Not long after our son was born in Key West, my wife, Janet got homesick for our native Illinois. So … we returned driving the somewhat beat up pickup truck we bought ourselves from the wedding gift money six years earlier. I looked for a cooking job but while we waited for that my mother bought a small liquor store in a town of about 2,000. We were happy thinking that we would make money hand over fist in that business and soon be able to open our own small restaurant. The inevitable arrival of the long, dark northern winter hit us and by January we were in white out winter days with bleak nights arriving by 4:30 p.m. hitting us. We were miles from nowhere. It was years well before a Grub Hub would exist to deliver anything from sushi to chateaubriand. We got hungry passing the long hours with a cash register that wasn’t exactly humming. And we had a young child who sometimes was with us as in that liquor store. We were young parents and his grandmother was at her job. We had to be at ‘last resort’ levels to do it … but we occasionally hit up the frozen pizzas we had in the small ‘grocery area’ of our liquor. The kinds of foods we stocked didn’t get much past canned pinto bean dip, Slim Jims and tortilla chips, things a working class guy might devour in his truck with a can of beer on his way home … before dinner with wife and family.
I remember that liquor store very well. I lived in Waconda on Bangs Lake. The store was on my way home on Rt. 176. It was a very well stocked liquor store. I was never disappointed with your selections. Great pricies too.
Those were the days.
Thanks for the kind words!