Gade's General Store

My grandparents owned a 160-acre farm about five miles southwest of Streator, Illinois.  Corn country.  Corn and soy bean fields all around.
To get to the farm from Streator, you would head south on route 18 until it intersects with route 17 (what my grandmother always called the "hard road"), and turn right at the four corners.
In my youth, the four corners was the intersection at routes 18 and 17, complete with a four-way stop.  On one of those corners was a gas station that also had a small lunch counter and sold ice cream cones.  Although I don't think the place had an official name, it was always and forever known far and wide as the Four Corners.  I think there were farmers who were "regulars" at the Four Corners.  It was a gathering place, of sorts, out in the middle of nowhere.

After turning right (west) onto route 17, you had to go under what we called a viaduct but was actually a train track.  Just a bit past that was another unmarked intersection.  If you turned right onto the rock road there, you would be on the east side of my grandparents' property.  If you turned left, you were headed into a place called Ancona, IL.  I call it a "place" because it wasn't really a town.  There was a railroad track, a grain elevator, a tiny church, and a small cluster of houses.  Ancona isn't even on all Illinois road maps.  It just is.

It's gone now, but just barely into Ancona, standing all by itself, there was a small general store.  It was run by the Carpenter brothers and was, in every sense of the stereotype, typical of the general store of pioneer days, complete with the false front,  open wooden porch, two rows of glass-covered counters that ran the length of the store, with shelving behind.  Watch any movie of pioneer times and you will see that general store!

As I said, the Carpenter brothers owned it.  I think the brothers' names were Gerald and Rolly (Raleigh).  Gerald was called Gade, and he was the one who mostly ran the store, so we knew it as "Gade's store".  This was not a place where you could find much by way of perishables--certainly not a stock-up store--but good for recipe emergencies.  It was less than two miles down the road from our farm, and every time my grandmother would send my grandfather to go pick up a couple of items, I begged to go along.  And he always took me.  He was such a softy for his grandchildren, I knew I could probably talk him out of a candy bar or a bottle of pop.  (In retrospect, I'm 100% sure that he knew that's what I'd do, and he was always up for it.)

Popo (our name for our grandfather) drove to the store with a small list, but when we got there, the list had been augmented by my grandmother who had already called the store to add things.  The canned goods were all dusty.  (They didn't have expirations dates in those days, but I'd be willing to bet that most of them, had they been processed with expiration dates, would have long expired before they were actually sold!)  Of course, I would be drooling over the candies in the glass cases, and I would usually get some of it.
But out on the porch of the store, there was a chest-style pop dispenser.  The pop was in glass bottles.  If you put your dime in, you could pick a bottle and pull it through a metal track that suspended the bottles by the neck, to have it for your very own.  On hot summer days before air conditioning, the Nehi pop that came out of that cooler was just what the doctor ordered.  Nehi grape and Nehi orange.  My favorite was grape.  God, I loved that stuff!

Somewhere along the way, the Carpenter brothers died and the old store was torn down.
Still, it is part of my childhood, and I will never forget that little taste of the prairie.