Dennis Crocker Memories - Part 8 (June 27, 2013)
You know, little country stores usually have a lot of character and reflect the personality of their owner. Burgess' store was one of those. It was a little shoebox of a building, with a front porch. The counter was at the front of the store, and its longitudinal axis was aligned with the longitudinal axis of the building, and so were the drink boxes (coke and pepsis, orange crush, and RC colas). of course back then, we called the beverages "dopes" and the beverage coolers were called "dope boxes". If someone said to you , "hand me a coke outa the dope box" he was asking you to hand him a Coca Cola out of the beverage cooler.
All the counters were aligned lengthwise of the store, and the store's inventory consisted of aforesaid "dopes", candy and other packaged sweets, such as Moon Pies, canned goods, cigarettes, chewing tobacco, snuff, loaf bread, various crackers, sardines, pork and beans in the can, a few boxes of 22 ammo and a couple of boxes of shotgun shells. There was no produce, or dairy counter, but there was small containers of whole and chocolate milk in a separate dope box.
At he back of the store was a potbellied coat stove, and a coal bucket. The coal pile was just behind the store. There were a couple of chairs around the stove, and in the wintertime they were usually occupied by Uncle Floyd and his buddy and right hand man, Jesse Greene. Jesse was a bachelor and had a little 2 room house on out the dirt road that ran between the store and Uncle Floyd's house.
The front porch had a bench on one side, and a kerosene tank on the other. The tank had a manual pump that was operated by a crank. There was a meter that had a dial that showed you how much kerosene you had pumped, if you remembered to zero it before you started turning the crank. If I recall correctly, kerosene sold for about 15 cents a gallon.In the summertime, Uncle Floyd and Jesse could usually be found sitting on the front porch bench.
Uncle Floyd had rheumatoid arthritis-so bad that his fingers were crippled and clawlike and were turned almost 90 degrees at the middle knuckle. I am sure he suffered from a lot of pain. He used Jesse to do a lot of the things he couldn't do, and they had a lot of fun teasing us kids. The front porch was made of boards and there were cracks between them. If you were unfortunate enough to drop a coin on the porch it could,and seemed most often would, drop through the cracks.
The store was not underpinned, and it set on stone pillars and the ground under it was on a grade. On the side toward the barn, and to the side where the kerosene tank sat was open under the store, i.e. it was the downhill side, and there was enough room to crawl to about the midpoint of the porch. Past the midpoint, it was so close to the ground, it was a tight squeeze. There were all sorts of spider webs under there, and if Uncle Floyd and Jesse were on the bench on the porch, and you had dropped a nickel through the cracks, and went to crawl under the porch to try to find it, they would immediately start talking about the large black widow spider they had seen yesterday on the porch. They had tried to kill it , but it went through one of the cracks and under the porch. After they had our attention, one of them would generally call out “Be careful under there. We saw a big black widow spider go under there yesterday!”
About then. you had a serious decision to make about how bad you wanted that nickel. If that didn't get to you, then they'd start talking about the big copperhead snake that they saw crawl under the porch a couple days ago. The decision about the nickel was made at that point and out you came without the nickel. Those rascals had a lot of fun teasing us boys. The devilment they dreamed up was really funny, to them. I am almost sure they "baited " the area under the porch, cause if we stuck it out and really searched, we'd usually find more than the nickel we dropped-sometimes as much as a quarter!
Jesse Greene had gone to an auction, and one of the thing he came dragging back to the store was an old, but usable microphone. He and Uncle Floyd put their heads together and came up with an idea. They took the speaker out of an old radio and wired it up to the mike. Now the old store didn't have running water or an indoor bathroom. It did have a path on the lower side leading to a pit privy, a regular "two holer' about 25 yards down the path. Uncle Floyd talked Jesse to pulling the planks that formed the seat up, and putting a hinge on the board seat where it could be raised . On the underneath side, Jesse mounted that old radio speaker, and ran a wire back up to the store to the microphone. Anytime an unsuspecting soul went in there, they'd make a scratching sound on the mike, and it'd usually scare the occupant about half silly, hear that scraping sound come from just underneath his bare bottom.
One day a Cadillac pulled in to the store yard. It had Michigan plates on it, and a lady was driving with another in the passengers seat. Gosh knows what these two were doing in the little backwater area in which we lived. It was summertime, and Uncle Floyd and Jesse were sitting on the porch. The lady asked Uncle Floyd if the store had a restroom. She must have been in a bind to even stop. Uncle Floyd apologized that the store was not so equipped, but offered the use of the toilet out back of the store.
Well, I guess the lady had no option, 'cause she hurried down that path. Uncle Floyd, moving as spryly as he had in years, scooted inside to the microphone. He gave that poor woman just about enough time to get ensconced on the throne when he turned on the microphone and said “Lady, we're cleaning out down under here, Could you move over to the other hole!!!” She just about tore the door slam off the outhouse, running up the path, pulling things up that needed to be up, and pushing things down that needed to be down. She did not bid Uncle Floyd and Jesse adieu as she lept into that Cadillac and layed down a streak of rubber off its smoking back tires as she and the car disappeared in the direction of Pacolet Mills.
Uncle Floyd and Jesse laughed about that for more than a year. They had more fun with that mike under the toilet seat than you can imagine. When it came to devilment and having a good laugh at someone else's expense, Uncle Floyd and his henchman were hard to beat.
Not all of my memories are as funny as this one, so don't hope for an encore next time we get together to share a memory of growing up in the Pacolet area.
This web site has been started as a public service to share the story of Pacolet.
