Staff Celebrity Spotlight: Linda Calloway

Job: Mt. Airy Deli staff

Where She’s From: Reading, PA

Where She Lives Now: East Mt. Airy, with two cats, Merlin and Boo. (She shares the space with Weavers Way IT programmer Marko Nastic.)

Before She Got Here: She spent 20 years in the seafood business, working her way up to store manager at Filbert’s Seafood in Reading, and then managing at Adelphia Seafood there after Filbert’s closed. She had to quit after a heart attack in the early 2000s, but then went on to work for Surgical Specialties, a Reading-based manufacturer of surgical needles, from 2013 until July 2014. (The plant moved to Mexico at the end of 2014.) 

Notable Side Gig: For three years in the early ‘90s, she ran Calloway’s Seafood, a stand in the Reading Farmers Market that also specialized in Polish delicacies.

How She Got Here: She’d been working at Rite Aid since moving to Philadelphia in 2015. Her daughter, Shekinah, who also lives in East Mt. Airy, saw Weavers Way online, and said, “Mom, this looks like you.” 

Fun Family Facts: She has two other adult children: Craig and Melissa, and 13 grandchildren, ranging in age from 6 to 26. Also, she’s a twin, and the second youngest of six; her sister Brenda is three minutes older.

Favorite Co-op Products: Stryker and Garrett Valley meats, Santa Cruz juices, My House apple caramel walnut pie, Chilly Philly ice cream

A Little Co-op Love: “I’ve made so many friends, and the customers are friends. I appeal to them, and they appeal to me … I feel like I found my home, and I don’t want to go anywhere else.”

— Karen Plourde, Weavers Way Communications Staff