The Montgomery Ward Seizure

A World War Two episode I knew nothing about:

The Montgomery Ward Seizure

Posted on December 27, 2018 by ahcadmin

On December 27, 1944, the U.S. government seized control of properties belonging to Montgomery Ward, a successful department store retailer that had been in business since 1872.

Very interesting.  And with long lasting repercussions.

What was grocery shopping like before the modern grocery store?

Italian grocery store, New York, 1943. Even after the big chain grocery stores local stores managed to hand on for a very long time for a variety of reasons, including neighborhood and transportation reasons.

I read an interesting entry some time ago on A Hundred Years Ago in which a person in their comments to a post (I meant to memorialize the post, and now I'm not sure which one it is) noted that their grandmother was shook up by having to go into grocery stores where you simply didn’t place an order on the counter. That is, the modern grocery store.

Grocer with his daughters, San Angelo Texas, 1943.

In keeping with the theme of this blog, this is something that is in area of inquiry.  How did grocery stores  in the pre Piggly Wiggly era work?  I’m so used to the idea that you go into the store and find what you want, and pay for it, that I’ve assumed they always worked that way.  But apparently they didn’t, or at least they didn’t fully work that way.

Indeed, photographs of older stores support that they didn’t work that way fully, as there’s always a counter and always a person working behind it, and a lot of stuff behind that person.  There’s usually shelves out on the floor too, so at least to some extent you must have picked up what you wanted but you must have also had to ask for some things.

Beyond that, what did a pre Piggly Wiggly grocery store actually carry?  Modern grocery stores carry a full slate of food items plus some hard ware and some periodicals.  Even the smallest of them is still a fairly large establishment.   They really tiny local markets I was in as a kid, and I’m occasionally in now, are about as big as most older grocery stores seem to have been, but they carry a very limited selection of materials (and the modern ones are often specialty stores).  We know that at one time certain items tended not to be acquired at a grocery store but at another shop.  For example, while groceries frequently had a meat counter (I think) people routinely bought meat from a butcher.

Indeed, people often brought meat from the grocer every single day, or nearly every day (keeping in mind that nearly 100% of retail establishments of all types were closed on Sundays).  Before really good refrigeration people kept ice boxes in their homes which were small and limited as a rule, so you usually didn’t keep a lot of perishable food items at home.  Anyhow, the common practice was to pick up meat to cook that night earlier in the day.  Other perishables worked the same way.

Indeed, while we never hear the term now, a common type of grocer was a “green grocer”, who carried nothing other than vegetables.  Big cities frequently had street venders who operated in this fashion, carrying a selection of fruits and vegetables to be sold that day, in carts, on the street.

All of which partially answers the question of this post and partially not.  Obviously grocery shopping was different prior to a century ago, and after that for some time (by the 1940s the big grocery stores were most places), but how different?

November 27, 1918. The Consumer Economy appears and the Nation resumes a Peacetime Economy.

The Laramie Boomerang reported that the country was resuming a peacetime economy and cutting appropriations, which in fact was done very rapidly, and with a somewhat disastrous impact on the national economy and individual businesses. At the same time, the paper was reporting that a giant military commitment of 1,200,000 men would remain in Europe for the time being.

At UW, the campus military training detachment was standing down.  Mass military training at UW came to an end.

The Casper newspaper, however, was focused on Thanksgiving, which in 1918 occurred on November 28.

To my surprise, Thanksgiving was clearly already associated with shopping, giving evidence to that phenomenon having existed much earlier than I would have supposed.  Indeed, an occasional topic of historical focus in some areas of historical focus is when the consumer economy first appeared.  Whenever that was (and its generally regarded as having its origins prior to World War One, it was clearly before 1918 as the stores in Cheyenne were going to be open to 9:00 this evening.

Thanksgiving and Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, oh my!

Today is Cyber Monday, originally so named as this was the day when workers returning to their offices, work stations, cubicles etc., chose to shop on company time, rather than dive right back in.

Not surprising really.  Those with a long weekend tend to return for the most part with the post holiday blahs.

Retailers, however, picked up this pretty quickly and started offering Cyber Monday deals, making it a real thing.

How about you, have you participated in the Consumer Culture Bacchanalia?  It's sort of hard not to, although I support Small Business Saturday.

Which doesn't mean I participated in it.  I don't like shopping much anyhow.  And my land line phone has broken so that the message light hasn't been going off.  Given that, I missed an invitation to a book signing, but truth be known as I was very much looking forwards to four days in a row with now work, perhaps that was to my benefit in another sense.  Book signings make me really tense as I'm highly introverted by nature, something that people who know me only in a professional sense would be surprised to learn.

Anyhow, I guess it isn't true that I didn't participate entirely. That Saturday I did run out and stop by a sporting goods store to get something I required anyhow.  Things were marked way, way down and it wasn't until I got home that I realized that it must have been a Small Business Saturday sale.

My daughter and wife did participate, however. They went to a collection of small local businesses on Saturday to shop for Christmas.  Good for them.

Thanksgiving was otherwise low key but odd. As already noted on these pages, we went to our in laws where an elderly hunter died in a field while we were out there.  Strange melancholy experience. The next day I had a message from one of my employees about a medical emergency of epic proportions in their family, very distressing indeed.  All that caste a sort of tense gloom over things.  I didn't work, however, and did go hunting a couple of times.

Cyber Monday?  Who knows, perhaps even I'll participate a bit.

Traveling for Boots

Main Street, Casper Wyoming.

When I was a boy here, which is now a very long time ago, there were at least two downtown stores that sold boots for outdoorsmen.  There may have been more, but I know that there were at least two.

One of them was a shoe store that carried the Red Wing brand, among other offerings.  Around the time I was a senior in high school, by which time my feet had quit growing, I bought, or rather my father bought for me, a pair or Red Wing logging boots.  They were my first real pair of really good purpose built outdoor boots, replacing the cheaper Red Wing type boots I wore as a kid, and a pair of very well worn Corcoran paratrooper boots I'd acquired from the Civil Air Patrol while I was in junior high.

For those who don't know, logging boots and boots in that family, are the best rough country boot around. They're fantastic.  Far better than the synthetic "boots" so many wear today.  And the Red Wing loggers were typical.  I wasn't the only one who had a pair, another one of my friends did. The boots lasted for years and years, being on endless hunting trips in all kinds of terrain around Wyoming, serving me as a geology student in the field, where they went up and down ridges in New Mexico and Colorado, and even being my footgear (they had steel toes) when I worked on a drilling rig one summer.  I don't know when they finally gave up the ghost, but it would have been probably around ten years ago, at which time they'd have had decades of use.

Before they died (and I'd acquired various other more narrow purpose boots in the meantime), I lucked into two pairs of Hathorn boots, a brand built by Whites.  One pair is their Farmer and Rancher boot, and the other their Smokejumper boot.  They were being carried by Big R, a farm and ranch store here locally, and they were their demonstrator models that were in my small foot size.  They were half off in price.

For those who don't know, everything built by Whites is fantastic.  They're the Mercedes Benz of outdoors boots.  These two pair are the most comfortable shoes I own and I'd wear them every day but for the fact you really can't in my daily job.

My son is now at the age where his feet aren't going to get any bigger. So it was time for some outdoor boots.  Easy task?  

Not so much.

My what a change in local offerings.  We looked everywhere.  The old shoe store downtown has been closed for years.  The other place I know that had boots closed in the 1970s, I think, and the couple of other places that used to have hunting boots locally are gone as well.  One store downtown that used to carry Whites no longer does, and the store that replaced Big R doesn't either.

In their place are various places that advertise boots. But they are overwhelmingly the type of boots, cheap boots in my view, that are aimed at men working in the oilfield. They aren't good outdoorsmen's boots and aren't worth having in my view.  A couple of sporting goods stores offer the modern composite type boot which is nothing better than a light hiker.  And two offer Danners, which are legendary, but Danner's boots offered here locally are invariably insulated, which isn't something that's universally a good thing for outdoorsmen.  Light hikers are fine for trails, but they're not a serious boot either, which serious outdoorsmen usually learn at their expense.  We could find, literally, nothing.

Now, in fairness, before I go on, a Red Wing store just opened here.  I didn't bother to go there.  We probably should have, but this point we determined to go the one place nearby. . . 120 miles distant, that we knew had Whites and Hathorns.  A store in Sheridan.

It's a great little locally owned store.  It has a fantastic selection of boots of all types.  It carried Hathorns and Whites in stock, and in more than one variety.  We were in luck.

But what an odd odd development.

In 1981, when I was young, you could get logging boots.  And I suspect that if I'd gone next door to where I'd gotten those, I could have gotten smoke jumpers.  I know that I could have gotten smoke jumpers or great packers in that latter store as recently as the 90s anyhow, and maybe more recently than that.

Not now.  Now, everything for a person's foot, shoe wise, is either going to be an oilfield boot of dubious utility for anything else, or a light hiker.

It probably makes sense that the store in Sheridan has a better offering, even if it's in a smaller town. The oilfield isn't a big deal in Sheridan and the mountains are.  It's a tourist town too, with some of those tourist being people headed out in the game fields and the fishing streams.  So there's likely a ready set market.

But you would think things would be different in Casper.  They should be, really.

Sears and K Mart, locally, exit the stage.

The news hit yesterday that the Sears Holding Company, which owns Sears and K Mart, is closing the two local outlets.  Sears had declared bankruptcy.

To anyone paying attention, this is no surprise whatsoever.  Neither brand seemed to get over the financial flu that they picked up a couple of decades ago.  I haven't been in our local KMart for years, indeed since my son was small and I went there as they carried certain toys he liked.  I've been in Sears a couple of times in the last year but each time was really disappointing.

Indeed, it was pretty clear to me that Sears was in trouble when I bought a Craftsman lawn mower about ten or fifteen years ago and hated it.  The brand name had been legendary.  It was a complete disappointment and was rapidly replaced.

I don't know how Sears Holding allowed these stores to fall into this state.  I'm sure that competing with more aggressive Walmart had something to do with it, and adjusting to the Internet including Amazon, or failing to do so, even more.  But what a change.

I'm not going to get too romantic about it.  It wasn't as if I was a huge KMart fan.  I rarely went there in recent years.  And Sears had declined to the point where a trip through the Sears was universally disappointing.  The latter didn't carry nearly the number of things it seemed to have once carried.

But both stores were real institutions when I was young.  KMart was about the only department store of that type around locally.  And Sears had a downtown store that, while we didn't go into it frequently, was sort of a big deal.  It carried, I recall, everything, even firearms, and had its own automotive garage.

A person can debate what happened to these companies, but in the end they don't seem to have been able to get ahead of the new economy.  While they do go back a ways, the Sears company dates back to 1886, they weren't ancient institutions and reflected instead the American economy that came up during the 20th Century.  They started to decline, really, in the late 20th Century as Walmart, which was born in their image and that of similar brands, but much more aggressive, came up and then the Internet really started to polish them off.

But we don't really know where this is all headed really.  Sears and KMart were once giants.  Is this unique to them?  Well in some ways, certainly.  In others, not so much.  The new economy, whatever it will be, hasn't ceased developing to where we can know.

The Food Desert. Disappearing Grocery Stores.

From this morning's Tribune comes a human interest story that directly relates to the focus of this blog:

In Midwest, there are three local choices for food: a gas station, a church food bank and a bench outside of the post office.

There was a grocery store, off of state Highway 387. It closed either five or 10 years ago, depending on whom you believe at the Arcade Bar, a watering hole in nearby Edgerton. In either case, the store is locked and boarded up now. The driveway is overgrown, and a row of storage lockers sits in the field behind it. Were it not for the bartender pointing the store out, visitors would drive by, completely unaware that at one point, there was fresh food for sale in this small community.

Kaycee’s general store is 30 miles away. Casper and its handful of grocery stores is more than 40 miles to the south. But the Big D, the gas station, is in town. It has milk, cartons of eggs, pre-packaged cold cuts and frozen hamburgers. There are no fresh vegetables. The restaurant in the gas station has fried chicken meals that top 2,000 calories.

“There are people in need here,” Donna Miller said from her community garden in Midwest last week. She explained that the older residents give grocery lists to the younger people who drive into Casper.

We've dealt with this before, but  this story does document a real change, as well as a real burden for people living in small Wyoming towns, and I'd wager small towns all over.

First on the closure, I recall that store and I recall stopping in there, but I couldn't tell you how long ago now it was either.  The older you get, the more recently it seems things like that occurred.  It feels like five years to me, but I'll bet its ten.

Anyhow, back to the story, all the little towns have this struggle, pretty much.  The situation in Midwest and Edgerton is noted in the story.  Expanding out just a little bit, in this county in the other small towns there aren't any real grocery stores in any of them.  Powder River had a gas station that carried some items, and a bar that sold package liquor (all bars can sell package liquor) but they both closed about a decade or so ago.  Out at Clarks Corner there used to be a crossroads gas station that sold some convenience items (and which had a bar and sold liquor) before that locality started to be developed into a rural subdivision which became a sort of town, but it's closed.  Alcova has a small store that sells convenience items (and beer) and does quite a business with fishermen, but it's not a full grocery store by any means.  The two nearby reservoirs that are heavily used have marinas that sell convenience items (I've never been in either, so I can't answer the beer question).  Waltman and HIland both have stores, although the Waltman one was closed for quite some time and may have just reopened for hunting season last year, I'm not sure.  Neither are full stores, although Hiland has a restaurant as well, as Waltman once did, associated with their small stores.  You can buy gasoline at Waltman and Alcova.  Glenrock, over the county line, does have a small grocery store.

Now, if you wanted fresh meat, let's say, or fresh vegetables, in most of these areas you are going to have to drive to a distant town. Sometimes very distant.

And we could go on and on.  Shoshoni, for example, doesn't have  grocery store.  People there must drive to Riverton.

This phenomenon is sometimes call a Food Desert, and before its misunderstood, it also applies to lots of urban areas, particularly poorer ones. And it reflects the consolidation of grocery stores.

Consider this again.  Casper at one time had the Grant Street Grocery, Braddis Grocery, Elk Street Grocery, and some small grocery store down on Ash Street whose name I don't recall.  My father sometimes patronized Braddis', which was the largest of the ones noted above, and when I was a kid a neighboring family often sent their children, whom I was friends with, down to the one on Ash Street whose name I can't recall.  Braddis' store was downtown and delivered.

And those are the stores I can remember.  There may have been more small local groceries I don't.  I do recall that in addition to Safeway and Albertson's, the big national grocery store chains, we also had an Ideal (which also goes by some other name I can't recall).

Of all of these, only Grant Street and Braddis' remain, and they have changed in order to stay in business. Grant Street is a specialty grocery store, although if you lived nearby you could walk there and get meat, bread and milk if you had the need.  Braddis' is a butcher shop, their meat counter always having been legendary.

Even the story of the big grocery stores has changed.  Safeway was purchased by Riddley's in Casper and now the same entity owns both the Albertson's stores and the former Safeway stores. They have to compete with Walmart, the giant retail entity, that sells groceries.  K-Mart, which I never go into, does as well, I think.  Smiths has a huge grocery store here and is also a chain, with their store located in what was once a Gibson's.  The two Buttrey's, however, bit the dust.  And there's a Natural Grocers, which specializes in what it sounds like.  Mills and Casper both have Family Dollar stores which do sell groceries.  Evansville and Bar Nunn, which adjoin Casper like Mills, don't have any grocery stores, but its a short drive into Casper for their residents.

So, if you are in Casper, there are plenty of full grocery stores around to choose from, but you are almost certainly going to have to go to one of the big chain ones unless you make an absolutely dedicated effort not to, and you likely also have a really substantial garden (which this year I did not).  If you are in a small town which does not immediately border a big one. . . you are driving to a large one, and that means you are putting in no less than thirty miles, one way.

And if you aspire to be a small town retailer of the type that was once known as a "Grocer" or a "Green Grocer", you have an uphill battle, to say the least.

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Related Threads:

Food: Seasonal, local, and from the grocery store. A revolution we don't often recognize.

The Corner Store. . . .isn't there.

Not that local. Dairies

First modern grocery store opens in Memphis, Tennessee. September 6, 1916.

Foodies, locovores, fishing poles and sychronicity

The Corner Store. . . .isn't there.

I went to work on Monday and found that I'd left my reading glasses somewhere else.

I have to use reading glasses now thanks to my deteriorated near vision.  Indeed, I've worn bifocals for quite awhile but had to start using "computer glasses"  for office work. That proved untenable as I was constantly switching between my bifocals and my computer glasses.  Switching to contact lenses lets me get away with one less set of glasses.

I'm not hugely keen on the contact lenses, quite frankly.  I probably should be, but I'm not.  Anyhow, I apparently left the office the other day with reading glasses in a pocket as they weren't at work when I returned the next day.

I had to go out, therefore, and buy another set.  With a full day ahead of me, that was actually easier than returning home to search for my missing reading glasses. . . which I still haven't found.  I have a couple of sets here, but they aren't the ones I had at work.  Oh well.

 Where the Woolworth's once was. . . now a clothing store.

Anyhow, when I was young, even still into my teens, there was a Woolworth's downtown.  Indeed, it was on the same block as my office building is on.  On the corner there was a "cigar store" that did in fact sell cigars, but also sold newspapers and magazines (not all of the latter of which were decent. . and there were always rumors what else you could buy there) and an amazing assortment of odds and ends, particularly for a store that was no larger than than big closet.  It remained in business up until its owner died in the 1990s, although it opened back up in the last decade, now solely a cigar store (with malts, which the original also had, and a small legit magazine stand) and remained open until the new owner died.  A couple of blocks away there was a Safeway grocery store.  And a couple blocks of way in another direction there was Brattis Grocery Store, a local company.  Across the street from the Safeway was Bi Rite, a large pharmacy that was also a liquor store and a small grocery store.  Indeed, Bi Rite sold so much its a little difficult to describe what it actually was.

 The Rialto Theater.  Just below the tall sign, which usually says "Rialto" but which is being refurbished, there was a cigar store.

None of these remain.

Where the Woolworth's was is now a nice clothing store.  The cigar store is closed awaiting an anticipated reopening in some other form.  Brattis' closed as a grocery store upon the death of the last of the two brothers who owned it and the surviving entity reopened as a butcher shop (its meat counter was always legendary).  Bi Rite closed about a decade ago and its now a series of shops and a bakery.

So what, you say?

Well, what this means is that in order to get a pair of cheap reading glasses I had to drive a few miles to go to Walgreens, which while it may be on the corner of Healthy and Happy, that corner apparently doesn't occur downtown in my town.

Of course, this is just a local example, but for towns and small cities, I think this is pretty common.  If we were speaking of a bigger city, the situation would be different.

Our downtown remained fairly viable until "the mall" came in during the late 1970s.  That hurt the downtown severely.  The mall is now hurting itself, and downtown has undergone a revival, but the corner markets just didn't come back.  Lots of other things did, but they didn't.  There's probably a demographic reason for this, but it's sure inconvenient.

There's probably some sort of lesson in here about the illusion of "progress".  When the mall came in, during the big boom of the 1970s, it was "progress".  It's still there, but it certainly isn't what it once was.  Downtown, which really took it on the chin as a result of that, became really grim when the crash came.  During that same episode oil companies that were headquartered in town pulled out, and they never returned. Starting before the last boom, however, the downtown started staging a slow recovery, centered oddly enough on the two movie theaters that had never left, but which had been taken over by local entrepreneurs, and improbable but actual revival.  Stores started to reappear downtown and restaurants as well. People even started living downtown, which seems rather odd to me for this local.  But the corner store, or the small department store, never did.  Now we have to drive for the convenience of going to one. . . which isn't very convenient.

 

The American Theater at night.

Mid Week at Work Blog Mirror: January 14, 2014 Pearls Before Swine

Out of Business observation.

I wish I could post the actual cartoon, but copyrights. . .

Anyhow, this is a very real phenomenon.  I happened to post this on reddit and received a few comments, including one from a person who works in retail who noted that he expediences people actually coming into the store in which he works to try stuff out so they then can order it on line knowledgeably.

Rude.

Lex Anteinternet: Happy Centenary! Things or rather places, that are 100 years old. Adding another of a bit different character.

 Last week I posted this item:

Lex Anteinternet: Happy Centenary! Things or rather places, that ar...: I've been meaning to post this forever but just wasn't in any big hurry to do it. Then it suddenly dawned on me that if I didn't...

Later, I went into the local Sutherlands and saw they had t-shirts celebrating their 100th Anniversary. Turns out they are also 100 years old.

Now, they aren't local, and I don't even know how long they've been here. They took over the space used by another store, although I've forgotten what it was.  I go there relatively frequently however.  And it turns out they too remain family owned.

Another interesting retail centenary.

Tauberts Ranch Outfitters over the ages.

Tauberts Ranch Outfitters over the ages.

Pretty cool video.

Happy Centenary! Things or rather places, that are 100 years old.

I've been meaning to post this forever but just wasn't in any big hurry to do it. Then it suddenly dawned on me that if I didn't do it soon, these places would be 101 years old, not 100. So here goes.

A thread dedicated to a few local places and establishments that made it to year 100 in 2017.

The ConRoy Building

 

 The ConRoy (Consolidated Royalty Building).  The building's appearance has changed somewhat, but you have to really observe it to notice the changes.  The windows were replaced from the original style about fifteen years ago, giving it more modern and more efficient windows.  The elevator shaft, not visible here, is an enlarged one to accommodate a larger elevator than the one put in when it was built in 1917.  The awning restores the building to an original appearance in those regards which it lacked for awhile, but at street level the building has a glass or rock masonry treatment which clearly departs from the original.

One that I've mentioned here before is the ConRoy, or Consolidated Royalty Building.  Built in 1917 as the Oil Exchange Building, the building was one of Casper's first "sky scrapers",  if in fact not the absolute first.  Ground was broken in the summer of 1917 and the building was completed some time in August 1917. The Consolidated Royalty Oil Company, a company in which former Governor B. B. Brooks had a major interest, occupied the fifth floor of the structure.

 

The ConRoy Building occasionally gets some interesting avian visitors.

Unlike its two sister buildings, the Wyoming National Bank Building (now apartments) and  the Townsend Hotel (now the Townsend Justice Center) designed by the same architect, the building has never been vacant and remains in use today.  At least one of the current tenants descends from a firm that was a very early tenant, and perhaps a 1917 tenant.

 

The building has been updated over time, and its appearance is slightly changed due to the addition of an odd decorative rock face in the 1950s, but it by and large looks much like it did in 1917 from the outside.  It's one of the few old downtown Casper buildings that hasn't undergone major appearance changes over the years.

May 2, 1917 edition of the Casper Daily Tribune announcing vacancies in the yet to be built Oil Exchange Building.  The remainder of this issue was full of war news, and indeed it was partially the oil boom caused by the war that brought the building about.

Kistler Tent & Awning Company

Painted building sign at original location of Kistler Tent and Awning.  At this point the company occupied a couple of buildings in the heart of downtown Casper.

Another Casper feature hitting the century mark this past year is Kistler Tent & Awning.

 Kistler Tent & Awning log on an elevator pad.  Up until very recently their logo featured a sheep wagon.

Kistler Tent & Awning is a canvas manufacturing company.  It makes, and still makes, all the things listed in this sign, as well as anything else that can be made with canvas.  Two of my pickups have tonneau covers made by Kistler Tent & Awning.

Kistler logo in the cement of a building most recently occupied by the Western Book Store.  Obviously this was the storefront for Kistler Tent and Awning at one time. An interesting thing is that the photos on the bricks depicted above are not on the same building, but an adjoining one.  Either Kistler leased the sign space or, probably more likely, it occupied several adjoining buildings at this time.

At some point in its early history Kistler Tent & Awning occupied a location, or locations, right downtown, showing what a major business it was.  When it located there I'm not certain of, however.  It's earliest noted location was on 7th and Durbin, a few blocks away.  The structures located there do not date to this period now.   The company is presently located about one mile to the west in more spacious quarters.

 Kistler Tent & Awning today.  I'm not sure when the company moved to this location, but if the sign is any indication it would likely have been in the 1940s or 1950s.

Wyoming Automotive

 Wyoming Automotive.  This building is obviously not the original structure.

If Kislter Tent & Awning made at least one product that was focused on an older means of transportation, covers for sheep wagons, the arrival of the automobile age was signaled by the arrival of another company in town, Wyoming Automotive.

When exactly in 1917 Wyoming Automotive opened up seems lost to history, but it was in 1917.  The company was one of the very first automobile supply stores in Casper and its amazingly still open today.

 July 26, 1922 edition of the Casper Daily Tribune.  An advertisement for Wyoming Automotive as a "jobber" of Eveready Flashlights is included.  I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.  Note also the odd advertisement for "Driverless Cars".  We may expect to see advertisements like that soon in  the paper, but what did it mean in 1922?

Wyoming Automotive isn't the only local automotive supply store still open, but in the age of the chain stores, that it keeps on keeping on is pretty amazing.  I wish I could say more about it, but unfortunately I really can't.  It has a focus to a degree on performance automobiles, and I've never owned one, so I've rarely stopped in the shop.  I'm glad they're still up and running, however.

Changing times and changing ownership.

One thing that perhaps we should note about all of these entities is that even though they're all still there, not one of them remains owned by the original owners, I think (I'm not completely certain about Kistler Tent & Awning).  Wyoming Automotive was purchased years and years ago by one of the individuals who worked at the store and its since gone on to another.  So it hasn't passed down in the family, per se, but sort has passed down through its employee family, which is neat.

While I'm uncertain, I think that Kistler Tent & Awning also went, at some point, from the Kistlers to an employee and is now passing through that family.   Again, I'm much less certain about the story there so I could be off, and in fact it might still be owned by the same family.  It's still locally owned any way you look at it.

The Consolidated Royalty Oil Company no longer occupies the entire fifth floor of the ConRoy Building which is named after it, and hasn't for many, many years.  So many, I don't know how many it is.  It actually came into formal existence in September 1917, just in time to occupy the building it had created, but how long it occupied space in the structure I'm unaware of.  It might have been a really long time, or it might not of.  No idea.

At any rate, the building always had tenants and other occupants and to a degree that was always the most significant aspect of its day to day existence.  Early on the Casper Star Tribune published from its basement as one of the tenants and, when it moved, Prairie Publishing (which is no longer around, but which I think would also be 100 this year but which only made it into the 1980s, I think) occupied that space.  Accounting firms and law firms had a presence in the building right from the very onset.  The descendants of two such entities that stretch back to the very early history of the building are still in it and other tenants have a presence that dates back up to fifty or more years.  Today the building is owned by some of its tenants, which shows an interesting degree of stability in the occupancy of the building.

Indeed, all three of these entities have shown that stability.  While they may no longer be owned by the original owners, they are all owned by people or business that had direct roles in the businesses and knew them well.  They all remain major local businesses a century down the road.  We can't say that about too many local enterprises.

Coffee

Coffee rationing began in on this day in 1942.

Smiling soldier.  I think he's drinking coffee.  I may have had to volunteer for service (which I likely would have done anyway) just in order to get a cup of coffee.

I would not have liked that.  Coffee roasters were already restricted to 75% of their war time prior average.  This resulted not due to fewer beans being produced during the war.  Not hardly. Rather, it resulted from the fact that this import crop is shipped to the continental United States

I think that's something that we tend not to ponder much. Coffee is a huge American drink, just like tea is a huge British drink, but in neither case do these consuming nations produce the elemental crop locally.  Given that, it's really amazing that either drink has such a hold in the consuming nation.  Indeed, by and large, with some slight exception, its not even grown in the Norther Hemisphere.  Kona coffee, grown in Hawaii, is the only coffee actually grown in the United States, in so far as I'm aware.

Just consider it for a moment.  The bean that is roasted to produce the crop is grown thousands of miles from the continental United States, roasted (often) in the US, and then packaged for sale here.  It's pretty amazing that there's more than a couple of varieties of it, frankly, or that its even affordable.

The Coffee Bearer, by John Frederick Lewis, Orientalist painter.  The same figure was a figure in his painting The Armenian Lady, whose servant she is portrayed as being.

As an aside, the second biggest coffee bean producer in the world (the first is Brazil) is. . . . Vietnam.

One more reason that not having prevailed in the Vietnam War is unfortunate, to say the least.

Well, anyhow, it's not cheap, as any coffee drinker will tell you. But it's not terribly pricey either.

And somehow, it's gone from a few basic brands to a wide variety of specialty brands and brews of every imaginable type and variety.

Coffee varieties have of course always existed.  Interestingly, one of the contenders for oldest coffee brand sold in the United States is Lion Brand which is Kona coffee.  Lion was first sold in the United States, as green coffee beans, in 1864.  Pretty darned early.  Hawaii wasn't an American territory at the time.  Folgers has them beat, however, dating back to 1850.  Hills Brothers dates to 1878.  Maxwell House to 1892.

Arbuckle Coffee, for some reason, was a huge item in the West in the late 1800s, showing how brands come and go.  I've never seen Arbuckles sold today, although it apparently still exists.  The owners of the company, John and Charles Arbuckle, owned a ranch near Cheyenne, although I don't know if that explains the connection with the West, or if perhaps that connection worked the other way around.

Now there's a zillion brands of coffee, many of which I don't recognize, and many which have pretensions towards coffee greatness.  This seems to have come about due to the rise of coffee houses, lead in a major way by Starbucks.  There's a Starbucks on every street corner now, it seems.  I'll be frank that I don't like their coffee much at all.  Too strong, and I like strong coffee.  Anyhow, the many specialty brews that Starbucks makes has spawned many various specialty coffees, or at least different coffees, to the extent to which a person can hardly keep track of it.  Over the weekend I was in City Brew, one of the local coffee houses, as well as Albertsons, where a Starbucks is located, and they both had "Christmas Blends".  How can there be a Christmas blend of coffee?

Chock full o' Nuts, a brand that, as the can indicates, has been around since 1932.  That was the date the company founder changed his nut shops into lunch counters, figuring that they were a better bet during the Great Depression.  I used to drink Chock full o' Nuts when I was in college but stopped as it seemed to have way too much caffeine.

Not that I'm complaining.  I frankly like the vast variety in coffee. And while I'm not inclined to buy something like Starbucks Free Range Easter Island Coffee Licked Gently By Baby Yaks, I will buy peculiar roasts just because the sound interesting. And I tend towards those dark roasts even if I sometimes wish I'd gotten something milder.

And it is interesting to see how coffee houses, following in Starbuck's wake, have popped up everywhere.  Just the other day I bought a sack of Boyer's coffee in the grocery store.  I was aware of Boyers, as they're a Denver brand with a Denver coffee house, but I wasn't aware that you could buy it up here.  Quasi local, as it were.  A great Denver coffee, with some good coffee houses is Dazbog, which plays up the Russian origin of the founders.  One of the independent local coffee houses here sells Dazbog, and its good stuff.  City Brew has outlets here in town, and apparently they're originally from Montana, which they play up with some of their roasts, even though we all know coffee isn't grown in Montana.  I'm told that Blue Ridge Coffee, another local coffee house that sells sacked coffee, is purely local.

And that doesn't cover every coffee house in town.  Quite the evolution when just a decade or so ago you'd have had to go to a conventional cafe and just have ordered the house coffee, whatever that was.  No special roasts or blends.  Just a up of joe.

And I prefer to buy from the locals as well.  Subsidarity in action, I suppose.  Indeed, I'm not told that I can buy Mystic Monk sacked coffee at the Parish Office, and I likely will.

In the grocery store, for the most part, you bought the major brands.  Most of those are still around,  but now you can buy any number of major and minor brands.  I even have a coffee grinder, although that certainly isn't a new invention, although most of the time I buy pre ground coffee.  Indeed, I got the grinder as I bought whole bean coffee by mistake, which I've done from time to time, and I don't want to waste it.

Using coffee grinders, of course, is an odd return to the past. Everything old is new again, sort of.  But the huge variety, of course, is wholly new.

Industrial strength coffee grinder.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Related threads:

Coffee

The Science Behind Coffee and Why it's Actually Good for Your Health

Blog Mirror. A Hundred Years Ago: Keep Coffee Warm with a Thermos

National Coffee Day.

The Joy of Field Rations: Roasting Coffee in the Field

Wet Subsidariaty

Distributism can be found, on occasion, in odd places.

I went to the grocery store over a couple of weekends ago (I started this post a couple of weeks back) and, on the way out, stopped in the liquor store.  There was a big display saying "buy local", and a huge selection of various alcoholic products made in Wyoming.

I was, quite frankly, quite surprised. There are now a lot of them.  As recently as a couple of decades back there were none.  Now there are several breweries and a couple of distilleries.  Indeed, there's one distillery here in town and there's rumors (I haven't followed it) that a second one will soon be here.  And there's going to be a couple of microbreweries here in town soon, something that has occurred all around the state.

According to Wikipedia we now have twenty three Wyoming breweries, and my guess is that list is probably a little light.  I don't how many distilleries we have but it'll soon be at least four and my guess is that there are more than that.  And there are even apparently a handful of wineries.

I'm not sure what all this says, but it is quite a reversal of the trend towards bigger and bigger just a couple of decades ago. Consolidation is still going on in the alcohol industry on the big end, with some giants seemingly buying up everything. But down on the consumer end the local is really making a comeback.

I like the trend.  I'm not going to go out and buy a bunch of local whiskey or wine, but I'll sample the beer, and I like that this is very local.  Subsidiarity in action, if wet.

Distributism at work . . .

Patrons lining up about two hours early for record store on Independent Record Store Day.

Quite a few more would be there before the store opened.

Admitting Defeat

After complaining about it here, but doing nothing about it, except to take one last look around yesterday, I finally admitted defeat and ordered a watch band and dress shoelaces over the net.

Seriously, should this be the way thing are in a mid sized city?

Sigh.

And now, let's add watch bands. . . .

to the list of things it is impossible to buy here.

Amazing.

I sued to buy them at the jewelry store downtown, where I also bought batteries.  It's now closed down, however, the owner having retired. The other jewelry store does not carry watch bands.

So, in addition to shoes and shoelaces, I have to now find replacement watchbands on the net.

One more service that the modern big box age has made impossible to find in locations that aren't served by a large city.  Sure, I could find any hip trendy kids shoe going, but dress laces, well, as recently noted, forget it.  And replace a watch band. . .hit the net, i guess.

Scenes of Child Labor in Boston, 1917.

Very young newsie.

On this day, in 1917.

Street vendor

 

Selling oranges

  Selling celery

 Selling balloons.

Selling bananas.

Selling firewood.

Selling fruit.

Collecting bags to be mended.

Selling lemons

Selling lemons.

Selling lemons.

Selling lemons.