz was an enormous, LA-raised Rastafarian nice Jewish boy, replete with natty dreadlocks. There was Rafael, a single
father from Honduras. And my favorite, Miguel Zuniga. Miguel hailed from Zacatecas in Northern Mexico. He instructed me, quite patiently, in the art of hand-crafting bialys.

Over the next couple of years @ Noah's I would rise into management roles,
mentored by the legendary retail ops guru, Jim Mizes. Jim (and most of the
rest of executive management) would pop into the bakeries and get behind the
counter. No one was above *schmearing* a bagel for a happy Noah’s patron.. Jim
gifted me with “milk crate management” pep talks. Sitting in the cramped
back of the house area (on milk crates, of course), Jim would coach me on
how to keep labor costs low, how to turn c-sat issues into sales
opportunities and how to live through firing people.

1997 I left Noah's for Kellogg, and I traded in my dungarees and arm burns
for an HP 12C calculator and an MBA. But I still wax nostalgic for those
days in front of the 550 degree Revent oven and the behind the counter of
ACME chums and Green St. Babka.