The Way it Was

[wdfifteen]

The "How were you raised" thread got me thinking and I went back to look at some photo albums. For the first few years of my life my parents ran a rural grocery store. My mother wrote her autobiography before she died and described how the business worked. I found it fascinating. Maybe someone here will too.



This is the store - the whole thing. Can you imagine a viable business today with cinder block steps to the front door?



Shelves inside the store.

It’s kind of a tossup whether the store was the front room of their house, or their home was the back of the store. The store was a one room affair with shelves for canned goods, a cooler for meat and cheese, and a small freezer for ice cream. Store hours were typical for rural businesses of the time – 8 to 6 most days, but 8 to noon Wednesday, and 8 to 8 on Friday. They were closed on Sunday of course.



The "parking lot" was the gravel driveway that ran from the hard road and alongside the house. (In an era when most roads were dirt or gravel, a paved road was called a “hard road.”) People would show up on horses, mules, tractors, doodle bugs, and sometimes whole cars or trucks, which were fairly rare in those days. My dad used to say, “What’s the difference between a pidgeon and a farmer? A pidgeon can make a deposit on a new car.”



I'm not sure why this picture is in the album. It just says, "typical" on the back. It is typical of the vehicles that showed up at the store. Even though I was only 4 I remember a doodle bug that a customer had.

They sold goods to locals from a five-mile radius for cash, but their business wasn’t that simple. To stock the store they bought canned goods, flour, sugar, cheese, ice cream, and sundry items from a wholesaler. For fresh meat they traded these kinds of things to a farmer for hog or a side of beef. The meat from the animals went into the “meat locker” in the nearest big town (Wilmington, Ohio if you’re keeping score).

A meat locker was a big community freezer usually run by a butcher. Since personal food freezers were rare in the early 1950s, farmers, or anyone with meat to freeze, would rent space in the locker. The meat was put on shelves in butcher paper packages with the owner’s name on it.

When dad needed meat for the meat counter at the grocery he would go to the locker and get whatever he needed and gave some in payment for locker space rental to the butcher who owned the locker.



I got this picture off of the internet. Whenever a store sold a taxable item they gave the buyer a stamp proving that they paid the sales tax. I don’t know if food was taxable then, or what my parents sold in the store that was taxable, but there are books and books of these tax stamps in the stuff they passed along to us before they died. I assume they came from the store.


The big money day was Saturday. Dad traded canned goods, flour, sugar, and sundrys to other farmers for eggs. He traded for dozens and dozens of eggs and on Saturdays took them to the biggest city around – Dayton, Ohio and sold them door to door. That was the source of most of the cash they received.




Dads first delivery truck was this '37 Ford panel truck in the parking lot of the store.



At some point he traded up to this Ford panel van. He took it with us when we moved to the farm and tore it apart, using the front axle to make a trailer.

The country was changing fast. Roads were getting better, there were more cars available, making it easier to get to Wilmington and beyond to shop. They closed the store in 1954 and Dad started farming.

[masraum]

Great post! Thanks for sharing, and please, share more. I find this "history" stuff fascinating, especially a lot of the real people, real life stuff that often doesn't make it into history books.

What the hell's a doodle bug?

When I hear doodle bug, this is what I picture.

[wdfifteen]

A doodlebug is a car/tractor made out of a cut-down car, usually a Model A Ford. They have two transmissions, so you can drive it at the speed a car would go (if you dare) or gear it down to pull a wagon. A good one would even pull a plow.

[masraum]

Cool, thanks!

[stevej37]

There used to be many around here also.
Here's another nice one...

[stevej37]

Born and raised in a rural area also. My Grandparents lived a few miles away on a road to a 1 mile lake. When they built their house it was the first house on the road to and the lake. Now, there is not one open lot on that lake and the homes are all very high value.

Grandma was born in the late 1890's and she told me that when word got out that a someone had bought the first auto in the area....everyone stood out by the road and waved as it went past.

[Zeke]

I never knew about the cut down 4-wheeler. There was a company in SoCal in the late 50's and 60's that sold a scooter with that name on it. Every boy wanted one.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by stevej37

There used to be many around here also.
Here's another nice one...

So cool!

[Zeke]

Coffee pot as the choke. Now that is brilliant. I can see these as being the next car fad. Especially with tractor wheels on the rear. There must be plenty of candidates parked out on farms across the country.

[Seahawk]

Thank you, Patrick.

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by stevej37

There used to be many around here also.
Here's another nice one...

That’s a pretty good description of what a doodlebug is. It’s kind of a whimsical example made for fun, most of them were strictly business. You can tell he’s not a farmer. That thing in front of the radiator is a “sileage fork” not a “pitchfork.”

[stevej37]

^^^ Hah...I caught the 'fork' thing also.

It's kinda like people calling any bale they see on a farm as a 'hay bale'....even if it's clearly a 'straw bale'.

[KFC911]

LOL .... I had the remants of my grandfather's "doodle bug" hauled off about 13 years ago .... I remember it plenty from the 60s/early 70s when it ran .... don't think it was road worthy, but it had lots of "just puttering around" miles on it !

Thanks Patrick !

[VINMAN]

Very cool pictures and story Pat!

Love seeing old stuff like that.

.

[fintstone]

My Great Grandparents (on my Mom's side) had a similar store in VA. They built the house in 1917, so I assume the store was built around the same time. I didn't know him, (he died pretty young). I did know my Great Grandmother. She ran it alone with the kids (until most went off to war in the 40s). She was also the Postmaster and folks got their mail there.

The thing that intrigued me is that if you bought meat, they slaughtered it themselves...killed and dressed a chicken on the spot if you ordered it. If you did not want to wait, you ordered in advance (when you passed by in the morning) and it was ready when you came back). Largely the same with milk/butter and vegetables that they could go pick during the day (they had an adjoining farm to supplement what they bought for resale).

[oldE]

We were a small community, but because we were 15 miles from the nearest town, we had two places you could buy groceries. One had been built a century before as a store for the local mill. The second was so similar to the store in the o/p. Our house was at a 3 way intersection. One store was the first building on the road to the west. The other store was the second property to the south and the butcher was our neighbor to the north. Aside from the house in which I grew up ( which was built as a hotel in the early 1800s) the other places are long gone.
Oh yes, I forgot to mention my father had a small dairy herd and sold raw milk every evening after supper to our neighbors. 25 cents / quart.

Best
Les

[LWJ]

Very cool. My Great Grandparents and Grandparents on Mom's side were small town grocers. Very very similar.

And, my wife's Grandparents ran a farm. We still have the remains of a doodlebug. I didn't know it was a thing until now.