Glencoe cashier checks out of Jewel — at age 89

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Jane Dill remembers how it came about at age 53 that she began working as a cashier at Jewel-Osco. It was during a conversation with her retired husband, Neil, who wanted to know when she was going to slow down.

“He said, ‘Sit down and let’s watch television.’ I sat in one chair and he sat in the other chair. I don’t like television, but I sat there,” Dill recalled. “He said, ‘Hush, I can’t hear.’ I got out of that chair like lightning and got my coat. He said, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘I’m going down to Jewel to see if I can get a job.’ I wasn’t going to sit there and watch those shows.”

Thirty-seven years later, two days shy of her 90th birthday Saturday, Dill retired Thursday from Jewel, blaming arthritis that makes it difficult to maneuver.

“I can’t move around. Otherwise I wouldn’t leave, I guarantee you. I like it too well and people are nice,” she said.

A self-described workaholic, Dill has only a trace of grande dame.

“As a child, I had to wear white gloves,” she said. “I was raised as a lady. I don’t wear slacks. Never. It’s always a skirt.”

Her family was wealthy — her father, an undertaker, who called her “Tops,” never said no to her — and she was educated at a private school in Wisconsin and went to country club events.

“I don’t hold that over anybody,” she said.

She worked as a ticket agent for American Airlines before marrying and settling for 37 years in Glencoe. After taking care of their first baby on her own, she had live-in help for the remaining three, she noted, so she could continue her extensive volunteer work for the Catholic Church.

For 23 years, she and other volunteers have organized a monthly bingo game for missionaries — “We call them ‘the boys’” — living at Techny’s Society of the Divine Word.

Her second career as a cashier spanned several Jewel stores. The assignment to the Deerfield store began in 1988, where the grandmother of six and great-grandmother of five is known to co-workers and customers as Grandma Jane.

The only grandmotherly thing the feisty Dill does is knit.

“There isn’t anybody that I can think of in my years at Jewel that I couldn’t get along with or disliked,” she said. “That’s my nature. I’m not a crab about anything.”

Dill is sometimes paired with Al Foresta, an 87-year-old Libertyville man who has worked at the Deerfield Jewel as a bagger for 45 years.

“I can keep up with her,” he said. “Some of these other checkers are a little more speedier than her.”

Kaye Lyons of Deerfield was among shoppers wishing Dill well in retirement this week.

“She makes it fun. She’s got a personality. She’s been great,” Lyons said.

The biggest change, Dill said, might be the loss of her car. Her children have finally persuaded her to give up the keys and move to St. Louis.

“I can cause as much trouble there as anyplace else,” Dill said.