Give Me That Old Time Convenience

We didn't have convenience stores when I was a boy. But we had REAL convenience because a lot of the merchants came to us. My favorite merchant by far was a guy named Tony. He came once a week in the summer time and you could hear him coming long before you saw him. He rang a bell that was attached to his ice cream truck. It was more like a little room with glass windows than a truck and it was pulled by a horse who seemed to know exactly when to stop and when to go. I imagine he stopped when he saw at least five kids with their eager tongues hanging out. Tony came to our neighborhood once a week and I'm sure he covered other neighborhoods the days he wasn't at Osceola Mill. He drove his ice cream truck standing up. Even as a kid I could tell how delighted he was to be selling ice cream. He didn't hurry you if you couldn't make a decision among the flavors he offered. Sometimes he would suggest one scoop of each...he would mix the cone up if that's what you wanted. We always got cones of ice cream. My Mother and aunts would get cups of ice cream with little wooden spoons. They didn't think licking ice cream cones was lady-like. We didn't care because we were boys and we could lick faster than the ice cream could melt, even on the hottest day. On other days --- but not as often --- kids would run down the street yelling, "The Jew is coming. The Jew is coming." They didn't mean anything deragotory. Everybody called him The Jew, and not behind his back. The Jew owned a dress shop on Main Street. But many of the mill ladies rarely made it into town. They didn't have cars. If they went to town, they had to take a bus. The Jew drove a black van. The sight of it got the ladies off their front porches, especially the ones who cared about looking good and the ones who went to church regularly and needed something to wear. Going to church was the main time women got dressed up. I never knew any other woman other than my Aunt Hattie who actually "went out". She was a clothes horse and The Jew loved her for it. He would let her buy clothes even when she didn't have money. And even I --- a kid --- could see right through his sales pitches to her. He would say, as he held up a nice dress, "This is what they are wearing in Charlotte this season." He might as well have said Paris or New York. I don't know who "they" were but apparently my Aunt Hattie did because she would get the garment from his hands and hold it up to her body and look in the mirror he had hanging on the back door of the van. If it was good enough for Charlotte, it was good enough for Aunt Hattie. She had closets full of clothes; a room full actually. She was a "Looker" and she knew it. Groceries got delivered to the door. Not all the time. If you bought just a few things, you would carry them home in a poke. But if you were getting a week's worth of groceries, you could ask the store to deliver them. In this case, they packed the groceries in wooden boxes and then they would deliver out to your house and even bring them in an put them on the kitchen table. The service was free of charge but the delivery man would always stand around and wait for a tip. If you had money, you could pay for the groceries. But if you were short of cash (which most people were), you could charge the food until next pay day. That's where the song, "I owe my soul to the company store" came from. Except the store wasn't owned by the same company that owned the mill. But you still owed your soul. We rarely got meat unless you can call fatback meat. Once in a while we got stew beef which my father said was "tough as a horse, and might be one." We never asked him if he had eaten a horse before. We just assumed he did when he went off in his early life to live on the railroad as a hobo and to work in a circus. He might even have eaten an elephant. My father would sometimes say he had steak in his eye but bologna in his wallet. We actually didn't have bologna that often, just on pay days when they delivered a lot of groceries. I haven't even touched here on the convenience of having a Sears and Roebuck catalog. It's not that we bought that much. It was more of a "dream book". But when you did your order came right to your mailbox. My friends and I loved it most when the ice man cometh. Not too many people had refrigerators back then. There were a few electric Kelvinators around. But mainly we had ice boxes which served the same purpose but without electriicty. There was a big metal box and the ice man delivered a big block of ice which would then cool the whole ice box as long as the ice lasted. We had a carboard sign with numbers that would hang out to tell the ice man how many pounds to leave. But he generally knew without looking at the sign. Our ice box was up against the kitchen wall. There was a door in the wall that the ice man could open from the outside and put the ice in the box without actually coming inside. But the main reason we liked the ice man is because he would give us chunks of broken ice. We would suck on it. And if it was really a hot day, we would sometimes rub the ice all over our chests. And somebody would always remind us that Eskimos lived in ice houses. And then somebody else would say, "Yeah, but not in Gastonia, North Carolina in August."