The big A&P Super Market is today the location of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise on Broadway. I paid a visit to my friend Tim Heath, the best mechanic in the North Country, to help identify this dateless photo. Tim looks at the photo, whips out his phone, pulls up a picture of a car that looks like one parked on the street, and says, that is a 1956 Buick. Of course, his wife Judy, had already said to me, with fanfare at all, “I think it’s the mid-1950s.” Tim’s left-hand man Harold LaVair, was trying to ID the buildings but he’s too young for that job. Straight across the street from the famous Bitters & Bones Restaurant is the Nutrition 365 Vitamin & Supplement Store that originally was Effenbach’s Oxford Market, (73 Broadway) then owned and operated by Mr. and Mrs. Effenbach, parents to Ruth and her brother, Mark. The store today selling medical supplies was the Army & Navy (71 Broadway) Store in the mid-1950s operated by Jake Kraus and Ellsworth (Red) Wilcox. When that store moved to Berkeley Square, the Oxford Market moved into that location). Can’t identify the Enterprise parking lot building but it originally was Fortune’s three-story furniture store. To the right of the A&P was John Munn’s Business Machines office with the other side of the building housing Floyd Green’s Insurance business. It’s unclear which parade is marching down the street. (An aside to former Supervisor Judge Mike Kilroy, I was once a grocery bagger at the A&P.) (Photo courtesy of the Adirondack Room of the Saranac Lake Free Library)

A brief 63 years ago, my column was over 1,000 words, and the newspaper pages were bigger. The column was 20 inches in length, and we were not paid more for writing a column; it was just part of the job.

What makes this one so special for me is that it that it was retrieved by Marilee Dupree from a book belonging to her grandfather, Charles Ladd, a science teacher at Saranac Lake High School back in the 1940s and 1950s. The students knew him as Professor Ladd, probably because of his quiet, dignified demeanor and always in a suit and tie.

The column begins about small grocery stores back in the day. I was thinking of Lezak’s grocery store in Ray Brook, which also contained a little dinette room at one end catering to patients from the Ray Brook San; Elmer Roger’s store in Vermontville, just now being torn down; one can see the rubble of the foundation next to the Nazarene Church in the center of the main drag and of course the “M. B. Norman Wholesale Grocery Company” as listed in the telephone book] in Bloomingdale.

When we moved to Saranac Lake, after living on our farm on Norman Ridge, I arrived home one day, (5 Pine St.) and my mother was arriving home from the direction of Bloomingdale.

Asking who she had been visiting (we had relatives all over the place), she replied that she had been shopping at Mr. Rogers’ store. I asked why she would drive to Vermontville to shop, and she replied that during the depression in the 1930s when we lived on the Ridge, Mr. Rogers would sometimes let her “charge” the groceries she had purchased. She never forgot that kindness and often did her shopping at his little store in Vermontville.

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Life with Riley, by Howard Riley

Gro-cery Kartin’

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“What would our grandfathers’ reaction be if he could visit a supermarket today? He might think he was at the race track at the county fair but he would never imagine that this was what grew from his beloved country store.

“But what do the people think that flock to the supermarkets every weekend? It’s a place to cash your paycheck, but no one waits on you, you do the work yourself and leave a good part of your money behind. It’s strictly a cash deal, so this is the last stand of the big spenders, almost everything else is purchased on time.

“If you usually shop with your wife, you probably wander through the maze of boxes and cans, numbing yourself to the weekly chore of grocery pushing, only observing where you start and where you finish. When circumstances force you into the shopping role alone, it is quite a different experience.

“You grab a kart and head for the starting line, the most popular spot being the soap and cereal corner. Hardly ever is there a kart lost here, as everyone is jockeying for position coming into that first aisle keeping a firm grip on the push handle with one hand and grabbing boxes with the other. A word here on cereal: If you buy five or six different brands a week, as we did, you don’t use brand names, but go by the picture on the box, like Tiger or Boy-with-the-cereal-on-his-head and so on. You must also look for what they are giving away inside the boxes from plastic monkeys to plastic six-shooters, some even have a little cereal covering up the toys.

“As you continue on this aisle through the rows of canned goods that are gravity-fed to the customers, you begin to appreciate your wife’s skill in whipping the can out of the rack. A clumsy beginner may get a finger or two mashed or the wrong technique may start a big can avalanche.

“When you get through the first lane it’s pretty easy going as far as the booby traps go, but be a little careful if you get to peeking down in that coffee grinding machine: there is a fine dust from the coffee beans that is hard on the eyes. Out in the wide-open places where you have to leave your kart to get an item, you may lose it. You turn back to your vehicle and see a lady wheeling it through the kart-clogged lane with your groceries and her own kart parked back where the mistake was made. They should paint the baskets in various colors, it’s kind of embarrassing running down the aisle shouting, ‘Hey lady you’ve got my kart!’ Or maybe make all the ladies use pink karts and the men blue ones.

“The produce department is a relatively simple place to get yourself balled-up, unless you are good at distinguishing rutabagas from regular turnips and pink grapefruit from regular grapefruit and baking potatoes from some other kind. If you really want to get confused, take a look at the face of the scales in this department, it looks like a miniature panel out of an Atlas missile control tower.

“You are now ready to hit the check-out stands. And don’t try running that 8-item express with a full basket, you’ll cause more commotion than jumping a red light in Times Square at high noon. The cash registers seem to enjoy their part in the big rush. The clackety-clack and ring-a-dinging goes with a steady rhythm until the cashier hits the total button and then the old machine goes crazy, as if it were adding on a few bucks all by itself, just for good measure.

“Striving to maintain a personal touch above the ring of the moneychangers, all store personnel wear a tag bearing their name. The name cards are really more like GI dog tags for the boys who carry groceries out into the parking lot, what with cars backing out and swinging around the big yard. If anything does happen, they will be much easier to identify.

“One of the supermarkets had a main exit door with a ‘magic eye’ to open it automatically when approached by a customer. There are not many doors like this in the Adirondacks and this one took a little getting acquainted with. You charge this machine-age marvel the first time with a bag of groceries in one arm and the other arm extended, the door opens and you sail right through, as if you’re giving somebody the straight arm. Well you think this door can only fool you a couple of times like this, so after some time you walk right up to the door with a non-chalant air with two bags of groceries, not hesitating a bit, and ‘ca-whomp’ the magic eye does not open it.

The magic door proved too much for the supermarket clientele or vice-versa, at any rate it has been removed. So, if your wife cannot do the weekly shopping and you can’t get out of it, there is a little store in Jay that you might find is just your speed.”