I was the first kid in my school to own a transistor radio! Made in Japan. Aqua blue in colour – the only colour available at that time. You have no idea how proud I was of that radio and how envious the other kids were of my tiny cordless device. It was the iPhone of that era. And it came from my aunt’s store.

That store was a going concern. On the outskirts of London (Canada) it served a new subdivision development and the nearby houses and farms south of Commissioners Road. Unlike the title of this article, it was not a General Store. 

But you be the judge. Except for its age, my aunt’s store seemed a lot like the one in my own community now – the Crysler Old General Store.

A word first about my aunt’s store. She opened it at five thirty in the morning every day except Sunday when it was safe to open at 8:00am. Why did she open so early? Because the construction workers building the new subdivision nearby and the contractors who lived in the area wanted to eat their breakfast at her store. They came from miles around. The front and side parking lot around the store would be filled with pick-up trucks, dump trucks, cement mixers, and the occasional car. When I visited her home which was built upstairs, I would smell the rich aroma of bacon and eggs permeating the entire building every morning. That’s when I would venture down. I loved eating my breakfast “with the guys.” The place would be packed with workers awaiting their breakfast or socializing over coffee. 

Half of my aunt’s store was restaurant, the remainder the most incredible collection of food, snacks, cigarettes, toys, and the latest electronics, imaginable (“No room for tv consoles,” my aunt said, “they take up too much room”. This despite the fact they were all the rage at that time). There were coolers for soft drinks or milk in three-quart plastic recyclable jugs, quarts of chocolate milk and bottles of homo milk with cream on top. My aunt told me she was the first store in London to sell three-quart jugs and that she sold more milk for Silverwood’s Dairy than any other store in London – grocery stores included. There were freezers full of ice cream, freezees and popsicles and a wide variety of frozen tv dinners and french fries. She even sold meats obtained from a local butcher. Elsewhere there were rows of groceries: canned vegetables mostly, ketchup and mustard, cereals, hot dog buns, and bread. Lots of bread. And chips – including barbecue, my favourite. She even stocked towels, facecloths, and blankets (including “newfangled” electric ones). She said she got these on sale from “KMarts,” her favourite store for bargains. There was even a giant glassed in candy area where you could buy black balls, Swedish Berries, Twizzlers, sour cherries, wax lips, and a veritable gold mine of other specialty candies, all neatly eventually placed into paper bags when purchased to ensure the savouring moments would last.

And then there were the toys! My aunt tried selling them one year as an experiment and it was so popular that she had to make several trips a month to the distributor in Port Burwell to get more. Dolls and buggies, Monopoly, Sorry and other popular games, electric trains, dinky toy cars, roller skates, hockey equipment, guitars, record players and of course, transistor radios. When they came out a little later, she even sold cassette recorders and 33 1/3 albums. My aunt was state of the art in small (inexpensive) electronics and an early adapter. And I loved going through the old “45’s” she sold after they were no longer playable on her juke box in the restaurant area. She found teenagers were very eager to acquire these low-priced used records. At Christmas time people came to the store to buy toys – it was cheaper than Simpson’s, they told her, and she always had what was popular. 

My aunt mostly cooked in her store. Not just breakfast but lunch and dinner, too. Families came to eat fish and chips, or even steak dinners or sometimes they came just for desserts with ice cream. She made fantastic strudel and her apple pie with cheddar cheese on top was famous. When she didn’t cook or serve, she’d be washing and drying dishes – all by hand. She never stopped working.

My uncle would tend the front store area, serving up “smokes” to the workers or making milk shakes with real ice cream and milk. He’d also scoop out ice cream cones for the nearby high school kids who came by at lunchtime. Ice cream cones were a specialty – nothing less than two scoops at this store! I’d help out doing the cones when I came to visit in the summer. I’d have ice cream from my wrist to my elbow from scooping, but the best part was when my aunt told me I could have as many scoops on my cone as I liked. 

At 10:30 pm my uncle would go to the front door and turn the “OPEN” sign to “CLOSED.” He and my aunt would then go upstairs to begin counting the money. No credit or debit cards in those days, but selectively my aunt would allow some customers to pay monthly. Of course, there would always be someone who knocked at the store door – they needed aspirin, or Tums or milk or some other emergency. The store seemed to never close. 

I don’t know when my aunt and uncle went to bed. Counting change, rolling it, balancing with the cash register receipts. It took forever. My aunt went through the bills and wrote cheques and some folks had to be paid in cash with their name prominently entered on the envelope. She did these finances while consuming a huge amount of Coca-Cola in the little bottles. No Diet Coke in those days and definitely no Pepsi for her. My uncle would always cook up his token Mac and Cheese which he ate in huge quantities as he worked on the books. When he finished, he would go downstairs again to clean the floors and take the empty pop bottles to the basement. They were as good as cash to some customers in those days, but heavy and dirty for my uncle to lug around. 

Seven days a week, 364 days a year- they worked every day except Christmas. Looking back, I have no idea how they did it. Incredible work ethic. Always polite to customers (although my aunt never allowed anyone to bother others – they would be sternly asked to leave. She ran a tight ship. I recall a story she told me that one day a local high school teacher had to escort several students to the store to clean the ketchup off the ceiling after they thought it might be fun to print their names on it).

When I first walked into the Crysler Old General Store it brought these memories of my aunt’s store back to life. The Crysler Store opens at 5:30am and serves local contractors. The food service area is small – just a grill -and I’m sure not as active as my aunt’s, but there are food selections for any occasion during the day. The store has a broad array in the cooler of delectable sandwiches which I’m sure are prepared each morning. There are great tasting cookies (my nephew can attest having received one at the Crysler Christmas parade). There’s gourmet coffee and as you enter the Store there are rows of every type of candy in packages, or chips which have many more flavours today than my aunt’s. And there’s an ice cream area where cones of several flavours are scooped in addition to snow cones which I suppose today is the new generation’s version of freezees. 

As I wander through the rest of the store the same wide selection of groceries is there. With coolers too and milk- but the three-quart jug has been replaced with four-litre bags. There are a few toys, mostly on upper shelves providing a background milieu rather than the wide variety my aunt sold. There’s even a church pew at the window where some folks can eat their lunch or have a coffee and cookie. 

The Old General Store is a rich part of the Crysler community and has a history dating back to the early 1900’s. It has well-trodden wooden floors and an exterior that could use a face lift. Not particularly attractive, it is endearing just the same.

There are many regulars that frequent the store, not all driving their trucks to the front door. The regulars go for lottery tickets, and one lucky resident even won $100,000. The regulars also go for milk, chips, soft drinks, and special candies. And in the warmer season, they go for ice cream.

The store is the centre piece of the Crysler business community. It collects donations for the food bank and regularly is raffling Easter goodies or Christmas surprise packages for some worthwhile cause. In many ways the owners are as devoted to running it as my aunt and uncle were. While they open at the same ungodly morning time, they close at a more respectable 8:00pm and they keep their doors shut on Sundays. I’m not sure how much time they spend doing books, counting change, rolling coin, etc., but I’m sure they feel their work is never done. 

The Old General Store epitomizes a work ethic that, sadly, no longer prevails, but must be admired. The owners creatively continue to look to expand the Store’s popularity in the image of the bygone Old General Store, which in its earlier days I’m sure was a lot like my aunt’s.  Their dedication and hard work will no doubt make them (even more) successful in the years to come. And it sure is a great place to visit.

As a postscript, my aunt and uncle sold their store when their health began to fail to Silverwood’s Dairies. A flagship acquisition for Silverwood’s, it became one of the first of their Mac’s Milk chain of variety stores. Eventually that chain was sold to Alimentation Couche Tarde, one of the largest and most successful convenience and gasoline service station providers in the world. I don’t know whether my aunt’s store is still operating now but on my bucket list is a trip back to London to try and find it.

If you are interested in seeing a little of the General Store in Crysler, you may wish to check out the MainstreetRob video interview of Ian Nichols – Rock star. Librarian in Crysler? Right from the church pews in that old store. See https://youtu.be/5-gOLde10Ic?si=HGYpYY8j2Xnf_203