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John K.

The Source

I’m really not old enough to tell this story. John K. Thompson’s grocery store somehow crept into the 1960’s and 70’s, long after the rest of his ilk had long passed to that great supermarket in the sky. John K’s store was located at the very center of the bustling heart of Perry, Illinois. Okay, the town had lost its bustle long before my birth, but his one-room grocery was a fixture. (His only competition was the Read brothers across the street. They were a mega-mart…they had three rooms.) John K. Thompson had one employee: John K. Thompson. One man, one store in one room…just like his father before him. I appreciate friendly service from a retail clerk, but it’s nostalgically pleasant now to remember how John K. was not friendly at all if 1) you were a Democrat, or 2) you were a Cardinal fan. John K. was the most Republican Cub man I’ve ever met. He believed that the two most evil men to walk the earth were Franklin D. Roosevelt and Augie Busch. John K. was a human adding machine. Oh, he had a real one there on the counter, but unless you asked him to actually poke in the numbers, he’d simply glance at the price of each item and keep a running total in his head. I defy any checkout clerk alive today to come up with the total on a group of items as quickly as John K. And he was never wrong. He would absolutely zip the items into your paper bag faster than your eye could follow. For a lark some folks would ask him to re-add everything using the machine. John was never off a cent. He kept coins in a big old brass and steel cash register, but the really large amounts of cash were kept in a worn leather pouch inside his shirt. I have seen fellows walk in and cash a hog check for two thousand dollars and John would have the money beneath his shirt. I once asked him if he was afraid of being robbed. He said, “Hell, by the time they got the money I’d be dead anyway and what good would the money do me then?” Every day at 10 a.m. he’d run out of the store…and I mean run…to the post office a block away to get his Wall Street journal. The store would be left unlocked and if you tried to rob it while he was gone, well…he’d kill you. In Pike County that’s called deterrence. A particularly loud fellow once got into an argument with John K. in the store. The guy was both a Democrat and a Cardinals fan. John K. had enough, took off his apron and threw it onto his butcher’s block and challenged the guy to a footrace down Main Street in Perry. John K. won the race, put on his apron and started doing business again. John K’s butcher’s block was a many-layered work of art. Cupped in the center by years of his and his father’s meat chopping, he scrubbed it smooth every night. You could (and I did) ask for ten cents’ worth of cheese. (In the 1960’s we only had one kind of cheese. We called it “yellow.”) He’d haul an enormous slab of the stuff from the meat locker, cut off a chunk, measure it, and he’d hit it exactly to the ounce every time. Thompson’s Grocery was the only store I ever saw that used merchandise grabbers. I’m sure that there’s a more proper name for the long-handled pincers used to retrieve Quakers’ Oats boxes from twelve feet in the air, but I always asked for something from the top shelf. John K. would raise the long, wooden pole over his head, tip the top of the box, and then catch it in his free hand. He never missed. And I have no idea how he got them up there in the first place. I suspect elves. There were but two aisles in John K’s store, cleverly called the right and left aisle. Each was about six feet long. If he had more than three customers you’d have to wait outside. There simply wasn’t room inside the store. Write a bad check? The cure was easy. John K. would plaster it to the front side of his meat scale and it huge litters he’d scrawl the word “Deadbeat!” He was one of the most curious men I’d ever known. Soon as I walked in the door he’d want to know where I’d been, what I’d been doing, and what I thought of the President. Of course he never agreed with me on anything political, but John liked to discuss things. He was well read. You didn’t dare get into a factual argument with John K. His stock portfolio depended upon his being up to date on world happenings and he made a science out of simply knowing what was going on. I like Festival Foods in Jacksonville. The employees seem extraordinarily friendly and they meet you with real eye contact and a genuine “How are you today?” .. almost unheard of in today’s retail business. But I’ll tell you the truth… I secretly yearn for one of the older bag fillers to throw down his apron and challenge me to a run across the parking lot.