Sunday, 5 June 2022
The sun is out, the pool is full, and Potential Cyclone One will probably become Tropical Storm Alex sometime out over the Atlantic either late today or tomorrow. According to NBC Channel 6, Fort Lauderdale International Airport recorded 7.43 inches of rain as of 9 am this morning.
I was feeling good about my roof until I saw a trail of water down the door from the kitchen to the utility room and was worried I had a leak. I still may have one but other than that evidence, I don’t think it’s significant. It may simply mean I need to get the leaves away from the roof where the awning meets the roof. Back on the ladder again.
It’s funny what you remember as a kid. One of a series of memories for me was the hardware store my grandfather, Hollie William Agnew, ran in Morton, Mississippi. I loved hanging around the hardware and hardwares of that ilk always have a nostalgic smell about them. Agnew Hardware had everything you needed whether your home was out in the country or in town.
Hollie even had leather mule collars for farmers. Back then, I was around 4-5 years old and most farmers plowed their fields with mules. The leather of the collar along with leather tack and horse saddles filled the hardware.
When I was in the fourth grade (nine years old) my neighbor plowed his field with a mule and I used to walk behind him in the furrows as he guided the mule down the row. Once he reached the end of the row, it was either “Gee” or “Haw” to get the mule to turn either right or left. I’m sure I was a pest to him but he never complained about me following along and constantly yapping at him. My Uncle Jack in Pulaski still plowed his garden with a mule when I was a kid.
Another aroma from Agnew Hardware was floor sweep. The hardware had beaten up old wooden floors (there wasn’t a level place in the entire store). At the end of the day, it often became part of my “job” to lay down floor sweep (also called sweeping compound) and sweep the aisles of the store.
It’s an oiling particulate often with a pine scent added. The oily particles would attract dust and dirt as you swept. I suspect there were some 40 years of floor sweep oil absorbed by those floors. Ours had a red tint to the particles like the one on the left in the photo.
Add in the miscellaneous smells of paints, roofing compound, and other sundry items and you had a cornucopia of aromas. I loved it!
For some strange reason, the conversations lately with my cousins Jimmie and Jo got around to tokens. Both remembered them but all of our memories were a little fuzzy on the issue.
I remember the old cash register at the hardware had “tokens” and for some reason remembered they had a square hole in them. There was a specific drawer for them.
According to the web site for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Mississippi instituted a sales tax in 1932 and issued tokens in 1936. The tokens were in 1 mill and 5 mill denominations and were originally of aluminum and brass but during the war when metals were needed for the military, the tokens were made of fiber and plastic.
A mill is one thousandth of a cent. Why would you ever need that? Back in the 30’s and 40’s a lot of items in stores sold for 5 or 10 cents. If the state tax was 1.5%, then 1.5% of 5 cents is $0.00075 cents. You would hand over a nickel, and a 5 mill token and two 1 mill tokens to pay the sales tax.
The archives said tokens were used from 1936 to 1952 in Mississippi but Wikipedia says that most tokens were eliminated in the early 1940’s except in Missouri.
I was born in 1948 and in 1952 I was only 4 years old. I remember tokens taken in by the hardware when I was 10 or 11 years old so I can only assume the hardware took them out of courtesy to the public. I remember both the metal and the plastic ones. I swear some of them were actually wooden.
The hardware was to eventually become a big bone of contention in my family. When Hollie died in 1956, he left the hardware to my mother, or so she said. She supposedly threatened my grandmother with a law suit. In any case, mother ended up with the hardware and mother and dad moved from Cleveland, Mississippi back to Morton to take ownership and run it. Not very successfully, I might add. It was later sold to another family in town and eventually the entire building was moved to another location in town.
I miss old hardwares, their smells, the salespeople that really know what they are talking about, and just the general feeling of the store. In my travels, whenever I see one of the old country hardwares, I go in, take a deep breath, and go down memory lane (or aisles).
