The Red Star Grocery was not the old country store made nostalgic by movies. We did not sit back in rockers on a porch and watch the world go by or sit around the heater playing checkers and swapping stories. Our store was located at the corner of Green and Lincoln Streets, only blocks from Main Street, the state capital, and fewer blocks yet from the University of South Carolina. Our business bustled with customers and we returned to Shull Street worn out with the pace we kept in order to meet the customers' needs and our bills.

The University of South Carolina would later raze the Red Star along with the homes of our customers, and the old East Glencoe community would become the parking lot for the new coliseum. Our customers would be scattered into various developments of "235 houses" on the fringes of the city. Our family business would then move to another down-and-out neighborhood across the river.

Regardless of its proximity to the center of Columbia, historic sites and gardens, East Glencoe was not on the route of the yearly Home and Garden Tour. No frothy azalea bushes or bearded iris blossoms graced the gritty yards and alleys that surrounded the store. In a larger city East Glencoe would have been called a slum or a ghetto. It was an area many people thought best to bypass altogether, but it was my family's world--one unknown to the suburbs just across the river.

It was a community whose residents dressed in torn and ragged clothes and whose bodies suffered infrequent baths. The children's feet were often bare in the coldest weather, and their noses ran mucus over lips and chins until snuffed back or wiped on a sleeve or shirttail. The poor and forgotten who lived here, both black and white, were my neighbors.

In this neighborhood unpainted, wooden shotgun houses rose four feet off the ground on leaning brick pillars. Concrete-block apartments with tiny, broken windows crowded end-on into spaces where older houses had fallen down. Dusty unpaved alleys served as sidewalks. Front yards were nonexistent and back yards were trash-strewn plots where human wastes accumulated.

Front porches sagged or gave way entirely. Broken windows provided handy places for rickety metal stovepipes to poke through. The smokestacks were held in place by tin panes that were less combustible than the rags and cardboard plugging the holes of other windows.

Junked cars by the side of the roads served as playgrounds. An elevated railroad track neatly divided homes from industries and its mighty steel girders were the children's jungle gyms.

Mama, often frustrated by the demands of the business and its customers, always threatened to write a book about our experiences at the Red Star. Once or twice she got so far as to write a dozen short tales, but she was not satisfied with her work. Mama's stories lay quietly for years in the manila folder in her filing cabinet along with her records of insurance policies, bank statements and appliance maintenance booklets.

After her death, Mama's stories came to me. These echoes of the Red Star, itself now only a memory, recalled to me the events of my early days and my family's experiences just prior to and during the upsurge of racial tensions in the South of the 60's.

In telling the story of the Red Star, I evoke a time that is past and attitudes that no longer have a place in our society. Our customers, our neighbors, were poor. Most were illiterate. Many of our friends, and we, ourselves, spoke in a manner that now seems stereotypically Southern, ignorant and bigoted.

Admittedly, many of Daddy's relationships with his customers were paternalistic. The Red Star served populations of both black and white communities, most of whom had never ventured into a bank or school. Besides his role as businessman he became the legal guardian for numerous adults incapable of caring for themselves. He conducted weddings, arranged and attended his customers' funerals, cashed their checks and deciphered their legal documents. It was through my father's efforts that veterans received their benefits, that civil wrongs were righted, and that senators learned the needs of their poorest constituents. Daddy helped his customers document birth dates for Social Security and Medicare benefits. He provided transportation to the various governmental offices so frequently that his riders were questioned about his motives. Paternalism was unavoidable.

Daddy's paternalism, however, was not condescension. Because of his loving attitude towards the residents of East Glencoe I felt little of the social superiority society would have granted my family. I learned from our customers, our friends, lessons of endurance, of humor, and of spirit. Ours was a closely mutualistic relationship, not a parasitic one.

There are those who would say our customers were parasitic, living solely, as many did, on government funds. Others would say that we, a family whose income was dependent on the trade of those less fortunate, were the true parasites. Both attitudes would be wrong. Ours was a life of give and take, of love and strife, of hard work and hard laughter. Along the way we discovered the real issues of life.

Life, I have been told, is what happens to you while you are trying to decide what to do with your life. This was our life: The Red Star Grocery.

The Corner Where You Are

Daddy grew up in the cane breaks of the South Carolina midlands. His father was a farmer, a carpenter and musician, who stayed on the lookout for any job that came along. During the lean depression years Grandaddy worked as foreman of a crew of WPA workers, building outhouses for homes, businesses and public buildings.

Daddy, the second oldest child of seven, began looking for ways to make life better at an early age. He began school when he was four and walked miles of country roads to sell nickel newspapers when he was ten. Struggling to find a way to make life better, he found his mentor in Mr. J. A. Porter, the leading businessman of lower Lexington County.

In the rural South during depression days business owners were the lifeblood of a community. The proprietors were looked up to and were considered in a somewhat higher class than mere farmers and laborers. In the Porter’s Gin community, Mr. J. A. Porter was the hardest working and most successful businessman of all. His workday began at 2 a.m. and ended well after dark. No one could accuse him of wasting even one minute. The flapping strings of his shoes attested to his industry. Mr. J. A. could not stop working long enough to tie them.

He inherited nothing from his parents, but by dint of his labor Mr. Porter's children stood to inherit two general merchandise stores, two gristmills, a cotton gin and thousands of acres of land. In his working days J. A. Porter employed dozens of tenant families who between them plowed hundreds of mules.

In the eyes of a young boy this was wealth. Daddy tended Mr. Porter’s mill while he studied his high school lessons, but he studied his mentor more closely still. The drive that fuels my father, still working twelve hour days at the age of eighty, had its beginning in those early days of the nineteen-thirties. He wanted to be “somebody” and he wanted to help his family and neighbors.

Daddy's first dream was to be a doctor. Family finances would not allow the fulfillment of this ambition, so at the end of eleventh grade he graduated from high school and set off for town and full-time employment. He arrived in Columbia and began learning to be a grocer in the tradition of J. A. Porter.

It was here in the Eiler’s Food Stores chain one day that destiny took a firm hand. So many customers had poured into the Assembly Street store that the two over-burdened checkers could not cope with them all. The manager of the Eiler's on Honeycutt Street sent Daddy over to help out. "Red" was known throughout the chain as a lightning-fast checker and Mr. Eiler counted on him to shorten the lines of patrons backed up at the checkout counters.

Daddy quick-stepped in the door, tightened the strings on his white grocery apron, slapped a folded paper cap on his head, and began to make the register sing. Red, living up to his reputation, played the cash register like some young men played pinball machines. Uneasy customers tried fruitlessly to watch his flying fingers, fearful that his accuracy could not keep pace with his speed. The beleaguered checkout clerks on either side paused in their work to watch along with the patrons. It seemed a one-man band had arrived. They watched his fancy footwork, the piston-like left arm grabbing the groceries and moving them along and the finger-work that rivaled a typist’s on the keys of his register.

As if to further irritate the overworked clerks he had come to relieve, Daddy cracked jokes while he bagged groceries, sent each customer along with a smile, and before anyone could blink, began propelling the next buggy of food down the counter toward the waiting paper sacks.

While he tallied the sale items and coupons, answered questions and made change, Red was all business. Then the paper bag crackled open with a loud pop. He joked and passed the time of day while his arms continued their flashing pace. When the bags were loaded with eggs and bread carefully placed on top, fruit gentled into their nests of bags of rice and beans, when all meat items in their brown butcher paper wrappers were safely stashed in doubled bags in case of leaks, the boy wonder gave a final grin and parting pleasantry, and another customer stepped out the door, wondering just what had happened. One minute they had been standing in an interminable line, the next their canned goods had been whirled into sacks and they were on their way home.

Marah, the young woman commanding the checkout counter to Daddy’s right, especially noticed his exceptional performance and obvious self-possession. Not long in the city herself, her self-consciousness and eagerness to do everything correctly demanded that she work at a smooth, steady, and admittedly slower pace. She stood, auburn hair gleaming, mouth slightly open, and watched the groceries leap down the counter and disappear into paper bags and listened to the quips that accompanied them. She wondered how it was possible for a baby-faced boy fresh from the country to make the work seem so easy.

No premonition of her future interrupted Marah’s work that day, but she was to see a lot more of Daddy. In a short time, the sixteen year-old was the youngest manager Eiler’s Food Stores had ever employed. Later, when World War II took the men to the front, Marah became the store’s first female manager. Later yet, they would work side-by-side at the Red Star through 57 years of marriage.

The first building occupied by the Red Star Grocery was a two-storied clapboard building, taller than it was wide, whose walls leaned in imitation of the houses flanking its side and back. The store's wooden floors and paint-less walls reminded Daddy of the country stores of his youth. It didn’t have much in common with the modern, up-to-date groceries he had managed for either Eiler’s Food Stores or for the Dixie Home Stores chains.

In the chain stores aisles were well lit and items were balanced in perfectly placed pyramids on sparkling shelves. Bright signs lined the walls and hung from displays announcing specials. Three checkout counters were always open, with fresh-faced men and women standing at the ready to help customers find the items they required. Meat counters were lighted within, with two layers of trays stacked high with steaks and pork chops, fatback, country smoked ham and baking hens. Vegetables, fresh and perky, peeked from behind sliding glass doors at potential buyers.

At the Red Star wooden shelves were battered and lights were few. Vegetables resided in the peck baskets in which they had arrived from the Market and eggs rested in their cardboard box on the floor. Meat was fresh and of good quality but each sample had to be brought out of the windowless meat cooler and held at head height to be inspected by the customer. Sawdust lay inches deep under the butcher block and splinters rose from the old plank floor.

Another obvious difference between Eiler's chain store and the Red Star was the clientele. Eiler’s location guaranteed it a wide variety of patrons. Assembly Street was a busy thoroughfare, and the site of the open-air farmer’s market. Farmers hawked fresh produce from the backs of their trucks or set up stalls of wooden crates on which to display their goods. Ladies looking for tomatoes to can and Sunday School teachers needing watermelons for the class picnic came to the State Farmer’s Market to pinch and thump the polished displays of fruits and vegetables. Wholesale brokers and storeowners drove through the aisles, looking for their favorite suppliers. It was easy to drop into Eiler’s for a few items while shopping at the market.

The Dixie Home Store had been carefully located between the upper class neighborhood that was home to college professors and the more modest community of the blue-collar laborers. Here, housewives and maids found it easy to run into the Dixie to purchase their week’s supplies of food or to grab last minute necessities. The flow of customers was less hectic, yet steadier, than the Assembly Street grocery.

Located practically beneath the elevated track of the Seaboard Railroad and catty- corner from the King Steel Mill, the Red Star enjoyed a far less affluent customer base. Here dwellings spoke of hard work and low pay. The Red Star’s customers worked in the cotton mill or the steel mill, or not at all. The third day of the month brought many checks in the mail, from the Social Security Administration, from the Welfare Department, and from the Railroad Disability Fund. Often this was a family’s sole income until the next month rolled around. Too often, family requirements outstripped family income.

With these families the Red Star grew, struggling with them for survival and plenty, and often overwhelmed by the lack of timely cash flow.