Class Story 092 Grocery Stores Willow Glen 1948-58

 

The mom and pop "Busy Bee" on Lincoln and Byerley Avenues

This was a tiny little place I visited 2 or 3 times a week that first summer of 1948 while we lived on Johnathan Avenue.  It also became a half-way stopping off point on my way home from school during my first year at Willow Glen Elementary, 5th grade, 1948-49. 

My parents never shopped here except maybe just to take a walk and buy some popsicles.  However, my Dad became impressed when my mother sent him out that 1st Thanksgiving (1948) to get some things to put in her dinner.  Every place was closed up tight.  My sister and I pleaded, "Just knock on the door and the Busy Bee people will answer," and they did.  We would walk the six short blocks to this place to get candy and ice cream.  If we had the money, we would put a penny in the gum ball machine, gambling that we would get the spotted ball.  There was one inside the round globe somewhere and if we got it, then we could trade it in for a 5¢ candy bar.  I'm sure that this is the fore-runner of my sister's continued addiction to gambling at the penny slots in South Shore.

The store was tiny, just the downstairs of a house converted for use as a store.  They still lived upstairs.  It was mostly dry goods, one cooler cabinet, and a small selection of fruit and vegetables, but not as much as the fruit & vegetable trucks that would come around to every street back in those days.  The building is still there but it is a real estate office these days.

They did have a beer and wine license and I recall that I started going there again years after we'd moved away from Johnathan Avenue because they could be tricked into selling beer to minors.

A proper grocery store on Lincoln Avenue and Malone Road

Only I was allowed to walk down Malone, not my sister.  There was a lot on new construction on the south side of the street.  The land there was either freshly bull-dozed or still in orchards.  Malone was also a main thoroughfare and my mother worried that Patty would be hit by a car if she was too close to the road or bull-dozed if she were too far from the road.

But this is where she did her local shopping.  My mother didn't drive, so this store was her primary source of fresh food; meats, dairy, and vegetables.  This place had a butcher's counter and a whole side of the store in fruits and vegetables.  You could get magazines and even a few comic books.

It wasn't much further away from our Fairview house, so she continued to go there every now and then, but by 1949, my parents had discovered economy-sized quantity buying.

The fruit & vegetable trucks

As I was growing up, there was a tradition of door-to-door peddlers of everything one could want or need: the daily milk man of course, everyone has heard about the days when you got glass bottles with a foil or cardboard cap.  When there was snow, the cream at the top would push out and we got an ice cream cone of sorts.  The iron-monger was just a scrap collector but it was a great way to get rid of things that no longer worked.  To an 11 year old boy, this man always had a fabulous collection of memorabilia.  The knife sharpener was indispensable because he knew his trade.  He could sharpen scissors, the lawn-mower blades, and drill bits as well as knives.  My mother always had a box set out in the garage for when he next came.  The ice cream truck continues to this day, but I no longer see twenty kids of all ages gathered around to get popsicles and maybe a pint for mom for dinner.  In Detroit, we were very poor and made our own ice cream in the basement.  Here in San Jose, I felt affluent because I could spend 10¢ on a drumstick.  The Fuller Brush man and the Avon lady were generic terms covering a wide variety of sales.  Clothing, appliances, cosmetics, nostrums, even photographers and all sorts of "handy" gadgets, still parodied in Dagwood Bumstead cartoons.  And of course there were us kids ourselves, who went door-to-door collecting old newspapers or scrap metals, or selling magazine subscriptions for fund raising drives at school.  The transition to the fifties saw the loss of some wonderful private institutions, one of which was the produce guy who came to our Fairview cul-de-sac every Tuesday and Friday afternoon.  When I was home, I would love to go out to that truck just to see all the variety of fresh produce that was available.  My mother would be too busy sometimes and just send me out with a list or if it was short, just tell me: 2 cantaloupes, 4 apples, a head of lettuce, and a bunch of carrots.

Besides buying produce, this was a time to gossip with the neighbors.  Every family on our 9 house, key-hole shaped street would send out a representative, at least to get a head of lettuce.  "Helen and Debbie are going to miss Camp Fire Girls this afternoon.  Tell your sister and your mother."  The produce man would add in the gossip of the surrounding neighborhood.  "The Gagliardi's over on Roycott Way have sold another 500 acres of orchard land to the developers.  Can you believe it, $400 an acre!"  "Down at the end of Cherry, the Ferrante's oldest daughter had her wedding last week."

It was a cash and carry business and thus one that probably didn't pay a lot of taxes, if any, no sales tax in those days.  The merchants were what we would today call independent contractors.  Farmer's markets to some extent satisfy the need for fresh, wholesome produce, especially with their home-delivery options.  But we'll never be able to return to the almost pioneering aspect where, if a man could own a truck, he could support a family from the buying and selling of produce.  Regulations, taxes, health inspections are all too prohibitive these days.  Somehow we lived through it without all those government things.

The Willow Glen Creamery on Lincoln

I'm not sure that people even know what a creamery is anymore.  I guess that reflects my age.  I ran across this picture in a 1977 book, "Old Willow Glen."  It stated that this had been, "the Village Pizza since the early 1950's.  Prior to that it was the Willow Glen Creamery … .."  The only time I remember going in there was on the way back from a week-end of back-breaking spading and shoveling out at a one-acre plot of Monsanto Chemical's, north of town.  I think it was Steve Brown's dad that got us four seventh graders (1951) the job, for $40 bucks each, for the week-end ($2.50 an hour).  The fourth dad picked us up on the Sunday afternoon.  He worked for Carnation Milk, who supplied this creamery and right now I can't remember the name of the creamery, Towner's or Tuttle's maybe.  We stopped in there on the way home and he drew in some favors.  We all got what ever we wanted.  I had a vanilla milkshake.  Actually, now that I have been a father many times over, he just paid for it under the table and let us think that he was calling in a favor.

Driving to East Santa Clara and 15th Streets

Supermarkets were a new post-war thing back in 1948 and our family made a regular Saturday ritual out of visiting one of the firsts in San Jose although it was across town.  The selections were paltry by today's standards but you could get everything you needed all in one place rather than having to go to a butcher's, a baker's, a dry goods store, and a produce outlet.  Furthermore, the prices were cheaper and you could buy economy-sized packages of things.

I think that my sister and I stayed in the car most of the time.  We were probably too much to handle going up and down the aisles.  As the years passed by, Bettencourt's became our regular place because it was a shorter drive; eventually The Trio Market opened up in Willow Glen and we could walk.

The "country" chicken ranch out in Sunnyvale

As everyone, us included, committed more and more to supermarket shopping, we began to miss that taste of freshness which was missing from packaged and frozen foods.  And although no one likes to discuss it, there were chemicals and additives tossed in with those things.  Also to get products to market in a supermarket operation, things had to be picked green and slaughtered early.

My parents found a little country farm/ranch out on the Sunnyvale-Saratoga Road at Homestead, almost into Sunnyvale.  The chickens were out roaming all over the yard as we drove in.  The farmer and his wife had a standing joke for the kids who visited, "You just go catch the ones you want and we'll butcher them for you."  My mother was there to get three plucked fresh chickens and a flat of fresh eggs.  We grew up on a high cholesterol breakfast: eggs, bacon, toast with butter and whole milk.  It was an airing out for us kids as well as a shopping stop.  My sister and I loved running all over the place.

The frozen meat lockers

Another trick for getting meat a bit cheaper and being able to select exactly what you wanted was the concept of buying half a steer, usually with a friend taking the other half, and having the Sunday butchers cut it up and package it for you.  In those days, butcher shops were legally closed on Sundays and so to make a little extra on the side, some butchers would leave their union card at home and work the day for one of these wholesale packing and storage companies.  The frozen meat lockers over on Coleman Avenue off West Julian Street just past the RR underpass was where we had a locker.  This is while we were still in the Fairview house.  When we moved to Glen Dell, we bought a freezer of our own.

My Dad and I would drive over there to Coleman every two weeks to load up on steaks and chops, bacon and stew meat.  I used this place myself in later years when Gisela and I set up housekeeping in San Jose.  One of the offices on the second floor at Coleman was the weekly meeting place of my Christian Science Youth group, presumably donated by the owners for our use.

The mom and pop on Minnesota at Cherry

In my early teen years, at Glen Dell, as a family we were still hooked on neighborhood Mom and Pop grocery stores.  Now we were only one block away, so Petie could run over for a tomato or whatever.  My mother still used her wire mesh tote basket, sort of like a stewardess's bag on wheels.  That was invaluable for six block trips with three bags of groceries, but we didn't do many of those anymore.  Still it came in handy for the multi-functional shopping trips.  We went down Minnesota to the Library, then the drug store at the corner of Lincoln, cutting across Hutton's filling station.  A stop at the bakery for a treat and a pie or a dozen cookies and another brief moment at The Pronto Pup for a comic book, then maybe a stop at Bergman's department store for notions, then back up by way of Brace Avenue just for the variety.

The Mom & Pop store on Minnesota tried to keep up with the times: more organized aisles, multiple checkout counters, competitive pricing, but nothing was going to beat the variety and cost of a Safeway.

Lucca's on Lincoln across from the Garden Theater

The first one to hit our Lincoln Avenue strip was right across from the Garden theater.  Now we were getting to Safeway size.  They had everything and at cheap prices.  But my parent's were successful by this time and did their main Saturday shopping at The Trio Market on Minnesota and Lincoln.

Rocci's on Lincoln between Coe and Glen Eyrie Avenues

The Trio Market at 1331 Lincoln was known as Rocci's because the owner & manager was Rocci Bengiveno.  His son was a buddy of mine, Dick, at Willow Glen Elementary.  My parents switched to Rocci's, primarily because of the quality of food that he sold.  Also I think because my mother could make the trip there on her own, with her basket.  Later Rocci moved, twice, once to the corner of Minnesota at 1396 Lincoln, then down to where the Glen Food Center was at 1202 Lincoln at the far end of Lincoln.  Then my mother had to go by the back streets: straight down Cherry, across Willow to Glen Eyrie and then right to Lincoln about three blocks down.  Before the move up to Coe, Rocci's had been a competitor with La Villa.  But the rent was high in "downtown" Willow Glen and Rocci's was forced to move out.

These days Rocci's is Spanish-speaking only and has hit bottom on the food quality scale.  This says a lot about the changing texture of Willow Glen.  For a short, but significant stint, I moved back here to Willow Glen, with a family, thirty years later.  The house prices had gone from $25,000 to $500,000, but that surprises no one these days.  Sue and I, at times, were both rich and poor.  When poor, we shopped at "Food-for-Less" and found weevils in our rice.  When rich, I could treat Marisol's friends to my favorite spaghetti & meat balls from La Villa.  People who lived in our neighborhood no longer shopped in our neighborhood.  They shopped in the malls and they worked in the malls.  In the sixties when I was married to Gisela and we were raising Tommy and Patti, we found the malls to be of great convenience.  After breaking the habit, by living in England for ten years, Sue, Marisol and I just tolerated the malls.  These days, the malls sicken me; such a waste of energy and resources.

I'm too much of a businessman to deny the potency of the malls, but I'm also too much of a romantic not to regret the passing of that Victorian age of self-less service.

La Villa Italian on Lincoln

Which brings me to La Villa.  La Villa, to this day,  and some would argue,  even more so in this day, provides a singularly unique Italian pasta experience.

At some point while we were on Glen Dell, we discovered take-out at La Villa.  Spaghetti and meat balls from La Villa became my favorite, and still is.  This was perfect for nights when my parents were going out and my sister and I had to fend for ourselves.