Rufus Caldwell was the first person I ever hired at Trader Joe’s. That alone would give him a place in my memory. Rufus earned a lot more than that over the years we worked together. I learned he’d passed away long after I’d left the company, and only through a third party. It hit me harder than I expected. He was one of the good ones.
This is my attempt to say so out loud, because he deserves to be remembered, and because the people who shape a career rarely get the credit they’re owed while they’re still around to hear it.
How we met
I interviewed Rufus back in nineteen ninety-four or nineteen ninety-five, in the earliest stretch of my time at Trader Joe’s.
He was the first employee I hired there. That makes him part of the foundation of everything I built in that department over the next two decades. The trouble was, I didn’t have the budget to hire him. Neither did Jimmy entirely. But Jimmy had some budget and I had some budget, so we did the only thing that made sense at the time. We split Rufus between us.
On paper that sounds clever. In practice Rufus spent part of his week as a network person for Jimmy and part of it as a PC person for me. It was awkward from day one.
Two managers, one employee, two sets of priorities, and no clear line between them. Jimmy and I were tearing Rufus in opposite directions, each of us convinced our work was the work that mattered most that week. It drove us both crazy.
We fought like cats and dogs over it, and the worst part is that none of it was Rufus’s fault. He just showed up and did whatever the two of us told him, even when the two of us were telling him opposite things.
The argument that fixed everything
It came to a head one day. Jimmy and I were as angry at each other as two coworkers can get without it turning into something worse. There was plenty of yelling.
We weren’t going to come to blows, but we were close enough to it that we both knew something had to change. So we did the smart thing. We walked outside, away from everybody, and asked ourselves what the actual problem was. Why couldn’t two reasonable people make this work?
We pulled up our job descriptions side by side, and there it was, plain as day. We had been handed nearly identical job descriptions. We were both managing Rufus to do the same things, chasing the same responsibilities, stepping on each other constantly because on paper we were the same person.
It made no sense for either of us. Our boss had given us conflicting roles. He was relatively new to Trader Joe’s himself, so it probably wasn’t entirely his doing.
New people inherit messes they didn’t make, and this was one of them.
That conversation outside changed everything. Once we saw the problem, the fix was obvious. Jimmy and I worked out a clean line down the middle. Jimmy took networking. I took infrastructure, the PCs, Windows, and everything that went with them. It was a natural division and it worked beautifully from that day forward. Jimmy hired his own person to handle the network side, I kept Rufus, and with the friction gone, Jimmy and I went on to become great friends.
That argument turned out to be among the best things that ever happened to our working relationship. But this isn’t about Jimmy and me. This is about Rufus, who sat quietly at the center of all of it and never complained once.
The kind of employee you don’t forget
Once the dust settled, Rufus settled in, and he turned out to be exactly the kind of employee every manager hopes to find. He started as a nuts and bolts guy, going in to fix PCs and handle whatever needed handling on any given day. We rolled out Windows NT in those years, and anyone who remembers NT in that era remembers the blue screens. It was a crashy operating system and it kept us busy at all hours.
We were standing up servers around the same time, building out real infrastructure where there had been very little before, and Rufus was right in the middle of all of it.
One day in particular stands out. We had a location in South Pasadena where the roof leaked every winter without fail. When it rained, we’d rush in to throw tarps over the computers, and I can still picture those tarps sagging with bulges of water, holding back what felt like tons of it. The only thing standing between our equipment and a complete soaking was a sheet of tarp and whatever we’d rigged to hold it up. In hindsight it was almost amazing that it worked at all.
At the time it was alarming. Rufus came in and helped us deal with it, the same way he dealt with everything, without drama and without being asked twice.
That was Rufus all over. He lived close to the office, and he was always willing to come in when something needed doing. He never pushed back, never gave me attitude, never complained about taking on something new or unfamiliar. He’d do anything that was asked of him, and he’d do it with a good nature that made the rest of us better to be around. I sent him to training classes whenever I could.
He moved up through the ranks steadily, took the typical raises along the way, and was happy at every step. He was about the most perfect employee I’ve ever had at that level, and I’ve managed a lot of people.
He was relatively slow at his work, but slow in the way that good craftsmen are slow, and thorough. He got things done, and the things he got done stayed done. I’ll take a thorough employee over a fast one every time, and Rufus proved why. He worked his way up to administering the middleware system. That meant middleware and database administration.
Formally, he was never a database administrator, but he knew how to administer the database, working alongside the DBA as a capable and trusted right hand. He reached a real height in his capabilities, and he earned every bit of it through patience and reliability instead of flash.
The laugh, and the ribs
If you knew Rufus, you knew the laugh. It was hearty and full of humor, the kind that filled a room and made you want to be in on whatever was funny. He was a funny guy who didn’t take much of anything too seriously, and that laugh was the proof of it. It’s the first thing I think of when I think of him.
You could be having the worst day in IT, with servers down and users furious, and that laugh would still find its way out of him and somehow make the day feel survivable.
The second thing I think of is how that man could eat. Rufus would put away a full plate of ribs and then go back for another full plate without a second thought. He loved to eat the way he loved to laugh, completely and without apology. The two things went together in my memory of him, the appetite and the humor, both of them generous, both of them larger than life.
Everybody liked Rufus, and I mean everybody. That’s not an exaggeration or the kind of thing you say about a person after they’re gone. It was true while he was alive. If I needed someone to have a quiet conversation with a user and I wasn’t available myself, Rufus was the guy I’d send, every time, because he could talk to anyone and put them at ease. He had real technical depth behind that easy manner too.
All around, he was a good guy, the kind that’s rare in any workplace and far too easy to take for granted until they’re suddenly not there anymore.
At Trader Joe’s, he was also my first Black hire, and far from my last.
Over the twenty years I ran that department, I built an IT team across a lot of backgrounds, nationalities, and ethnicities, and we got along well as a group. Rufus was the start of that. He set a standard for what I wanted in a person on my team, and I spent years hiring toward it.
Rest in peace
Rufus passed away a few years ago, from a heart attack as I understand it. I found out through a third party, long after I’d left Trader Joe’s. It’s part of why this tribute comes so late.
There’s a particular kind of grief in learning about a loss well after the fact, when the rest of the world has already moved through it and you’re left to feel it alone and out of time. When I heard, I was deeply saddened.
Good people deserve to be remembered well, in their own words and by the people who knew them, and he was such a good person.
Rufus Caldwell deserves recognition, and he deserves every good thing that can be said about him. He gave far more than his job ever asked of him, he did it without complaint, and he did it with a laugh that I can still hear if I sit quietly enough. The world has fewer people like him in it now, and that’s a real loss. Rest in peace, Rufus. You earned it, every bit of it.
