Roy Plinska finds what he likes and sticks with it. Fifty years in the same house. Fifty-nine years with the same wife.

And an astounding 65 years at the same workplace, the downtown Boston Store.

This is not a retirement story. At age 83, Roy plans to keep working full time as long as he's healthy. That could be a while. He says he has not taken a single sick day in 65 years.

Working clearly agrees with Roy. He's tall and lean and younger looking than his age, and he tops it all off with an impressive head of white hair. He doesn't eat fast food, he said, and he never smoked, even back in the days when doctors recommended it.

Friday evening, Roy is throwing himself a party at the Rock Bottom Restaurant and Brewery to celebrate his mega-time on the job. He did the same thing five years ago and five years before that. He wouldn't tell me the secret theme of the party, but hinted that it would be captured in the 80-pound cheese sculpture he ordered.

These days, Roy works on the store's shipping and receiving dock off Michigan St. As we talked there this week, delivery drivers came and went, and most of them said they would see Roy at his party.

UPS driver Matt Pallen told me the way Roy likes to calculate how far back he and Boston Store go. "He tells me, 'I've been working here 24 more years than you've been on this earth,' " the 41-year-old driver said.

There's more. For most of those 65 years, Roy had a second full-time job as a parking lot attendant across the street from Boston Store, meaning he worked 80-hour weeks. It was usually days 8-5 at the store, and then nights until 1 a.m. at the lot, with precious little sleep between.

About two years ago, he cut back to just the store. "Maybe it was three years. Time goes by kind of fast," he said.

Tell me about it.

Roy grew up near 35th and Hopkins. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was 6, and his dad, Oscar Plinska, was a Milwaukee cop assigned to the corner of 5th and Wisconsin. He's the one who heard about an opening at Boston Store and told young Roy, who had just graduated from Custer High School.

Roy started at the store July 7, 1946, and spent the first nine years (minus two years in the military that Boston Store gives him credit for) parking customers' cars.

"When I started here, I thought I'd stay six months. That was my plan. And I'd get a decent job, not parking cars," he said.

The president of the store back then was a guy named Richard Herzfeld, and Roy started dating his daughter. "I thought someday I might own the store, but I never married her."

Roy has seen numerous owners come and go since then, including Federated Department Stores, Carson Pirie Scott, Bergner's and Saks. Boston Store is currently one of seven department store chains owned by Bon-Ton Stores Inc.

The company's corporate offices are above the downtown Boston Store, and Roy counts president and CEO Bud Bergren as a friend. Bergren gave him a plaque to mark his 65 years, which is well over half the years the store has been in existence since its founding in 1900.

No one at the company's 276 stores has worked there longer than Roy, said Barb Hassler, manager of the Boston Store at the Shops of Grand Avenue. She checked with corporate human resources and found that the closest are two workers with 54 years seniority, one in Ohio and one in Pennsylvania.

"It is extremely amazing he has worked that long," Hassler said. "He's very dependable. He's very friendly. He knows everybody in the building, and he knows every nook and cranny of the building."

Roy has done a variety of jobs at the store, including a brief time on the sales floor. He didn't like that he had to wear a suit.

He hasn't worked this long and in multiple jobs just to give me something to write about someday. He says he needs the money, though his Social Security and pension checks have been showing up for more than a decade now. He and his wife, Frances, who have two grown children, have enjoyed traveling all over the country. Hundreds of postcards Roy collected on these trips cover the walls of the loading dock.

Somehow Roy has found time to have a neatly kept house and yard, said his alderman and friend, Bob Donovan, who added, "He's obviously the epitome of America's old work ethic. For God's sake, this guy doesn't give up!"

Roy can't think of a reason to retire. He's not interested in sitting around trying to think of something to do.

Work keeps him going. And going.

Call Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or email at jstingl@journalsentinel.com

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