The Little Store

By Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca
As a child I found myself in a situation that many kids could only dream of. On the day I was born, my father took ownership of a small general store, so I grew up having access to everything a kid could possibly want. Candy, pop, ice cream, chips and comic books were all there, free for the taking. All I had to do was walk in and help myself to whatever I wanted any time I felt like it. At least, that was what most people thought, the reality was a bit different.
First of all, there was the health aspect to consider. I would have been quite happy subsisting on a diet of licorice, chocolate milk and potato chips. Understandably, my father thought it might be a good idea to leave a little bit of room for real food in my system so he tried, with varying levels of success, to limit the amount of “junk” I consumed. Also, as time went on and the family grew, it just became too expensive to allow everyone free access to the candy counter. All those ten-cent chocolate bars, nickel bags of Scottie’s Chips and seven-cent bottles of pop soon added up. I don’t know how many times people have told me that I was eating up my father’s profits.
Since Dad worked in the fishplant during the day and he was only in the store in the evenings, the bulk of the responsibility as guardian of the goodies unfortunately fell to his day-time clerk, Gladys Bailey. I think that some days Gladys spent more time arguing with us over how many Fudge-stiks was too many for one person than she did waiting on customers. Gladys could put up a good argument, but as the family increased, she became badly outnumbered and quite often just gave up in frustration, saying, “Go ahead, take it, I don’t care if your father does fire me”.
Even when we did lose the odd battle, there were other ways to get what we wanted. In those days every time you bought a bottle of pop, you paid a deposit on the bottle. When it was returned to the store, you got the deposit back. A small bottle was worth two cents and a large bottle got you a nickel. Any kid in need of some quick money could usually come up with a couple of bottles after a quick scour around the wharves and fishplants. Then you could just walk into the store like any other customer and buy whatever you wanted. (As long as it didn’t cost more than a few cents.)
This bottle return system was a kind of fore-runner to the recycling system we have in place now, except it was run entirely by the bottling companies. The bottles were glass and were re-used over and over. Each store had a rack near the pop cooler where you placed your empties, they would then be sorted into wooden crates according to whether they were Coke or Pepsi products, taken back to the plant, washed out and refilled.
For the most part, this system worked quite well. Unfortunately, between the time they were bought and the time they were returned, a few bottles were used for purposes for which they were never intended, often coming back with the residue of gasoline, oil or who-knows-what in them. One of the most popular uses of an empty pop bottle was as a make-shift ashtray; as a result, occasionally a customer would have the unpleasant experience of discovering a decomposing cigarette butt or some other unidentifiable object floating around in their half-consumed bottle of Evangeline Ginger Ale or Frostie Root Beer.
Digby Dairy used a similar system, empty milk bottles were returned, cleaned and refilled. I can remember more than one occasion when I grabbed a bottle of nice, cold chocolate milk, popped the cardboard stopper and took a big gulp, only to run gagging and spitting from the store. Apparently the sanitizing equipment had failed to remove some of the old sour milk at the bottom of the bottle. Maybe the disposable, one-time-use container is not such a bad idea after all.
Digby Dairy also delivered the ice cream. This was before they had refrigerated trucks so frozen products were packed in green canvas containers that looked like well-insulated duffle bags. To keep things cold, dry ice was packed in around the frozen items. Dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide; it is extremely cold and can cause instant frostbite in anyone that touches it. When it melts it turns directly from a solid back into a gas. The fact that it could be dangerous in the wrong hands made it very interesting to us kids and we usually made a point of hanging around when the ice cream man dumped out the leftover ice at the end of his delivery. Laying there on the ground in front of the store just giving off little waves of vapor it didn’t look all that exciting; but kick it into a puddle of water and all kinds of steaming and hissing took place.
Of course it didn’t take long for someone to figure out how to get even more excitement from this chemical reaction. Kids started bringing jars on ice cream day, for some reason pickle jars seemed to be the jar of choice. Using a stick, you would maneuver some of the dry ice into your jar, screw the lid on tight, then retreat to a safe distance and wait. As the ice turned into gas, pressure would build up until the jar exploded in a satisfying spray of glass and old pickle juice. Surprisingly, given the high possibility of putting an eye out, except for a few minor cases of frostbite, no one was ever seriously injured in these experiments with exploding ice.
Like the milk and ice cream, almost everything was delivered to the store by truck. Jones Bottling Co. delivered Pepsi products from their plant in Weymouth, the Coke truck came from the Valley as did the Scottie’s Potato Chip truck, Willett Fruit delivered fruit and vegetables, Atlantic Wholesalers brought a wide variety of items and Oscar Andrews made a weekly run in his little van to deliver fresh meat from his butcher shop near The Crossroads on Digby Neck. Some of the larger items, like barrels of stove oil and bags of coal, were delivered to the warehouse on the end of the breakwater by the coastal freighter “Mohawk” on its regular run between Yarmouth and Saint John.
Unlike today, not everything was available all the time, things had a season. In winter there was not a lot of fresh fruit available except at Christmas time when Dad would get in a few boxes of oranges and apples for the Christmas stockings. You knew that summer had officially arrived when Popsicles re-appeared in the ice cream freezer. Later in the summer watermelons would become available. I always thought of watermelon as a really exotic item. There was nothing as luxurious as biting into a cool, crisp slice of watermelon on a hot day. Unfortunately, watermelon was only available for about three weeks and I ate so much of it in the first week that I was usually sick of the sight of it by the third week. I think I probably did eat up the profits as far as watermelons were concerned. Late in the summer strawberry season arrived, Dad loves strawberries and he would usually order more than he could sell, as a result we ate a lot of leftover strawberries at our house.
The little store across from the ferry slip was an important place not just to me but to the whole Island. From it’s doorway you could see the ferry arriving and leaving or watch the wharf pile up with traps as the fishermen prepared for lobster season. The store was a meeting place for the tired and the retired as they sat on the bench in a cloud of smoke from hand rolled “makins”, and spent hour after hour discussing the weighty affairs of the world as well as the latest gossip on the Island. It was a warm refuge from the bitter wind for the high-school students waiting for the ferry on a winter morning. It was a place where, even if you didn’t have a penny in your pocket, you could still get the necessities of life just by saying, “Put it on the bill”.
The building still stands, but it no longer invites the customer or the lounger, the bench is long gone, the windows are boarded and the doors locked. It’s a storage building now, but in my memory, and hopefully in the memory of many others, it will always be “The Little Store”.