White's Grocery in August

Just a quick note today, as the heat seems to have ebbed a bit--

When I was a boy, there were small grocery stores in my neighborhood, more like tiendas one now sees in my hometown than like convenience stores. About two blocks away in opposite directions from our house, there were two. Mann's Grocery was about the size of a two-car garage, and, in fact, the new owners of the house to which it is still attached have converted it into a garage. It was always dark inside there, and it smelled of must and its oily concrete slab of a floor. I do not remember much more about it except that the old woman who ran it had unfortunate hennaed hair that frizzed out from the sides like a weathered Bozo wig. Mrs. Mann had been unkind to my mother a number of times, and I did not frequent that store.

Mr. Perry White (yes, the same name as the editor for The Daily Planet--there was a man named "Donald Duck" in my hometown, too) ran the other store, which was more the size of a convenience store, and it, too, still stands today, but new owners have consciously made it into a convenience store. When I went there, it was more like a full-fledged grocery. Mr. White even butchered meat there, I remember, and Mom bought the great majority of our groceries there, well before our town got its first full-fledged supermarkets. Almost all the change I could scrounge went to that store. He sold small bundles of "stripped" comic books--an illegal, bootleg practice ("stripped" comic books have their covers removed; retailers were supposed to return covers to distributors to get credit for unsold copies, and they were to destroy the remaining comics, because the comics were worth less than the cost of returning them). I bought a lot of penny candy there, learning to make modest purchases to avoid the sales tax that would kick in at eight cents. Before I outgrew the store, just as my neighborhood eventually did, I loved to buy bottled soft drinks from Mr. White.

My parents were teenagers in the 1950s, and they drank Coca-Cola--I cannot remember that Mom ever brought home any other soft drink. On occasion, I would get a soft drink in Mr. White's store, though. He had a large, horizontal cooler, about the size of a huge chest freezer, along the front wall of his store. While it had lids on it--heavy, metal lids with black plastic handles, hinges in the middle, and black rubber stripping on the sides--the lids were rarely closed, because they did not have to be. Open on the top, that big, red cooler kept water icy cold all day without a single drop condensing on the white Coca-Cola logo embossed on its front. The cooler would contain all kinds of soft drinks: Royal Crown cola, Nehi fruit-flavored sodas (peach Nehi--I haven't seen one of those for decades), Sun-Drop citrus sodas, and Coca-Cola. A kid my size would have to lean over the cooler and stick an arm down into the icy water, fishing around for the best available flavor, and would ache to the elbow with the fun shock of the cold. White's was a shady store, not dark like Mann's, and it did not smell musty, and he was happy to see us. The lady who worked for him, Mrs. Flannigan, was patient when I made one seven-cent purchase and then one six-cent purchase. They didn't care if a kid brought in a dirty bottle instead of paying deposit.

Cold water and clean concrete, dripping before jumping back into the elementary school pool, laughing while Dad sprayed my brother and me with a hose beside the neighbor's cinder block garage, standing tiptoe and barefoot while fishing for a peach Nehi in White's Grocery--the clinical display of today's upright fluorescent soft drink coolers offers none of small respite of mystery and adventure of a scavenged cold drink during a hot Alabama summer in the mid 1960s.

Please forgive the nostalgia.