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It looks like late winter around 1955. The panel truck delivered
grocery orders to people who phoned in. Today's on-line
grocery order system is just an update of this earlier scheme.
You don't see much store front advertising in today's world. |
That is what my father and his older brother decided to call
their businesses when they opened it in the Spring of 1954. They bought the business from their
employer, Charles H. Payne, and essentially continued to do what C. H. Payne
had been doing at that location since the Great Depression: selling groceries and meats.
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Look at those prices. This ad
looks like it for warmer months. |
Dad and my uncle Herb had bought the meat business and the
grocery business, respectively, and operated both businesses in the same
building. They did not buy the building
itself; C. H. Payne and his heirs owned that and rented it out to my Dad and
uncle. The only equipment Dad and Herb
bought was the already existing fixtures in the building.
Dad and Herb had worked for Charlie Payne, as they called
their employer, since the years of the Great Depression. At that time C. H. Payne Grocery did business
at three locations in Bloomington, Illinois:
One store somewhere on Locust Street; one small neighborhood store on
South Main Street at the corner where Lincoln Street crosses it (as best I can
recall); and the store at 918 West Market Street.
Some time around the beginning of WW II
Charlie Payne closed the stores on Locust and South Main Street and focused on
the remaining store on West Market Street.
I know that the West Market location was very much larger than the store
on South Main Street because I had been in that store as a small child and it
seemed small to me. On one trip to the
store, after hours, Dad and another employee were after a rat that had come
into the building. I still remember them
poking under some of the racks in the back room and the rat bounding out and
holing up somewhere else in the store.
To a small kid that was a big rat.
In C. H. Payne's employ, Dad managed the meat market and
Herb managed the grocery business. They
were open six days a week, Monday through Saturday. They opened at 6:00 AM and closed at 6:00 PM
Monday through Thursday, and stayed open an extra three hours on Friday and
Saturday. On Sunday the store was closed. They were also closed for New Years Day,
Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. That practice continued when they became the
business owners.
Outside of family
members no one knew the arrangement between the brothers; it just looked like
one fairly large store to the customers.
Dad and Herb had some agreements about those items that would lead to
competition between the two businesses.
Dad sold some butter and a few other items that were also grocery items;
Herb sold frozen turkeys and a few other meat items. It seemed to work out pretty well.
I started working, part time, in the meat market the summer I
was 14 years old. I continued working
there, part time, until the summer I was 20; I went into the US Air Force at
that point. In those six years I learned
a lot, but that is in retrospect. At the
time it was just doing the work that goes on every day in a meat market.
Being a kid with no knowledge of meat
cutting, I did all the crappy little jobs that had to be done. Every evening at closing time I had a bucket
of scalding hot water, with a big shot of ammonia added to it, and proceeded to
clean up all the meat cutting equipment:
the lunch meat slicer, the big band saw, and a meat tenderizer that had
two big opposing rollers bristling with small sharp cutting edges. I swept up the pine sawdust that covered the
floor and raked out all the paper and other debris that had fallen into it
during business hours. The sawdust
(small wood chips, really) was put on the floor to keep meat fat and blood from
soaking into the hardwood flooring. It
made the floor kind of slippery. I also
cleaned the glass windows on the inside and outside of the meat display cases. On Saturday night I swept up all the sawdust,
threw it in a large scrap barrel, and put down fresh sawdust for the next
week's business. I also cleaned a very
large, heavy, meat grinder after it had been used, wiped down all the knives,
and scraped the meat block of its excess fat and blood accumulations.
Speaking of heavy things, it fell to me to go
to the basement walk-in cooler to lug 50-pound bags of chipped ice to the
poultry and fish cases to make sure that the chickens and fish were properly
chilled. That was not easy for a skinny
14 year old kid. During business hours I
also was responsible for doing chores like keeping the sliced lunch meat case
filled and fairly neatly arranged. At Dad's direction, I
also ground beef and pork scraps into hamburger and pork sausage and filled
long pans with the stuff; those pans went into the meat case, side by
side. People bought the product bulk; it
was put into paper meat trays and wrapped with white butcher paper. I generally kept the meat cases stocked with whatever was running low. However, at
least at first, I was not allowed to use the band saw for cutting meat. I don't recall ever being allowed to break
down primal cuts of anything on the band saw.
The skilled meat cutters did that:
Dad and one full-time employee.
That scene is like just about every food market I have ever been in, the
store is laid out with grocery items in front and the meat counter at the back
of the store. Looking in through the big
plate glass windows at the front of the store, the customer checkout was to the
right, near the front door; there were three lanes, as best I recall, with a
cash register at each lane. The number
of lanes open depended on how busy we were.
On weekends at least two lanes would be open; during week days just one
lane was usually open. On the left front of the store there was a small bakery.
An elderly lady, by the name of Bina Carlson, worked there making some
in-store products like donuts and cakes.
There was some specialized bread sold there, but I'm not sure who baked
it.
There was a donut frying machine
that stood in one corner. Yes. Donuts are fried in oil. As a kid I used to watch the donut machine in
action: in one corner a dough dispenser
would inject rings of dough into a carousel kind of arrangement. The carousel was divided into many small
sectors just large enough to hold a donut.
The carousel was immersed in hot oil and it rotated. As soon as the dough dispenser injected a
ring of dough, the oil bubbled furiously around the fresh dough. Half way around the carousel, a flipper
emerged from the hot oil and flipped the donut over so the other side could
cook. Finally, just as the donut had
completed a full turn on the carousel, another flipper would toss the freshly
cooked donut out of the machine and onto a small chute. From there Mrs. Carlson would sprinkle sugar
on the cake donuts and put icing on the yeast donuts. The whole dispensing and frying mechanism was encase in a glass cubicle to protect against being splashed by hot oil from the frying process. As a kid I was fascinated.
The rest of the grocery business was laid out
pretty much as grocery stores are today, with canned items, packaged items, and
frozen items grouped together. The other
stuff you see in today's grocery store such as magazines and kitchen items was
less common, but Herb did stock a small selection of such items.
The meat department had series of large chilled meat display
cases arranged across the width of the building. The layout, as the customers saw it, was fish
and poultry on the far left, followed by lunch meats, sausages, and other
manufactured meat products in the middle, and various cuts of beef, pork, and
even lamb and veal on the right. Dad
also would custom cut anything he had on hand.
It was pretty much a
full-service meat market. Dad would also
order in a quarter of beef, mostly prime hind quarters, for those who wanted
something special. He would hang
the quarter in the walk-in cooler to age for two weeks or more and then cut it
up and package it for whoever had placed the order. Letting meat hang that long is considered to
be dangerous nowadays, but no one gave it a thought back then.
The clientele of Hanner's Compete Food Market was widely
varied. Many Blue collar workers
shopped for their meats and groceries there, but there were also professional
people who would come in for the variety Dad offered, and there was a pretty
wide selection of ethnic foods available all the time too. The neighborhood the store was located a
block or so east of the GM&O tracks; it was "salt and pepper" and
low income in makeup. Dad and Herb
catered to them all. Dad sold things
like pig ears, pig tails, and chitterlings to the black folks – and to the poor
white Southerners who also shopped there.
I can remember a young white man coming into the store on noon hour,
when I was the only one behind the counter.
He had a Southern, drawl (or maybe Appalachian) and asked for a
"pound of wät meat." I knew
the terminology by then: he wanted a
pound of salt pork, but I asked him to repeat the order just so I could hear
him say it again.
But there were other consumers of the "offal" that the poorer people ate. One was my paternal grandmother. She was used to making for herself some of the ethnic foods that Dad sold out of his meat case. One thing Grandma made was "head cheese." In the winter, Grandma would ask Dad to order a pig head for her. She would then cook the head down to get the meat and then make a terrine, aka jelly meat, from the resulting meat. Sometimes she would add vinegar to make a variant called "souse." Dad sold commercial versions of both products, but Grandma liked her version. I wonder what Grandma did with the pig skull and whatnot after she finished making her head cheese.
Many years later, I discovered that Mexicans also like pig heads. They also cook the heads, recover the meat and use it as an ingredient for tamales they make during the winter.
European refugees shopped
in the store. Hungarian refugees from
the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, who spoke little or no English would come in and
ask for things in German (our family is largely of German descent). I understood neither Hungarian nor German
(Dad could understand some German).
Fortunately, we had some employees in the grocery department who were of
Hungarian descent and sometimes served as a go-between/translator. There were also some German refugees who
shopped the store. And there was one
knife salesman who would make periodic visits to the store selling his
wares. I think he was a Jew, but I don't
know for sure. We did have a Jewish
clientele, however. A great deal of what
they bought was carp for gefilte fish,
salmon, and whitefish. At least that's
what I recall.
Dad also sold to local
restaurants in relatively small quantities most of the time. I recall one restaurant owner (he owned
the Green Mill restaurant on Washington Street) was Greek.
He ordered several whole lambs for his daughter's wedding reception; I
recall seeing about half a dozen lamb carcasses hanging in the restaurant
kitchen when we delivered some smaller items.
That must have been some reception.
Dad also special ordered some fairly exotic items for lodge
dinners, parties, and the like. Some of
the clubs and lodges had a taste for fries, aka, rocky mountain oysters. I learned that there are lots of variations
of rocky mountain oysters, ranging from beef to sheep to turkeys. More than once he had sweetbreads in the meat
case. Beef tongue was available in colder months. Jars of pickled lamb tongue sat on the counter at any season. The occasional celebrity would show up. Victor Borge was one. Borge was in town for several performances at one of the local colleges; he came in and ordered a half pound of finely ground round steak. We supposed that he had a taste for steak tartare. In the end, some of those more exotic items sometimes ended up
being eaten by us at home since many people couldn't afford them and probably didn't
know what to do with them.
Thursday was poultry delivery day. Dad bought dressed poultry, mainly chickens,
from a local farmer who raised his flocks and also did the slaughtering and
preparation for market. He also raised
turkeys for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Customers could special order turkeys at no extra charge. Dad also
ordered seafood from a distributor in Chicago.
The usual fare was catfish, buffalo fish (a species of suckerfish),
whiting, ocean perch (Pacific rockfish), and a whole halibut that was reduced
to slices as orders came in. The halibut
probably weighed at least 30 pounds, dressed and head removed. Never saw a halibut with the head on.
In the months with “R”, in them i.e.,
September through April, Dad stocked canned oysters from Chesapeake Bay. Usually, the order consisted of the smaller Standards,
but around Christmas and New Year he also stocked larger Selects and the even larger Counts. He sold those in
bulk. All the seafood came via railway
freight from Chicago and packed in well iced raw wooden barrels. A Railway Express truck delivered it. It took considerable effort on a cold winter
day to paw through all the ice and make sure all the product was accounted
for. It was another one of those jobs
that usually fell to me.
Several farmers raised flocks of laying hens and collected
the eggs that were transported to the store in 36 dozen crates. The eggs came in all sizes and both brown and
white. I learned that white eggs came
from hens that had white plumage; brown eggs came from hens with colored
plumage. That is the only difference between white and brown eggs.
Herb, Dad’s brother, packaged the eggs and sold them as candled,
ungraded, i.e., whatever size made it into the egg box. One of Herb’s young employees had the job of
candling the eggs. Candling eggs was
kind of a nasty job because some of those eggs were pretty well along chicks,
and some were downright foul.
Dad was always experimenting and innovating. He would bake whole hams in a big electric
roaster he kept at the store. The aroma of baking ham was enticing. Usually,
the hams were for catered events. He
also did homemade pickled herring and pickled mackerel from old recipes handed
down through the family. In the winter
we had a fiber drum full of mincemeat sitting in a corner of the meat
market. Mincemeat didn’t require
refrigeration and lasted through the winter season.
Working in the meat market was demanding on everybody in many ways. And there was danger in the business. Those beef quarters weighed anywhere from 175
pounds up to a bit over 200 pounds. We
were on our feet for the better part of twelve hours on week days, and a bit
longer on Friday and Saturday. It was
hot in the summer (no air conditioning) and cold in the winter (but that
probably saved on refrigeration costs).
There was no place to sit, but everybody was usually busy doing
something to keep the place tidy, clean, and looking like you just had to buy
something.
There was also a risk of being prey for local criminals. More that once the store was broken into after a Saturday night closing. The safe that Saturday's sales proceeds were kept in was little more that a tin can to a competent safe cracker. After several iterations of that Dad and Herb bought a much more substantial safe; that caused the number of burglaries to diminish but not to zero. And then one innovative criminal did the obvious: He went to Herb's house one Saturday night. When Herb answered the door the armed robber ordered him to drive over to Hanner's Complete Food Market and open the safe. Dad and Herb sold the business soon after that.
For me it was a good six years worth
of work experience.
Our boss was an old hand in
the flying game; he had flown B-29s and some other aircraft before getting to the KC-135. His name was Ernest P. Vicchio, and he was a
senior captain, not far from becoming a major.
George always referred to him as “Ernie.” Not to his face, of course.
George and Sue Ann were instrumental in helping Linda and
our children while I was on a year assignment to Southeast Asia. Sue Ann and
Linda always had been close, especially then.
