Silver Lake Store

I grew up in a small town in Minnesota during the 1940’s and 50’s. Children of that era were raised in a parental style that is best described as “benign neglect.” 

My family lived in the lower half of a duplex. My grandparents, my mother’s parents, lived upstairs. We didn’t have a car or a television. We had indoor plumbing but no bathtub. We took our baths in a big wash tub, filled with hot water from a tea kettle heated on a wood stove. My mother and grandmother washed clothes in that same washtub and hung them on a clothesline in our backyard. We had a telephone, with multiple families sharing the same line. My mother listened to news on the radio all day long. I remember it as a time of great joy and tremendous freedom. 

Looking back on it, no wonder mothers didn’t have time to entertain their children. No wonder we were told, “You kids go outside to play. I’ll call outside for you when it’s time to come home.”

There were not many girls in my neighborhood, so I mostly hung out with my brother and his friends ~ Leo Fortier, Davey Cournoyer, and Carl Olson. At least once a day my mother sent me to the Silver Lake Store, about a block away, with a note and some money to buy whatever she needed ~ a can of coffee, a package of Kool-Aid, maybe milk or a box of Jello. A pack of cigarettes was also often on the list. Occasionally, Mom would let me spend a penny or two on penny candy.

My favorite candies were root beer barrels. At two for a penny, they were a bargain. My brother and I were always hunting for pennies dropped in the dirt or behind couch cushions, so we could buy candy that cost more than one penny ~ wax lips for me and baseball cards for him.

One day, Bob, Davey Cournoyer, Leo Fortier and I were especially bored and looking for something to do. One of us suggested forming a club. We wanted to call it the Be Bad Club. We were tired of being good and we wanted to see how it felt to do something bad. I was about seven years old and the boys were all six. As the oldest, I should have known better but it sounded like fun.

We hatched a plan to walk into Silver Lake Store and throw all the bread on the floor. When the owner saw what we were doing, he yelled at us and we ran out the door. We raced down the alley to Leo’s backyard, laughing all the way.

Later, we couldn’t think of any other bad things to do so we formed the Be Good Club. The Korean War had just started. We considered ourselves practically angelic as we knocked on people’s doors and asked them if they wanted us to tell them about the war. Most people just shook their heads and said, “No! Go find something else to do.”

When I was eight years old, we moved to a new home, about two blocks away from my grandparents. Our new home had a bathroom with a bathtub. My mother had a wringer washing machine in the basement. She spent all day Mondays washing clothes and hanging them on the clothesline by the side of our house. On Tuesdays, she ironed. It’s what most mothers did. When I was nine years old my father bought a car and later we got a television.

During the summer, my brother and I continued to roam the neighborhood, often the two blocks between our new house and my grandmother’s house, where we used to live. My brother rounded up his friends to play baseball in the open field next door. I helped my mother do the laundry and I learned to iron. My mother sent me on errands to Silver Lake Store at least once a day. I loved it.

One day Dad came home from work with a canister and asked me to take it to the store. The canister was meant for people to donate money to help people with cerebral palsy. I needed to ask the owner if it was ok to put the canister next to the cash register in his store. I was horrified. I was so painfully shy, I was later diagnosed as an “elective mute.” I could talk to people my age, but never to an adult.

I was terrified at the thought of actually having to speak to the owner. I had been coming to the store daily for years, but for all those years I just handed the owner my list and he filled my order. The day I took the canister to the store, I wanted to talk but I couldn’t find the words to say out loud. I came home with the empty canister and told my Dad that the owner said “No.” I felt terrible. I went to confession and told the priest that I lied to my father. 

A couple of weeks later, we were out for a drive when we saw a young man struggling to cross the street. He was on crutches and he shuffled his way across the street. 

“What’s the matter with that guy?” my brother asked.

“He has cerebral palsy,” Dad answered. 

To this day, I wish I had been able to talk to the owner of the Silver Lake Store. I wish I could have done something to help the man on crutches, trying to cross the road in front of our car.

Silver Lake Store was never the same for me again.