Life on Byron Street: The Fruit Stand

Right across a gravel drive from my father’s hardware and garden store sat Tony’s Fruit Stand.  This was very convenient for a kid like me.  I used to walk over to their counter and plop my dime down on it and ask for “10 cents worth of grapes.”  They weighed them out for me, put them in a plastic bag, and off I’d be on my way back to my dad’s store.  Some times I would get hot, boiled peanuts which they put in a foil-lined white paper bag to keep them hot for me. The big, soft, salty ones were the best!

Tony’s Fruit Stand always had fresh fruits and vegetables, but they also had a “cold drink” machine right near the front.  It had fruit flavored “cokes” in it that I preferred over the Coca-colas in my dad’s drink machine. So I’d go there often to get a Fanta strawberry, orange, or grape drink.  Their machine was the type that had a tall, slender glass door on the left that held the bottles in individual compartments; each locked in place with a gate around the neck of the bottle.  When the coins were dropped in the slot, the gate would release so that the bottle could be pulled out.  I can still hear that clinking sound.

Mr. Tony Pizzolato had a cold-storage room where he kept some of his watermelons to market them as “ice-cold.”  And they were!  My dad and he had a friendly competition to see who could come closest to guessing the weight of a watermelon just by holding it in their arms.  I’m not sure if my dad ever got one for free if he guessed the correct weight, but he did win bragging rights!

In the fall of the year Tony’s Fruit Stand would get in a large load of pumpkins which would be stacked in a large pile out in front.  One October day in 1970, Art Kleiner, the photographer for the State Times and Morning Advocate newspaper in Baton Rouge, was driving around town looking for a human interest photo for the Halloween edition’s front page.  He dropped by the fruit stand when he saw the big pile of pumpkins out front.  He inquired at the counter if they knew of a school-aged girl who could pose in her Halloween costume while sitting in the pumpkins.  They immediately recommended that he go next door and ask my parents about me.  I was eight years-old at the time.  My mom brought me back home quickly and we threw together a homemade witch outfit, grabbed our household broom, bought a witch’s hat at the Pak-a-Sak down the street and headed back to the fruit stand — all in about 20 minutes!  It was great fun!Not long after this, Tony’s began selling seafood — fresh and boiled.  When that branch of the business took off, he and his sons rented an old gas station up Plank Road to expand this side of the business.  Today his children own and operate Tony’s Seafood Market and Deli, one of the largest seafood markets in the state of Louisiana.  They also produce “Louisiana Fish Fry” brand products.  What started as humble beginnings has turned into a very successful operation.

The original stand is not on Plank Road anymore, but I’ll always remember original Tony’s Fruit Stand with fond memories.

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Life on Byron Street: A Tale of Two Stores

Me with my Pa-pa in front of his toy store (1962)

Besides my house and yard, which were great places to play, I spent most of my time at the two stores of my father and my “Pa-pa.”  The close proximity of the stores to my house and the possibilities they afforded children with vivid imaginations made the two stores natural places to play.

My Pa-pa, W.T. Arnold, owned a toy store called “Arnold’s Toys.”  How many children get to grow up living down the street from a toy store that is owned by their grandfather?  I remember gazing at the beautiful Madame Alexander dolls that were protected behind the sliding glass doors of the display cases.  My brother and I test rode the bikes and Red Flyer wagons in the middle of the store and played with the sample “Mr. Potato Head,” “Operation,” and “Cooties” games. My sister and I played with the “Lite Brite” and “Easy-Bake Oven,” and the little toy piano like Schroeder plays in Charlie Brown.  “Mrs. Beasely” dolls sat high on a shelf over-looking our fun. One of my all-time favorite toys was the “Dancerina” doll which I begged to get one Christmas (and I did). I always remember feeling like I was the luckiest kid in the world to grow up playing in a toy store.

I often spent time visiting with one of my Pa-pa’s employee’s, Mrs. Mac (short for McBride).  She was always so nice and patient with me.  I loved helping her as she put price tags on the new toys.

One especially exciting place to play in Pa-pa’s store was in the ware room at the rear of the store.  It was a dimly-lit three-tier shelved storage room where we would imagine ourselves being on a ship, in a cave, a haunted house, or a space ship.  Two, short, painted boards that were alongside each other on the otherwise unpainted floor in the ware room always served as our trap door that would lower or lift us to a new adventure.

Hinson’s Hardware Employees — (front row, l-r) Aunt Daisy Mae Valentine, Mrs. McBride, Aunt “Boots” Edna Addison, Mrs. Nell (back left) Dale Arnold, (back right) Ray Hinson, my father.

My father, Ray Hinson, owned an adjacent hardware and garden supply store named, oddly enough, “Hinson’s Hardware and Garden Supply.”  Each spring, when the ware room had been cleared of the Christmas season’s toys, my dad would stock it full of used whiskey barrels that he would cut in half to sell as planters.  This was a great idea except for the fact that one could not walk through the ware room without getting totally drunk from the fumes.  It was quite an unusual and powerful smell for our teetotalling family’s noses.

He opened his store on my first birthday in 1963 and he remained in business in that location for the next fifteen years.  His store smelled of grass seed, nails, rubber gaskets and fertilizer.  Have you ever run your hands through a barrel of Bermuda grass seed?  Or bulk sacks of mustard seed?  It’s the nicest feeling.  It’s hard for me to go into a hardware store today without being thrust back into my childhood.

One job I had was to count the change in the old Coca-Cola machine in the back of his store.  I knew where the special key was hung. And how to unlock each compartment all the way to where the Cokes were held.  I had such responsibility!  And yes, sometimes I was allowed to get a Coke out of the machine, just for me.

Local gardeners would bring Daddy bushels of peas, sacks of tomatoes, and other vegetables from seeds or plants they had bought from him. He kept his bedding plants out in front of the store where he watered them every morning.  I still love the smell of moist soil.  At the end of everyday, he sprinkled a dark, green granular substance on the concrete floor before he swept it.  He said it was to keep the dust down.  Sometime I received the honor of sprinkling the “green stuff” on the floor.  It took me a while before I realized I was lured into a “Tom Sawyer white-wash fence” situation.  My dad was a good, honest businessman.  Everyone always said good things about him.

W.T. Arnold (front) at Ray Hinson’s Hardware and Garden Supply

My Pa-pa was a good man, too, and I don’t say that just because he let us play in his toy store.  My grandmother married him as a young widow after he had been kind to her by making sure that she and her two small children had extra ration stamps for groceries during World War II. It didn’t matter to us that he wasn’t our real grandfather, because he always treated us like his own.

I don’t remember having many conversations with him, but I do remember sitting with him in their kitchen at the counter as he spread saltines with “deviled ham” for me and him.  In the summer he would buy an ice-cold watermelon from Tony’s Fruit Stand next door and cut it on a marble slab table in his yard behind his store while we sat in Adirondack chairs waiting patiently for our slices.

He always looked old to me. He was many years my grandmother’s senior, but he never acted old.  He chewed cigars and he loved making coffee for his employees.  On cold days he and his employees took afternoon coffee breaks around the heater in the back of the store and drank the coffee that he had prepared in a French drip coffee pot on open burners in the back “ware-room.” Around Christmas he also boiled whole hams in a big pot on the same burners.  He boiled the hams with apples, bell peppers, onions, and celery.  The aroma would permeate the whole store! (I still boil my hams the same way.)

But my Pa-Pa’s store wasn’t always a toy store.  It was first a Plee-zing Food Store.  I still have the wooden meat carving table he used.  In addition to groceries he sold general store type items and “Esso” gasoline out front (Esso stood for S.O. – Standard Oil, which later became Exxon).

My Pa-pa, W.T. Arnold, standing with an employee in his Plee-zng Food Store on Plank Road (Click the photo to zoom in and read the prices on the shelves.)

My mother as a young girl with an employee in front of my Pa-pa’s Plee-zing Food Store (1944)

His old store is no longer there, but my memories of it will always be.

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“The Choo-Choo Train House” (1911-2005)

“The Choo-Choo Train House” (1980′s)

Fans, tuna-fish sandwiches, train horns, sand, donuts in the morning, the beach, seining, hot summer days, cold-water showers, afternoon naps, no TV, no telephone, sand, stacks of Reader’s Digest books, dart board, cards, sand, late-evening thunderstorms, crabbing, fishing, and oh, I almost forgot to mention…sand.   These wonderful memories all seem to bundle up together in my mind when the long days of summer come and make me long for “The Coast,” “the camp” — or more endearingly dubbed by the kids as the “Choo-Choo Train House.”

My Mom (L) with friends (1950′s)

Newly purchased camp

The Choo-Choo Train House was located in Clermont Harbor, Mississippi and was originally a school house that sat five blocks inland from the beach and a few houses from the railroad.  It had been a school from 1911, when it was built, until the 40′s when the town built a new school.  At that time it was put up for sale and my grandmother and my step-grandfather (Pa-pa) bought it when my mother was about thirteen years old.  They would spend the entire summer down at the coast while Pa-pa would go back to Baton Rouge on the weekdays to work in his store.  He would head back to the coast on Friday evenings to be with his family again.  When I was a child, we’d go down at least a few times each summer.

The old camp was one big room divided into three parts with half-walls surrounding the kitchen area in the middle. It also contained two fully-enclosed bathrooms — one with a tub and one half-bath.  There were large windows on every wall for opening  to allow a cross-breeze when the weather was hot.  The old ceiling fan in the front room made a loud, grinding noise as it started spinning, but when it got going, could blow a part in your hair.  There were beds  in the front room and beds in the back room.  But there was one special twin bed right by the front screen door where my Pa-pa took a nap every afternoon.  It was difficult to keep a bunch of kids quiet for two hours and not let the screen door slam while he slept!

Special days for me started at 4 AM when I would get up to go fishing with my dad.  It was still dark as I tried to get dressed quietly.  My dad would turn on a small lamp at the kitchen table and make French bread toast in the old Munsey toaster.  After scraping the blackened toast into the sink with a knife (quietly) because we left it too long in the toaster, we would finish eating and head to Bordage’s (pronounced Bo-dash’s) fishing marina inland on Bayou (Bye) Caddy. It would still be dark outside as I put on my orange life-preserver and got into our skiff.  Daddy would start the outboard motor and it always seemed so much louder in the early morning.  As we made our way down the bayou toward the Gulf with the marsh grass on each side of us, shining in the water as the boat glided through were phosphorescent organisms that would glow briefly in the darkness. About 30 minutes of winding through the watery passages we would reach the mouth of the bayou just as it was getting light.  We’d fish for an hour or more and then head back to Bordage’s.  We  always ended our trip with a Barq’s rootbeer and a pack of peanut butter crackers.  I still love that combination!

Me (L), my sister Karen and my cousin Steve

My children at the beach

We would get back to the house just in time to put bathing suits on and go to the beach with my brother’s and sister and whichever cousins may be visiting at the same time.  Playing in the shallow surf, if the tide was in, or playing on the sand of the sandbars running and splashing through the tide pools was our fun when the tide was out. We’d head back to the camp around lunch when it got too hot to stay out there.  Each of us got a turn at the hose out back to rinse the sand off of ourselves and then we’d do the complete job in the cold shower inside.  Brrrr!  And no matter how much you rinsed off, you still found sand somewhere on your body when you got out!

Cousins

Lunch usually consisted of tuna sandwiches or other cool lunch meat sandwich, then the sleepy people would find a bed and flop on top for a nap under the breeze of the ceiling fan.  Those of us who never napped, would read comic books or play a quiet board game or card game.  Sometimes Mom would give us each a dime to walk down to Garcia’s (Gar-sha’s), the local general store to get an ice cream.  I believe she did that mostly to get us out of the camp during her nap time.

My dad helping push the seine

My mom and grandkids

Finally when the nappers awoke, we’d get our damp swimsuits back on and head to the beach and play until the sun went down.  If the tide was out, we’d seine between the sandbars in the tide pools and see what little fish, shrimp or crabs we could catch.  The youngest children always enjoyed the flipping minnows jumping on the net as we pulled the seine up onto a sandbar.

When the sun went down we’d head back to the camp for a meal of hot dogs or boiled crabs if we went crabbing at the train tressel that day.  By the way, one of the best feelings in the world is to be clean, cool and in fresh pajamas after being hot all day and in a damp sandy bathing suit.  After supper it was time to get on — not in –our beds, until it cooled off.  We had our radio tuned to WWL New Orleans at 9:00 PM to hear CBS Mystery Theater.  We listened intently as the opening trademark  ”creaking door” would open and E. G. Marshall would introduce that evening’s suspenseful tale.

Melinda – 1962

Before we went to sleep, we would dust any sand out of the bed — and there always was some — and Pa-pa would tell us to cover our heads with our sheet while he sprayed the inside of the camp with the flit gun to kill the mosquitoes.  Going to sleep hot, but waking up in the cool morning with the birds chirping in the trees outside the open windows was one of my fondest memories of being at the Coast.

The Coast is where my parents met and courted.  It is where all of us  kids put our feet in the water at the beach for the first time. It’s where we went each summer to relax.  It’s where we had family reunions every year around my parents’ anniversary.

Our last family reunion at the Coast

Yes, it was hot.  Yes, it was sandy.  But it was a nice place to go and have no distractions, be with family, bring friends, enjoy the beach, eat, and sleep.

The Coast is where we used to enjoy all these things. But along with many other people’s precious possessions, our camp was destroyed in August of 2005 in the unprecedented devastation of Hurricane Katrina.  This stretch of the Mississippi Coast was one of the hardest hit areas.  The sadness I felt from the loss of our camp and the rest of Clermont Harbor was as if I had lost a member of my family.

Dad and Mom surveying the damage after Hurricane Katrina. The roof of our camp is on the ground in the distance. The picnic table is all that survived.

Nothing can replace the old camp, or Garcia’s, or Bordages, but one story demonstrates the resiliency of the place and its people.  One hot day while we were cleaning up the debris on our property, my mom proceeded to pull out a checkered table cloth, spread it on the surviving picnic table and began to set out sandwich fixings.  We all sat and enjoyed our lunch under the sparse shade of one of the bedraggled trees.  It was at that moment that I knew that not everything had been destroyed.  The heartbeat of the Coast was still there.

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