From time to time, I think about how things used to be in my hometown of Tutwiler.
At one time, we used to have four grocery stores that I recall. My favorite had the most charm and ideal of what a country store was.
Kellum’s store sat just north of the railroad tracks smack dab at the end of Hancock Street, where everyone had to turn to go over the railroad track or go over the bridge. Either way, it was plain to see in its two-story glory with its double doors and its overhang looking every bit like an inviting front porch.
Lewis Kellum owned the store, and if you got there early enough you could catch him shining up the wide, thick wooden board floors with something he would shake out of a can and then sweep up. It made a wonderful smell.
That’s what I miss about grocery stores today; they don’t smell. Or if they do, it’s bad.
Entering Kellum’s, you were greeted with produce smells; potatoes in a barrel with that rich smell of dirt that you could almost taste; stacked onions that were sharp to a child’s nose; bananas in a big, long branch off the tree; and you could actually smell the different fruits and vegetables. Sometimes I’m in a store and I put the tomato up to my nose and can’t smell anything,
The carts would bump along the floor because the floor had ruts worn from a hundred years of footprints. Mr. Kellum held court up front by the register where the good stuff was: an ice box holding orange Crush, grape Crush, 7 Up or Coke. We just happened to call it all Coke.
The glass shelves closest to the entry door held the candy. Five cents might as well have been a dollar; you could get a bag of stuff. I was fascinated by the red wax lips, then the wax bottles of Coke. My teeth today suffer from Slo Poke hard caramel suckers on a paper stick. The orange push-up ice cream in a tube was another delight. My mother thought the candy cigarettes were tacky and didn’t buy them, but I bet I bought a bunch of sacks of Fireballs.
This was also the go-to place for Dale Evans popgun ammo and where I begged for my first pair of roller skates cleverly on display outside of the red, white and blue box — complete with skate key. I had to wear hard sole shoes to keep them on and was one of the lucky ones who had the perfect driveway to skate on.
Outside the store on the railroad side, for all the train passengers to see, was a giant painted advertisement featuring Sprite the elf, with silvery white hair, a bottle cap hat and a huge bottle of Coke. This painting was the foremost feature art of our entire town during my childhood, which was pretty great.
The magical time was Christmas. My Paw Paw would send my sister Dorothy, 13 years older, and me to town to pick out a tree. Mr. Kellum had them all fluffed out, lined up under his overhang beneath a string of colored lights. To me, that was the signal that Christmas was coming.
