"Hello, Wisconsin!"

Hangin' out/Down the street/The same old thing/We did last week./
Not a thing to do/But talk to you/Whoa . . . yeah/
Hello, Wisconsin!

My youngest nephew and I share two PopCult areas, one in punchlines and laughing together over Red, Fez (arbitrary acronym for foreign exchange student), and the others of That 70s Show, whose theme song I've opened with, ending in the title, shouted the first season by Hyde (Danny Masterson), the second season by the lead singer Robin Zander of Cheap Trick, whose song it is. I'm also inclined to be a Packers-Favre fan to the extent that I deliberately drove through Green Bay past Lambeau Field on one of my trips years ago. Jared and I don't often agree on pro football teams and quarterbacks, though this year we've both liked the resurrected Steelers. The other area we share is movie addiction so that I ask him when I can't remember who played a certain role, for he's blessed with his father's good memory and apparently loves movies, albeit not duplicating my once-upon-a-time planning my Saturdays so I could go to at least three, if not four or five, movies in a row during my teaching years. With my dented, bent-up memory chips from too many years of court reporting overload of too many names-places-events-things, I need his help. All of which means a few helicopter flights still fly between the more popular southern rim and my favored less-visited-but-more-scenic northern rim of the Grand Canyon Generation Gap.
He is also the youngest of the family to grow up in my hometown, going to school, however, in Bloomfield, my parents' hometown, east of Center. So we're at two ends of sharply changed times, his Center retaining almost nothing of mine, little of my December 10th entry's business catalog left, a huge disappointment to centennial celebrants who hadn't been back in years. Which is why, in the bright glowing arc of the annual good-cheer comet from Christmas through New Year's, I'd also like to re-create a bit of town Christmas to balance Christmas on the farm, centering on Freddie's Store, kind of Christmas Central for my childhood. All our stores were what city people call mom-and-pop stores, and I have already said in the December 10th entry that two of our three grocery stores were precursors of the supermarkets we shop in now. They were the middle generation in the lineage from country stores to our lavish present versions with their restaurants, floral shops, delicatessens circled around the excess of groceries and necessary amenities.
No one sees a country store now unless it's at some tourist town, a kind of museum piece for the Amana Colonies or the fine collection of crafts at the Ozark Folk Center State Park, Mountain View, Arkansas. Grandma's sister and brother-in-law, [Great] Aunt Nellie and Uncle John Feddersen, ran briefly the one at the corner of the Peters homestead Up West, across the road from the rural schoolhouse used also for holiday programs, card parties, community picnics, the two together called Mariaville. I have only a wispy memory of being in their store--I think they went bankrupt--and recall much better the ones in Knox County extant to my adulthood, isolated store buildings run by couples living in the back, usually with one or two gas pumps in front, at rural spots like Venus, Middlebranch, Pischelville, and the six-mile corner east of Bloomfield. These are the kind in period movies, like Horace Vandergelder's early Yonkers version in Hello, Dolly!, several westerns, any New England movie where old geezers like me sit around the cracker barrel.
More specifically, Freddie's was our most popular, the best-stocked, and in direct eyesight a half block from our house, on the north end of the main block of businesses on the west side of Main Street, Mary's Cafe next door. In fact, before the superintendent's house was moved in and blocked the view, Mom could look out her kitchen window to see if Freddie was still open when we needed something for supper. Down where the post office is now, Ellingson's big white cavernous room became the Holmses' and had a different set-up and character entirely, including a large section for bolts of cloth, many sewing supplies, and patterns. Weaver's, a half block south of Freddie's, was about a third the size of these two supermarkets and had only groceries, also catering to Indians to make up for the trade lost to the other two.
I do remember when Freddie's was actually two earlier stores with a dividing wall in the long building, but I recall from very early boyhood only the northern room run by Holsts, a hardware, I think, not the southern half, said to be the town's earliest grocery store run by Floyd Weaver's grandfather. This original division left two main doors to Freddie's when that wall was taken out, the north door with, just inside, fresh produce by the large northeast corner windows, upon entry a long shelf island running the width of the room, wall shelves running along both ends and the back of the big store. The ceiling was floridly stamped tin, later painted, the creaking wooden floors stained dark by sweeping compound, the kind Dad also used, an oiled sawdust in small barrels. The southern door had next to it by its windows school supplies and then a number of counters with mostly nonfood items such as overalls, nylons, handkerchiefs, gifts, gloves, caps. Also by the southern door later were deep freezes for ice cream and frozen products, as well as a bench where the elderly or farm women nursing infants would sit. Huge awnings rolled down every morning, up every night, shaded the windowed east front. Near the north door were the small service counters, with the cash register, candy bars, and cigarettes secure behind whoever waited on you, Freddie, his wife, the hired girl, later one of their sons. Under the front counter was a fascinating big metal contraption like an oversized book of heavy tin pages opening from the top, with mousetrap holders for the accumulating credit slips for the different accounts. Freddie's wife, Lois, the town's record nonstop talker, would write down what Mom sent me uptown for--yeah, uptown--give me the carbon copy, and put the original in our trap, most accounts like ours to be paid monthly. At least for what I wasn't given the money to pay directly.
In front of this service-counter area was a large open floor space with a big furnace grate, like a very small dance floor when one came in the north door. On its west side was the meat case, behind which Freddie stood, grinding his own hamburger, cutting off steaks or chops as you requested, slicing up the cylinders of lunch meat such as minced ham or summer sausage, ladling out liver or, at Christmas, fresh oysters. That was also where the large roll of butcher paper for wrapping and his desk for business paperwork were, behind the meat case.
The store had two back rooms, the main one on the northwest corner behind the meat case, with its own outside door, where Freddie had a big scales, weighed and tested milk and cream, and candled the eggs that farmers brought in. We ate fresh for sure then. (Center had Mathine's dairy farm on the north edge of town which delivered milk in glass bottles, but that was only in my very earliest years, up to the age of 3 or 4. Cooks lived there in my years, Kettelsens now.) I was fascinated with the egg candler, a device like a tin lantern nailed to a door frame, the side toward Freddie with an egg-sized hole against which he would hold an egg and could tell its freshness by the illuminated yolk. The other back room on the south was a storeroom we were not allowed in. That was where the kerosene for our lamps was, in the other clutter.
I can still tell you where different items were. The breakfast food was on the northern wall shelves with most of the canned vegetables. The sugar, Jello, and spices were on the shelf island running west of the north door. Crisco was low on the wall shelf by the northern back room door. The boxes of kitchen matches, the big wooden kind for our bottle-gas stove, were on the wall shelf by the southern back room door. Kotex was hidden, already wrapped discreetly in brown butcher paper by Lois, behind the gift counters running west from the south door. (Mom had no compunction about my errands.) Big Chief tablets and No. 2 pencils were in the school supplies by the south door. You get the idea.
Incidentally, when a big truck unloading at the north door blocked my view, as I tried to peek around the truck, a speeding car hit my front bicycle wheel, which catapulted me off its side to spin me abrasively on the asphalt. With no flashing lights or honking horn in warning, the driver was roaring through to a Creighton doctor with his brother, who'd been kicked in the head by a horse. My slip-on was found a half block away by the bank door. My front wheel was irreparably bent. Besides being whomped off the side of the car and spun over the asphalt, I had uncharacteristic luck with nothing but abrasions, gravel-asphalt "burns." Dad's filling station-garage on the east side of Main Street directly fronted Freddie's, so he saw it happen, came running with everyone else who saw or heard it, and sharply refused to let M.K. take me along to Creighton. Who didn't see the accident heard the brakes screaming. The long black reminders on the pavement lasted several weeks. That's about as exciting as life got for me.
Now my goal. The Christmas season began officially when Freddie got in the fresh balsams stacked along the front of the store, in those years merely two or three weeks before Christmas. That day, that hour, I was worse than a puppy yapping at Mom to get a tree, get a tree, puh-leeze, can we get a tree. The other stores had trees too, and once or twice, when Freddie didn't get a good lot, we bought one in Bloomfield, but usually it was one of his. Our tree was always tall, to the living room ceiling with the top ornament a cardboard angel in a satin robe with a glass halo lit by a gold Christmas bulb. To me the tree was a whole fragrant magic woods in itself, strung with softly glowing colors, hung with shiny ornaments, under which I would regularly poke presents, checking daily for new ones, deceived by Mom's including marbles and other rattling objects to foil my snooping, and also under which I would regularly go to sleep to Christmas programs and music on the radio, my arm around my dog. Regularly. But first we had to buy that magic tree, have Dad trim it if need be, take it down in the basement at least overnight to put in a pail of water over my protests so that its branches could come down from the heat. My apartment house has an annual warning posted against any live Christmas tree, and a poll this year claimed 51% of Americans bought artificial trees. I know the real ones six feet tall have scary prices. I'd recommend you cut your own if Christmas tree farms are available, which I learned while teaching in Illinois.
Back in Center's Decembers, the Ellingson/Holmes store had only one feature competing with Freddie's, a miniature village of several small lit-up heavy-cardboard pieces, unlike today's much larger porcelain collectibles, set out on a white-cotton-batting layer of "snow" with a mirror lake, occupying at least two of the front window bays, the artificial snow we bought back then, like chopped-up mica in detergent-like boxes, sprinkled and glittering over the batting drifts. (Because I'm winter-crazy, I've always found artificial snows fascinating, from the Ivory flakes early TV used to the surprisingly effective foam snow of Truffaut's classic on movie-making, Day for Night. For home decorations we whipped up some kind of soap, probably shaved bar Ivory, with eggbeaters, the manual forerunner of mixers. Today artifical movie snow is so skillfully made that it can melt with actors' body temperatures or when they enter warm rooms.)
Though Freddie had the usual Christmas decorations in the windows and around the store, red-and-green crepe paper streamers, strung-up Christmas lights, artificial wreaths, the absolutely unforgettable Christmas feature at Freddie's equal in every way to the bundled trees leaning outside were the many large boxes of candies set spaced out at waist height in the large open area between the sales counters and the meat case. Three held mixed nuts, walnuts, and peanuts, all in the shell. He had a regular candy section, of course, on the shelf island between the columns where the dividing wall had been. That section had the Brach's chocolate-covered cherries we used for gifts for the unexpected, as well as bagged caramels, licorice, candy corn, the usual. But no other store in no other town at that time had his variety of candies in those Christmas boxes. Across the erosion-ravaged ravines of my mindscape, I see chocolate-covered malted milk balls, chocolate-covered creme drops of vanilla and maple, crunchy flat peanut brittle, foil-wrapped chocolate coins, big beautiful wavy ribbon candy of various colors and flavorings, root beer barrels, licorice Scotties, orange slices, nougats, peppermints, French creams of various flavors, goldish candy peanuts with hidden meltaway interiors, long satiny colored cylinders of holiday "straws," chocolate-covered peanuts and--yuk--raisins, maple sugar leaves, chewy wrapped taffy with peanut-butter interiors, cellophane-wrapped red cinnamon balls, assorted filled chocolates as in candy boxes now, cinnamon bears, molded solid little chocolate Santa Clauses, assorted toffees in bright color-coded foils, small hard candy disks like colored wheels around white fields with variously designed centers such as tiny green Christmas trees and red bells. Delirious children and bemused adults. I know I can now go to mall candy stores or trade up to Russell Stover's on to high-end Godiva outlets, but then, oh, then, it was one-stop shopping at Freddie's, Willy Wonka in little where-is-that? Center! Christmas Central to a little boy. You should've been there, Jared.