Dime Stores and Dollar Stores

Dayton, TN Lays 5&10 courtesy of Dean Wlson www.Yesterdayindayton.net

It’s 2021, shelves are sparsely stocked and prices are quickly rising.  And the last single-price store around has just announced their prices are rising too. Ah, for the days of the 5 & 10!

My children enjoy an Australian-produced kids show, The Inbestigators, whose kids often mention buying something at the “2 Dollar Shop”.  I found that phrase interesting because we have Dollar General and Dollar Tree and Family Dollar.  Of course, not everything at Dollar General and Family Dollar is priced at $1.00, but it is at Dollar Tree – at least until the first of the year when they’ve announced plans to move up to $1.25. Perhaps we are on our way to visiting a “2 Dollar Shop”.

This change reminds me of the “5 & 10” stores.  Okay, I’m not really  THAT old.  I don’t actually remember when everything was a nickel or a dime.  However, according to a 2011 article by The Saturday Evening Post, until November 3, 1935, Woolworth’s really did restrict all their prices to 25 cents or less. () – I’m curious just when they introduced the quarter!

Despite the price changes, we called the Lays 5 & 10 “the dime store” till it closed its doors.  And the prices really were pretty reasonable.   I suppose the idea of what is reasonable is constantly changing.  Today we’re fairly pleased with everything costing a dollar. 

However, the offerings of a dollar store in the 21st century are quite different than what the old 5 & 10 stocked.  They had yard goods, simple clothing (scarves, underclothes and socks – no winter coats or work jeans), household goods and toys.  Of course these days it’s increasingly difficult to find fabric and the cost of even simple clothing surpasses the idea of a dollar store.  That Saturday Evening Post article listed Woolworth’s first inventory to include pot-lifters and book straps – items today’s consumer couldn’t even identify much less consider purchasing.

I particularly remember the candy - those white paper bags you could fill with a wide variety of chocolate, hard candy or taffy dipped from a big box with a shiny copper scoop.  Just making that selection meant a trip to the dime store was an adventure.  What dime store memories do you treasure?

Firewood Philosophizing

You won’t usually find me in a mall, especially among the largest crowds of the year, so I spent some of Black Friday 2021 cutting wood with my Daddy.  I’ve mentioned here before my affinity for a roaring fire and with propane nearly $3.00 per gallon, bringing home a little jag (as we call it around here) of firewood seems like a very worthwhile activity.

I wanted to share a few lines of thought – this endeavor makes for good thinking time.  The saw is too loud to talk over and the woods are always a great place to think.

We were out on the farm where my Great-Grandparents raised their family, including my Grandpa.  I often say I hear their ghosts when I’m on that piece of land.  Actually, I just know so many stories set there that it seems like I can imagine every facet of their daily lives.  And since cutting wood must have taken a lot of their time and energy, it’s not hard to envision that bunch of kids out working a cross-cut saw or axe and then toting home a load of wood.  As I urged my little boy to carry 2 sticks instead of one and to keep working instead of sticking cold hands in his pockets, I wondered if my aunts and uncles complained about the work or the weather.  Did they understand better than my children the absolute necessity of the whole family pulling together?  Was it difficult for Grandpa to get them focused on the work at hand instead of the annoyance of their siblings?

Then there’s that noisy chainsaw.  Like so many products and tools, the post-World War II years saw improvements to a device first developed near the turn of the 20th century.  I don’t know when the first ones came to our mountain, but an awful lot of firewood had been cut and chopped by that time, and Millard Stepp’s children were all grown up.  Our work today would have been much more involved – and much slower – without that gasoline-driven chainsaw!

And then I thought about the trees.  I dislike cutting down trees, mainly because I so greatly enjoy having trees.  It’s easy to feel like we are just haphazardly destroying our forests, a subject I’ve often debated with my Daddy.  His philosophy is that aging or diseased trees need to be harvested before they are wasted.  Clearing out those trees allows young saplings to thrive and perpetuate the forest for many more years.  I have to admit he’s winning me over to his way of thinking.  Today we were working on downed trees.  In fact, they were somewhat past their prime.  They’ll still burn and provide my family warmth and comfort for a little while, plus we needed to clear up the field they were littering.  These were felled by an ice storm and their place in the woods is no doubt already occupied by new sprouts.

Supply Chain Shortages from the Past

You don’t need me to tell you that the store shelves have great, blank spots on them where both necessities and luxuries have normally been found.  The media tells us there is a global supply chain crises, the reasons for which they have failed to explain to my satisfaction. 

As a rule I try not to live in fear, but these changes and shortages certainly tend to push me that direction.  It makes me wonder what my Great Grandmothers were thinking in the early 1930’s. 

It was October 29, 1929 when the stock market crashed, effectively plunging the US into The Great Depression.  None of my family held any stock so that news story didn’t hit them too hard.  Their self-sufficient lifestyle meant they didn’t immediately notice when the local general store failed to stock new yard goods, housewares or other luxury items.  (Please remember that luxury is defined differently by different people; can you imagine what those ladies would have called an automatic washing machine?)

One of my Great Uncles told me about their lives during The Depression.  He reminded me that the economic issues were exacerbated by a severe drought that affected crops across the country.  We learned about The Dust Bowl years in history class, but no one outside our homes or communities ever mentioned what was happening in Appalachia at the time.  I was blessed to have living historians who talked much about those years.

All my life I heard things like, “The tater crop is good so we won’t starve this year.”  And, “This will taste good when the cold snows fall.”  A part of me scoffed when I heard those things because I’d never come close to starving and frankly we ate about the same foods in the snow as in the sunshine, save for the fresh vegetables we had during summer months.  Now I’m beginning to relate to those old people.

I was taught to keep a well-stocked larder.  I always thought it was because my family were farmers and there was cash to be earned in the summer months, but little of it in the winter.  So Grandma would buy up flour and corn meal, soap and lotion - really everything she used that wouldn’t spoil quickly – and have it stocked up for the wintertime.  I’ve always found myself doing the same thing despite having a more steady income, it’s just what came natural to me.  This is shaping up to be a winter that I’m glad to have done that.

At the beginning of the Pandemic shutdowns I wrote an article here challenging the modern mountaineer to buck up and face the situation bravely.  I need to re-read that piece myself.  But the shortages are very different now, not just toilet paper and Lysol, which people were hoarding.  There are times there’s no milk in the store’s coolers.  Cold medicine is scarce.  Apple juice. Please comment below on what you’ve missed on the shelves.

I want to be very careful of my comparisons between 2021 and 1931 and I am certainly praying we don’t face the same difficulties.  But I am predicting that I am neither as tough nor as resourceful as my grandmothers.  During The Great Depression, desperate mothers found ways to cope – recipes like Water Pie come to mind – and I’ll be interested to see how you readers and I work through things if the current crisis persists.

Remembering our Heritage

This week I had the honor to participate in Cumberland Horizon’s Heritage Day.  This one-day event has been held for the past three years at the Crossville Community Complex and features a number of displays and events aimed at teaching and reminding us of our American heritage. 

This is not a new thing. Since very early in our nation’s existence, we have sought to teach where we came from and what we went through to get here.  Coming from around the globe, our people strove and suffered.  They endured hardships and failures until by God’s grace they were delivered to a land of freedom and hope.  Then they fought to keep it.

Cumberland County has worked to remember both the good and the bad.  From Pioneer Days to Veteran’s Memorial statues, this town understands the investment our ancestors made to give us the lives we enjoy today. 

The 2021 Heritage Day included a gospel music band – because despite what you see in America today, this land was founded by God-fearing people who were wanted a land where they could worship without persecution.  There were displays of Revolutionary-War-era weapons, hand crafts, and of course local books.  Homemade jellies and soaps were sold.  And a ton of information was distributed about the beauty of unborn life, the American Constitution and the evolution of the American flag.

It’s obvious that I’m a fan of history.  Well I am also a proponent of teaching and passing along history; events like Heritage Day are a great way to do both.

2021 Winter Weather

Whether you’ll spend the winter feeding stock or commuting to an office, the weather affects all of us.  And this is the time of year we start looking down the winter road trying to predict how much cold, snowy-weather we’ll face.

There are lots of ways of predicting weather, and the nut crop is as reliable a method as any I suppose.  If the Good Lord is supplying his little forest creatures for a hard winter, He’s done a fine job.  There are a ton of acorns on the ground as well as hickory nuts.  Right in my back yard, where the dog and cats keep the squirrels scared away, we are covered up with nuts.  I took a little stroll through the woods just to see how many were still out – there were plenty there too.

Maybe you’ve heard the old adage that “even a blind hog gets an acorn sometimes”.  When it comes to weather forecasting, that’s a pretty good description for me; yet even this blind hog can observe nature’s abundance.  I’m putting it on my calendar right now to check back in and see how true this indicator holds.