Before Dale Cohoon left Kroger’s on the Park Square to open Dale’s Food Store on the west side of Miller Street, Clinton Goss, father of Jackson Goss, who recently donated $200,000 to the city of Paola for renovations, had operated Clint’s Market during the 1950s in the same little Miller Street building. Goss had also managed the Kroger Grocery Store.

“I remember the bandstand well,” Jackson said. “Having worked on the Square when my dad ran Kroger’s, the bandstand was always in view. I played many a band concert in the bandstand. Those are good memories. This is why I wanted to see the bandstand and fountain restored.

“Mom and Pop ran more of a delicatessen type of operation with good lunch meats.”

Erika Schmidt remembers both stores on Miller Street because Erika and her husband bought their house and thus the store on the west side of Miller Street run by the Cohoons.

“The McCluskey store always was the nicer of the two, but then the store in our yard had been standing empty for quite a while when we bought the property,” Erika said. “The Cohoons had a kitchen in the back and bedrooms upstairs. … After they moved across the street, the store remained empty, and we eventually had to tear it down in 1965.”

As a child, Helen Gilliland frequented the McCluskey Store. She also went with her grandmother to the Wilson’s Grocery, which was located in the northwestern part of town.

“It was run by a very nice African-American couple, and they sold groceries and had a small thrift shop,” Helen said.

When older, Gilliland’s family moved to South Mulberry Street, and she shopped at Rosnick’s Grocery, where, she said, “They had the best penny candy or two-for-a-penny candy. There was gummy candy shaped as money, the fruit-flavored gum with two sticks to a pack, the BB Bat suckers in vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and banana.”

Shelves behind a glass display case she explained were filled with candy and luncheon meats. Helen could go on and on talking about the red licorice, the cinnamon bears, kit candy.

“I can just taste them now,” she said.

Helen describes the small family stores as friendly.

“They never rushed you to make up your mind about what you wanted,” she said.

Helen explained how the little stores carried luncheon meat by the slice or the pound, along with cheeses, bread, crackers and canned goods. She was especially fond of pop in Coca-Cola coolers with the slide-open tops, such as the one at the McCluskey later Cohoon store.

“The Coca-Cola cooler was filled,” Helen said, “with cold ice water that you would have to stick your hand down in to get the flavor you wanted.”

There was black cherry, red soda, grape, orange, root beer and cola.

There is no comparison to the convenience stores of today, Helen stressed.

“They had a better atmosphere and more appeal,” she said. “They weren’t a fast-food place or a gas station.”

One person with first hand appreciation for the little stores, especially the McCluskey Store and then Dale’s Food Store, is Roger Shipman, who lived in an apartment above the store for a few years.

“I remember a lot of girls from the Ursuline Academy hanging around,” he said. “There were a lot of kids with bikes on the stoop and in the street. It was a place for them to hang out and visit.”

Roger still misses Nick Quimby, an elderly gentleman who lived down the alley across from the store.

“Quimby,” he said, “was a regular at the store. I can still see him walking up the alley to the store. Nick was a World War I Air Force veteran. He had a cigar box full of fascinating airplane name tags from each kind of airplane motor.”

Roger worked at Buy Rite, so he knew the delivery drivers from the bread company. They also made deliveries to the McCluskey Store.

“All I had to do was go downstairs when they arrived, and they gave me rolls I would eat for breakfast,” he said. “And you got to know all the route guys coming and going. This included milk and bread.”

Both Harold Achey and Erika Schmidt said the little stores provided lines of credit, whereas the bigger stores did not.

“The little stores were more expensive than the bigger groceries, but the little stores offered credit, so this kept many families coming back week after week,” Erika said.

“We set up a tab,” Harold said, “and come Saturday night, they came by to settle up. Basically, we provided a neighborhood function.”

But as Erika said, “It was nice how the little stores provided this charging service, but people couldn’t get ahead this way. Each week, they had to charge all over again for more expensive goods than in the bigger stores.”

Before the Acheys turned their house into a store, Verla worked for an elderly lady who ran a store on Agate Street.

“I must have been in the sixth grade. I wasn’t even in junior high yet, and this Mrs. Wilcox would leave me alone to run the store,” Verla said. “I would slice meat and kept busy. But why would she allow such a young child to run the store?”

Another reason for the need for little stores came to light with a comment by Sally Poff Diemer of Southern California, who once worked in Sutherland’s Market on the Square’s north side.

“I worked for Sutherland’s when I was around 12 years old,” she said. “I took phone orders and filled them. I also helped bag groceries. We lived on the south side of Peoria and didn’t own a car until I was 16 or 17, so we walked everywhere.”

Diemer came from a family of six children, and keeping them fed was a challenge, she said.

“We had a large garden, but she had to buy staples, and since we used Sutherland’s, we also had a charge account,” Sally said. “It seemed my dad was always paying on that bill.”

One time, Sally’s mother sent her to the store for bread, when the bread company was on strike. The only bread left was a loaf of cinnamon so that is what she bought.

“After all, we didn’t have cell phones then. I couldn’t call home,” she said. “I made the decision to buy the cinnamon bread. On the way home, it smelled so good that I just had to have a piece. Well, one piece led to another and by the time I got home, there wasn’t much left. I still remember how mad my mother was. It was so much fun growing up in that small town, but I didn’t really realize it until I left.”

Don Keith, who lives in Belle Vista, Ark., felt that the one-car family helped maintain the need for the little stores. And like Sally’s, the one-car or no-car family was the norm through the Depression and into the 1940s and 1950s.

“The one-car families made the little groceries that much more important,” Keith said.

Jo Ann Cardwell agreed with the one-car idea to a point up to the 1950s, but said, “Later most people seemed to like the fresh-sliced lunch meat that Mother and Dad always had.”

How many local markets existed at any one time is anyone’s guess. But memories remain.

Don Keith said, “It was a real treat to walk by the Little Red Store (corners of Chippewa and Walnut) to get a fudge bar for five cents either going or coming from South School.”

Keith added, “Although at various times there were as many as six to seven grocery stores around the Square, the neighborhood stores still did business.”

Something truly special went missing from the American landscape, when Dale’s Food Store closed in 1983, the last of its kind in Paola. My family had become accustomed to running over for milk, bread and bottles of pop from the Coke cooler. The last item I had run over for had been mayonnaise. It, by the way, came in a glass jar, not plastic.

By the time Alletta Cohoon was gone and the little store had closed for good, we found out just how much Alta McCluskey, one of the last of the little store owners, really missed her store. She missed seeing people and keeping up with the news in the neighborhood. She also missed the girls from Ursuline Academy.

“They came in acting like they wanted to buy candy and pop,” she said. “But what they really did was sneak out the back door to meet up with boyfriends to go riding around.”

Edith Nichols did not recall that happening, but she did say, “I know the girls at Ursuline, who boarded during the year, really looked at Alta’s store as being a real treat after school. But for everybody else, it was the convenience and friendliness of the stores that made them popular. That and you just became friends with the storekeepers.”

Erika Schmidt said it best when describing Alta McCluskey’s storekeeper philosophy.

“Alta didn’t care if someone paid a penny or a dollar or more,” Erika said. “She treated everybody the same with a genuine smile. She liked everybody.”

After Alletta closed her store for good in 1983 to return to Oklahoma with her daughter, Jo Ann, and son, Dale, my wife and our children continued to sit out next to the little store with Alta and Erika Schmidt and passersby from the neighborhood. Other people drove over from nearby neighborhoods or walked over, just to sit out with Alta McCluskey. A few years later, at age 95, Alta passed away, and with that any real connection to the past and those little stores departed with her.

— Thank you to the members of the online group known as the BSers for your memory and help with this story.

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