Auto Known Better Young’s store

By Rim Vining

Before you could drive you had a bicycle and before you were old enough to frequent your local Cheers establishment for a frosty pint you had a local store. No matter where you lived it was never too far to ride to a neighborhood store for candy and ice cream or the pack of cigarettes you were "buying for your mother."

Young's Store was a bike ride away from our house in Sudbury, Mass. Wooden floors, yard long licorice for a penny and Fireballs in a glass jar. I'm sure there were pickled eggs and pig's feet in jars as well but my palate was not yet fully developed. My first long distance ride to the store was on my 16" solid tire handme-down bike, orange and white. Fascinating freedom that couldn't have lasted more than two miles. That Christmas in Massachusetts, before we moved back to Virginia, I got a new 20" Raleigh Mountie with real air in the tires… and three feet of snow on the ground! Southerners… like a sled in Georgia.

We moved to Hartwood when there was only one stop light on Route 17 between the Falmouth light and Warrenton so the eight miles to town took about ten minutes. We got here just in time to enjoy all the local "Young's Stores" before they met their demise. I personally think local Mom and Pop stores deserve their own time signatures in some biblical sense with monikers like B.C. and A.D. I'm trying to work it out with pre-WAWA and Sheetz vs. the end of time days. Like BTM - Before the Mall.

We frequented Hartwood Grocery on Rte 17 where you got hand-dipped ice cream from Jeff or Mike and they stocked your favorite beer! It was known as 'Kathy Beer' in the store so friends could stop by and pick her up a six-pack on the way to the house… "Just ask for it by name!" Come to find out Jeff and Mike are from

Tryon, NC where my grandparents lived and Jeff did yard work for my grandfather as a kid. Hence my favorite phrase, "Only a hundred people in the world… the rest is done with mirrors!"

My wife Kathy grew up with a local store as well, Thelma's. It was about a mile from her parent's house in Great Falls, Virginia and good for about 20 cents worth of pop bottles collected along the way. Six-ounce shorts were worth 2-cents and twelve-ounce 'tall-boys' a nickel. Good money in the day. Thelma made her own ice cream and everyone had their favorite flavor and her husband had an Amphicar! Drive it on the road and then straight into the lake for a boating adventure… just pray the door seals hold or it sinks like a car in water.

But beware! When you're young on a bike and no one is expecting you home until dinner or dark, danger lurks. Again, during our time in Massachusetts, one of my older brothers and a friend rode far enough to find themselves in a neighboring town hungry and broke and decided that purloining a few Twinkies might solve their dilemma. Imagine a world where two young males are popped for a Twinkie heist, ride home in a patrol car with their bikes in the trunk and are released into the custody of their older sibling who was all of thirteen.

Yes, the terror of "waiting until your father gets home…"

Here's to M&P, Hartwood Grocery, Stern's Store, Johnny's Grocery and all the other's and may Mountain View Market continue to thrive. Really cold beer!

~autoknownbetter @ gmail.com

Rim Vining, humorist, friend and a devoted community volunteer