Laura Hillenbrand
Author of Seabiscuit: An American Legend.
When I was a child, we lived in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and on weekends and in the summer we'd go to our family farm next to the Antietam battlefield. It was a 90-minute drive in a station wagon with no air-conditioning -- four kids and two collies, everyone sweltering and carsick. And all the way up the kids would fantasize about stopping at Main's Ice Cream.
Main's was in an excruciatingly tiny place called Middletown, Md. There was a little red and green neon sign on Alternate 40 that told you it was there, and still you almost missed it. You walked down a dark, meandering alley and found yourself in an incredibly ratty place: warped wooden floors, no decor, no seats -- and the best ice cream you've ever eaten. They had very few flavors, but it was all handmade on the premises. I always got a double dip of chocolate; my sister got sherbet. Then we'd climb back in the car and, because we had our windows down, there would be a vortex of collie hair whirling around, and we'd all have to lick our ice cream as fast as we could to prevent the dog hair from sticking to it. Main's was a huge part of my childhood.
Clay Reynolds
Western novelist, scholar, and critic. His book Franklin's Crossing was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Punkin Center was located on the southeast corner of a remote crossroads in the West Texas county of Hardeman. The roads themselves were arrow straight and carelessly paved with that curious gray-white concrete you associate with old movies and what little remains of the pre-World War II highway system. The stripes were fuzzy orange, and the cracked surfaces were streaked with black tar patches halfheartedly applied to cover the potholes. Once, the roads probably came or went somewhere important, but other thoroughfares replaced them long before I was born. Now they were merely country roads leading nowhere except to Punkin Center. And that was good enough.
The store itself was a kind of everything place. On one side were antique gasoline pumps with mechanical handles that required an attendant to fill a glass tank on top. There was no longer an attendant. Nor was there gasoline, not since before the war, when coupons were hard to get and good help even harder. The driveway was mostly gravel, but it used to be just dirt -- mud when it rained. In those days in West Texas, it never rained.
There was a long covered porch that ran the width of the front. On one side it was anchored by a huge chinaberry tree, on the other by a towering mimosa. Along the planked floor of the porch, benches, wooden rocking chairs, and old metal lawn chairs lined up, facing out to the dusty fields. Beneath flyspecked sash windows and an array of rusting metal advertisements stood a row of block-ice coolers. In each was the excuse for the stop. "We'll get us a cold Delaware Punch," my grandfather would say as he piloted my grandmother's old Model A into the dusty lot. We'd wait for it to quit dieseling so he could set the brake, then we'd climb the splintery wooden steps -- a threat to barefoot boys -- and sit a spell in the shade, dripping bottles of frigid liquid confection in our hands.
Inside the store were shadows and smells: leather and fresh denim, gun oil, grease, and the distinctive odor of mothballs and linseed. The walls were hung with utensils for field and kitchen, and the shelves were stocked with old-fashioned hand tools and cooking gimcracks. In the back, gathering dust in the darkness, were groceries. Nothing fancy. Breakfast cereals hot and cold, bread, flour and meal, canned vegetables and fruits, cans of lard and syrups, crackers and cookies, and one small rack of nickel candy bars -- Baby Ruths, Butterfingers, 3 Musketeers, Cherry Mashes, and Zeros -- that I was forbidden to touch and knew better than to ask for.
A long counter ran down one side of the store, and on top was a long roll of brown paper and a spindle of string for wrapping bulky purchases. At one end, a massive cash register rang with the sharpness of a rifle report when a sale was made. The iceboxes, where the dairy produce reposed, were the only concession to modernity. H-bombs and Sputnik were of far less consequence than gone-over cottage cheese.
After making our manners with Mr. Lazare, the storekeeper, who always wore a huge white apron, white shirt, and tie -- and who never seemed glad to see anyone -- we'd sit outside on the rusty lawn chairs. Around us sat men in bleach-faded overalls and blue and brown work shirts starched so stiff you could cut yourself on a crease. They held Coke and Dr Pepper and 7 Up bottles in leather-callused hands. Now and then one would sigh or curse mildly, roll a cigarette, or fire a cheap cigar. Some worked plugs and expertly spat their amber juice onto the red-ant beds that formed large bald circles in the gravel of the drive. Few spoke more than a few words. The cotton wasn't going to make it again this year. The wheat planted last summer had been left in the fields to feed cattle. A mule was better than a horse for work in the sun, but milkers went sour in hot weather. There was nothing to do about chickens that wouldn't lay but to eat them, and they were too tough to fry, had to be boiled.
I was barefoot and in short pants, sunburned and bored, the only kid in sight. I knew better than to talk, or even to move. My grandfather never scolded me, but I always feared he might. So I sat there and was quietly proud of him -- my grandfather, who always wore a gray felt Stetson, whose shirt was always white and khakis were always clean, whose boots laced high on his ankle because, he once told me, that's what real cowboys wore.
Punkin Center is gone now and so are all the other stores like it, places that never knew neon signs and air-conditioning, that sold only what you needed, not what you wanted, but never tempted you beyond your means. Nearly 50 years later there's not a timber or a nail left to remind anyone that this was once a place where men driven hopeless by drought and bad luck could sit wordl
