FOOD FIGHT It appears that we often select a special evil to be featured for a time as bring the root of all evil which comes comes our way. Right now, it came be any one of a host of things: the Internet, TV, same-sex marriages, global warming riparian rights on the far side of the moon, sex offenders on parole, plus others who can be our scapegoat - just to mention a few of them and cause you to think of a dozen favorites of your very own.
Some are silly, of course of course, -other people's in particular.
I recall one particularly wild one which overwhelmed our part of the nation in he early 1930's...a terrible horror which faced our civilization - the dreaded coming of the "Chain Store"!
We were, as I recall, quite happy with our "local: grocery stores. Many of them had family backgrounds we all knew about, too, One got started because a family could not make a go of farming or livestock raising because illness in the family. They started a small business of buying and selling excess produce from the area and then added a box-like addition to their house which became their grocery store. The had "drummers" selling canned goods and boxed foods call on them regular local truck owners owners started hauling in fine apples from the upper Valley, peaches from across the mountain range to the east.
We hear talk about how the stores in the cities were changing at about the same time and we started to hear terrible stories about some which were connected together like a chain in city after city. They could buy in large quantities at lower prices and sell for whatever they could get in local areas.
The movement again chain stores started in local settings but it quickly became a nation-wide thing. I forget the call letters of a fifty-thousand watt radio station, I think, located in Shreveport, La. which devoted most of its air time to vilifying the evil chain stories telling how the people were being robbed by the greedy chain store owners; how they were killing local firms and destroying our way of life. They were the direct cause of most of our maturing troubles - both real and imaginary.
Our town we had a burst of crime associated with the establishment of a Kroger's store on our main street. They trucked everything from distribution centers, the nearest one about fifty miles away down a mountain road - unpaved in those days and with many twists and turns which slowed traffic going up the mountain to a snail's pace. It took one hour, at least, for delivery trucks to get up ole Burg Mountain. Such trucks in those days were , of course, much smaller than our trucks today and seldom closed across the rear end. A slack chain or rope, sometimes a net barrier. It doesn't seem possible but it took months before they realized how and why so much of their shipments bound for our Main Street store never got there. Eventually, putting doors - locked doors -on the rear end or hiring a man to ride shotgun to fend off stuff-dumpers during the long upgrade climb...helped.
The chain store did well on Main Street in our town and we got over the "I hate chain stores" thing right fast.I don't remember what took up the slack. You can bet we had something ready to blame for whatever we felt we didn't like at that time.
A.L.M. July 29, 2005 [c597wds]
