GROCERY STORE

 

I guess the first real knowledge of social economics I had came from the neighborhood grocery store, I’m not talking about supermarkets, which we Ohioans also frequently call “the grocery”, as in, “I’m going to the grocery, I’ll be back in an hour.” No, I mean the little mom-and-pop stores that catered to people before we all became so vehicular.

It was through my older sister Darla that I learned about financial responsibility. Mainly, that if you were close to somebody who, through no fault of their own, has less than you, then you were morally obliged to help them out. So it was probably at age three or four that my sister—not without a certain measure of reluctance—helped me start laying the groundwork for my future philosophy of democratic socialism. I had the advantage, in my initial contact, of being the beneficiary of it. And I learned it with and from her in what was for us—at ages five or six and three or four—our sole economic marketplace: Tillie’s grocery store.

Tillie’s was located less than a block from our house when we lived on North Defiance Street in our home town of Wapakoneta, Ohio. It’s proprietor, Tillie Neidemire, was the holder of the key to our then modest dreams: little novelty toys and games, comic books, pop, ice-cream bars and a dazzling case full of penny candy. The greatest attraction of this candy was not only its fetching aspect or anticipated flavor, but also that we could afford it. Or better said, Darla could afford it. She could even afford the occasional ice-cream bar. I could as well, but much less so, and that’s where the lesson in enforced solidarity came in. 

Whitie, our father, was a great believer in teaching children “to respect money.” A nickel, he felt, wasn’t “just a nickel” if you didn’t have it. If you were broke, a nickel was a lot of money. He’d grown up during the Depression in a rough neighborhood on the South Side of the industrial town of Lima, located half an hour north of our home town. He’d seen his father lose every cent he’d saved over the course of a couple of decades when the bank where he kept his savings collapsed, before the days of the FDIC guarantee.

At the time, his father owned a grocery store. Like all mom and pop groceries back then, credit was extended to regular customers, with the record being kept in a notebook and without either the convenience or the bureaucracy of credit cards, which didn’t exist yet, and wouldn’t for another few decades. So when my grandfather’s regulars became victims of the Depression as well, and could no longer pay their bills, his business too went the way of his savings.

The influence of what happened to his father back then—my grandfather would later emerge like Phoenix from the ashes and retire, not wealthy, but certainly well-to-do—seemed to have had a profound influence on Whitie as a child and the fear of “losing everything” remained with him throughout his life. That made him a man who was very careful with money.

So as very young kids, we had an allowance. If I remember correctly, mine was a quarter and Darla’s was a half-dollar, and it was up to us to learn how to manage it. We could blow it and trinkets and sweets and be penniless until payday rolled around again, or we could budget from one allowance to the next. It was up to us how we wanted to live.

When I griped about my allowance being smaller, I was told that Darla got more because she was older. So, I got my first lesson in seniority as well. But poor Darla received a hard to swallow lesson as well. If you had seniority, you also had responsibilities. If she went to Tillie’s and I asked to go along, she had to take me, make sure I got over and back across the one street we had to negotiate, and if I was broke, she had to share, because she made more than I did.

Darla, then, could never make plans for her money other than deciding to save it. If her fifty-cent piece went into her piggy bank as savings—in other words, if she decided to “invest it in the future”—then, I was on my own. But if she decided to treat herself and my more meager allowance was already gone, then she couldn’t just say, “Tough!” and enjoy it in front of me. She had to get something for me as well. I never thought about it at the time, but on days when she was particularly peeved about the unfairness of this arrangement, she was probably not the best person to be in charge of making sure I got across busy Defiance Street safely. But in the end, I survived.

Tillie lived in a house that was kind of beside and above the store and she’d had a side entrance put in that was elevated and accessible by a set of mill-ladder stairs. So when you came into the store and the bell above the door jangled, if she was in her house she would appear suddenly on the landing above the steps.

I found her intimidating. I’m sure she was perfectly harmless, just tired of having to attend unaccompanied children who visited the store to buy ten cents worth of candy and took an endless amount of time choosing what they wanted. It was as if we were invading rather than visiting the grocery. And as if, by coming to the store to make a purchase, we were infringing on her precious solitude. So her “friendly” greeting was often, “What do you kids want?”

The obvious answer would have been, “What do you think? Sweets!” But we usually remained there in polite silence until she could make her way down the mill ladder and behind the counter. It was a glass-front closed candy case so that kids couldn’t just reach in and serve themselves. You pointed, “One of those, one of these over here, a couple of this kind...” etc. Can’t say I can blame the lady for getting cranky.

But you could tell she ordered her merchandise with her miniature clientele in mind because she had a good selection of some of the most attractive of penny candies and chocolates: round butter caramels with pressed powdered sugar centers, coconut bon-bons, licorice and red lightning rods (which are now called twizzlers) all-day jawbreakers (which I fractured my teeth gnawing to nothing in an hour and which Darla could make last for days), super-hot cinnamon squares, suckers and lollipops, big sour-grape gumballs, Bazooka bubblegum and Double-Bubble, candy hearts, Tootsie Rolls, Necco Wafers, and all of the best-known candy bars—Milky Ways, Mars Bars, Sky Bars, York Peppermint Patties, Mounds, Almond Joys, Three Musketeers, Clark Bars, Zagnut Bars, Butterfingers, Bun peanut clusters (maple for Darla, vanilla for me), Hershey Bars... And then there was her little freezer stocked with popsicles, ice-cream bars, Eskimo Pies, Drumsticks, Fudgesicles and Rainbow Bars that were orange sherbet on the outside and rich vanilla on the inside.

The store was an old, dark, tired-looking place with squeaky, sagging floors, but for us, it looked like heaven. We missed it when we moved from Defiance to South Pine Street.

There, on South Pine a couple of doors south of Benton Street, we didn’t have a grocery very close by. But we were older. I was five and my sister was almost eight, and our mother trusted Darla to get me to the grocery and back in one piece. It wasn’t but a block from where Darla had to accompany me to Bible School, which, that first summer, was held at the Salem Church. That meant crossing three major streets. Fred’s Eastside Market was a block further east from the church, where two of those streets, Mechanic and Pearl, came together in a wedge.

Fred was a nice man who wore horn-rimmed glasses and always had a kind of half-smile on his face. He was soft-spoken and treated everyone, including children, like valued customers. The store had dark red shingles. It was up off the street a few steps and faced the tip of the wedge instead of either of the two sidewalks and was fronted by a porch that gave onto the wedge and onto the two streets. Fred often had fruits and vegetables in crates out there on the porch, neatly angled against the front of the building so that customers could see the merchandise and the prices posted on cardboard signs. He also had a little signboard at the point of the wedge, where he posted the week’s specials.

The candy section was up close to the counter on the right side of the main aisle as you came in. If Fred’s wife was in the store, she was usually posted sitting on a high stool behind the counter. Her character was more like that of Tilly’s so we “felt right at home.” Whenever unaccompanied kids came into the store, you could almost hear her sigh of irritation. She hadn’t mastered that “oooooooommmmmmm” attitude of Fred’s. She would sit there smoking a cigarette, the pack on the counter beside her, and would keep an eagle eye on kid-visitors. There was no candy case at Fred’s. It was an open display. And I’m sure that pilfering must have been a serious problem.

You did well to have your purchase in mind before you entered the store, because if you were under five feet tall, you weren’t going to be given much time before Fred’s wife would say, “You kids planning on buying something or are you just going to hang around all day?”

Fred’s was our go-to junior-economy marketplace for about three years until Whitie decided he hated the little house he’d bought and moved us into a big, old, rambling home in the seven hundred block of West Auglaize Street. We would only be there for about another three years before he again moved us, this time into a new home on Kelley Drive, across the Auglaize River and a field from our old place. But although my parents would live there for the rest of their lives, my fondest memories of any of our homes are of that beautiful old house on West Auglaize.

And it was there too that we had the best of all grocery stores, a place called Wahrer’s Grocery. The back of our house and backyard looked onto Pearl Street, and Wahrer’s was at the end of the block at the corner of Pearl and Buchanan. It was presided over by Clara Wahrer and her husband, Frank, two of the kindest people I ever met. There too, the candy display was where they could keep an eye on it, not from the counter, but from the kitchen of Mrs. Wahrer’s home at the back of the store, the door of which was always open, since it was from there that she mostly managed the place. It didn’t take much management, though, because she had a clerk named Judy who was almost like a granddaughter to her, a funny, zany, laughing girl who loved kids and whom kids took as one of their own, a “big girl” with a friendly sort of authority, but a girl all the same, not quite an adult. She liked to pinch our cheeks and ruffle our hair and make gentle fun of us.

At Wahrer’s kids never felt like they were a nuisance or as if they were unwelcome. Mrs. Wahrer knew us all by name and greeted us from her kitchen door. If she especially liked you, she might even invite you into the kitchen for cookies and milk, and to watch her big, cabinet-model, color TV, one of the first in town. There weren’t many shows that were in color yet then and something I remember about her set was that when you watched it in black and white, it was more like blue and white. Strange.

Clara’s penny candy display was, or should have been, award-winning. She had, for instance, and incredible variety of licorice, both black and red: lightning rods, “shoestrings”, strips rolled into a tight spiral with a tiny licorice-flavored hard-candy ball in the middle, plus the more expensive bars (five cents) of Switzer’s Old Fashioned Licorice and Switzer’s Cherry Licorice, and sometimes she even had dark green spearmint lightning rods. There were jellybeans and tiny rolls of Smarties, little paraffin bottles with a swig of fruity soft-drink in them, rootbeer barrels and cola barrels, lemon drops and little envelopes of Lik-M-Made guaranteed to stain both your tongue and first finger the same bright color of your favorite flavor. She had Lifesavers and Sen-Sen, marshmallow chicks and marshmallow sugarcones, Hot Tamales and gumdrops, Redhots and candy corn, and every type of bubble-gum and jawbreaker imaginable.

There was hardly a candy bar that you could name that Clara Wahrer didn’t sell, including a favorite of mine, Hershey’s semi-sweet chocolate. She sold Coke in a stubby six-ounce bottle for five cents each. She charged you a penny deposit on the bottle if you took it with you, so you were sure to bring it back (that’s how we recycled back then). But she was perfectly willing to trust you to sit on the front steps, drink it, and bring the bottle back in, if you only had a nickel. 

At Halloween she handed out miniature loaves of Wonderbread for Trick or Treat, and for a penny you could buy sweetened paraffin buck-teeth, scarlet lips and black mustaches to disguise yourself with, and then to chew when you tired of masquerading. She also had edible candy bracelets and necklaces for the girls (or even for the more secure of boys) and candy cigarettes in packs that looked a lot like the real thing, for those who wanted to look movie star cool while getting their sugar.

But besides all that, Clara had an incredible range of ten-cent individual pies. Cherry, apple, blueberry, wonderful pies each with two matching sugar-glazed crusts. Or, for a nickel, you could have chocolate-coated marshmallow pies—Jack Horners, Moon Pies, Mallomars.

As groceries went, Wahrer’s was a slice of paradise, and we visited it every chance our financial resources allowed.

When we moved to Kelley Drive, there were no grocery stores. It was a “new addition”. It was also eminently residential and just outside of the city limits, so it had no commercial activities at all.

But by then, I was twelve. I had a paper route, odd jobs, a brand new bike I’d bought, and cash in my pocket. I was grown up and independent. Almost a teen. I was no longer tied to the few blocks around home. I was free as a bird. I could ride to any grocery store, and every grocery store, I felt like visiting.

And did!