I Pray There Are Still Places Like This Around

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I remember places like this from my childhood.

Little snippets came rushing back when I watched this.

This is what American used to look like and it was this way for a long time.

Clear into the 70’s I can remember little Mom and Pop markets and stores in neighborhoods all over every county I visited.

Sometimes they were the local neighborhood store and sometimes they were way out in the boonies, serving small communities that were far flung but had at it’s heart, a little Market/ General Store/Gas Station/Post Office that the owners lived behind or on top of.

Miles away from anything else.

They were often the only thing that you could point to as the center piece of a community besides a church and were quite often just a wide spot in the road.

If you had this in your childhood, you were lucky.

30 thoughts on “I Pray There Are Still Places Like This Around”

  1. 15 cents for a coke and a boloney sammich.

    GOOD times.

    I had a store similar to that one just 3 blocks away when I was growing up in Walnut Creek, Cal., back when Cal was normal and a GREAT place to grow up.

    Thanks for the video. Made me think there was dust in the air…my eyes are sorta wet..

  3. My aunt and uncle (and his parents) ran a store VERY similar to this one in Squires, MO for over 100 years. It was the Spurlock Store and was one of the last truly general stores in Missouri. You could get EVERYTHING, from clothes to groceries (including baloney sandwiches, although they didn’t make me pay for mine) to truck tires, animal feed and farm implements. People would come in, sit down, drink coffee and talk all day long. Everyone from miles around would go just to visit and gab with Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Fred. My cousin Randy inherited the store after my aunt passed away and unfortunately, what with Walmart 5 miles away in Ava and the changing demographics, had to close it. What a time I had in there.

  5. None quite like that in my hometown, but several where my Mom grew up. The same people were still running it when I was little, and we’d go there when my Mom went to see her sisters.

  6. Even in CT we had little stores like that here and there; last one i know of is Rucki’s in Pomfret. Sad thing is that growing up my parents always saw them as “lower-class” and wouldn’t visit them. I got my driver’s license in ’82 and started visiting them where i could find them but the spirit was gone by ’90 or so. Shame, they were the perfect “meeting houses” IYKWIM.

  7. used to be a store close to that in Camp Dix KY. when I was a kid- 1960-70.
    had 2 gas pumps out front though. 22lr where like 50 cents a box I think.
    or you could buy 10 cents worth. my uncle used to get blasting caps there for
    “fishing” too. pop was 10 cents in a glass bottle in a big old Coke-cola cooler.
    road out front was blacktop but a lot of the side roads where still gravel
    and no guard rails either. we used to go down for 10 days or so every year
    in summer. those days where magical. went back in the 1989 and everything had changed.

  8. The Big Chain grocery stores killed ’em. We won’t see ’em again until after the crash.

  9. They’re still around here in every small community, but the ones in small towns often are now a Foodworks or IGA.

  10. My great uncle’s store in Converse Ohio was much like that. Old radio, traveling library book shelves in the corner and a gas pump out front. Lord how I miss those days.

  11. We had a Woolworth’s in the town I grew up in. The adults called it the five and dime. Not quite a general store, but one of the first “department stores” in the area.

    There was a general store in the next town east on the old “post road”. It was established in the 1800’s. It devolved into a tourist trap while I was away in the service in the 60’s. Don’t know if it’s still operating as I haven’t lived near there in almost 50 years.

  12. Growing up in a small town in Central Texas in the early 80’s we had stores like this all over. Hullum’s Grocery was the ONLY grocery store in town when I was a kid. It was a family run operation until H-E-B moved in. Great memories.

  14. Thank you for that Phil. America still looks like that just not in the places people not like us would look. See comments above.

    Most small towns still have something like that. I have seen a few and still do. Small town diners are still my favorite type of place to eat.

    The characters were awesome and spot on and to be honest I was much like Billy at that age when it came to girls.

  15. I grew up about a mile and a half from one that is still there today; the Colony Market in Roseburg, Oregon. In the 1950’s/60’s, it had an attached Texaco (back when they were REAL service stations), and the old guy, Ernie, who ran it was the hero to every kid with a bicycle problem. The Texaco is long gone, and the store incorporates a pizza parlor/deli now.
    We spent many a summer day scouring the roadside ditches for beer and pop bottles to haul in there to cash out for more candy, pop, and comic books.

  16. Used to be a bunch all over South Jersey. I remember just the South end of Ocean City having like 3. Reese’s on 52nd street, a bigger one (name forgotten) on 55th & a tiny one that might’ve been on 50th? There were at least 2x that many around Deepwater/Penns Grove/Carneys Point. Quite a few doubled as sandwich joints.

  17. Many a Sunday I’d ride my bike up to one of the Mom & Pop deli shops in town and while I waited for Willie to slice up the cold cuts and put some hard rolls & bagels in a bag, his wife Dolores would give me a cookie. They didn’t even have a cash register, just a metal box with cash & coins. Dolores would figure up the amount on the paper bag and that was your receipt I guess. At the pizzeria on the corner, I could get a huge slice and a coke for 50 cents served on a piece of wax paper of course.

  18. My Uncle Dent had a store like this in Mize Mississippi back in the Sixties and Seventies. He had a Minah bird that used to scare the crap out of the local diversity. Those were the good ole days of country living. Watching Cousin Wayne and his Girlfriend Sue Ellen French kiss with a plug of Copenhagen under each lip. Running a trot line on the Okieetommee. Swimming in the ole Swimmin hole buy the beaver dam.

    Good times.

    • There’s one a lot like that at the entrance to Lake Emmons at Pachuta, Miz-sippi and Thank God, they’re still relatively common in the Cajun area of south Loozy-anna.

  19. Sadly, the closest thing to a small town general store today is Dollar General.

  21. Around here they all got overtaken by india -Pakistani-Hindu Sikh types and they took out all the fresh deli foods and put in the fryer/hotdog roller/pizza. Stocked with cheap china trinkets… Yes they have motor oil, dog food, baking powder, smokes, a large selection of junk food, etc, but it ain’t the same. Even the couple holdouts fell in the early ’00’s. It was heart breaking,.

  22. You reminded me of a place back home… Merrill’s Post Office/General store/Gun Shop all you ever needed… was there since the 1890’s… they used to sell surplus rifles from WW2 out of a big 55 gallon drum…
    It was run by the same family what built it waaaaaaaaaaaaay back in the day

    I just looked on Goolag Erf
    It’s gone… torn down
    Guess you really can’t ever go home…

  24. When I was a lad, in a country far away to the south, there was such a store dedicated to supplying the farms, ranches and general public. It sold everything you could need. Mantle lanterns (white gas), fishing gear, rope, whips, rifles and shotguns, ammo, horse gear, wire fencing, hand tools, machetes, canned goods, seed, feed, small boats, and had a full service diner in one corner along with sales point for long keeping sausage, salami, eggs, cheese crackers in sealed cans about 15″ square with viewing window on one side in glass, and so on..

    I would spend hours just looking at all the stuff. Bought my first air rifle there and machete, knives and fishing pole. It lasted to the late 1960’s then went the way of the dodo as the world of supermarkets and specialized stores came to the area. I have fond memories of the place. Mind there were no regulations on owing long guns at the time, sold over the counter. A wonderful and different world where people were responsible for their actions and honorable.

  25. Worked in small rural TX towns. A lot. Mainly cottonseed oilmill towns. These types of stores left their mark Quick baloney sammich for lunch was order of the day. If cold as hell, a quick bowl of beans made for a fine situation. Gave you enough to make it to quitin’ time.

    • The cottonseed crush business has been on the decline for quite a while now and I can only think of four active cottonseed oil mills left in Texas. Two in Lubbock and one each in Harlingen and Richmond. There are only about a dozen left in the entire United States. Probably less.

  26. This is from a show on our local TV channel here in Knoxville Tn. The Heartland Series, later called Heartland Tonight. The host was Bill Landry. I watched it just a couple of nights ago. Always came on after the 11:00 news. A good friend of mine and his family. An episode call Saturday Night at Atomic Speedway. I guess they named it that because it was just off the corridor that leads to Oak Ridge.

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