Small Town in the 50s

I've been writing a story (turned into a term paper!) about the Duplin Times & it includes a bunch of stuff about my home town of Kenansville (population 600, more or less). If you're over 50, you probably remember some of this stuff.

When I came into the world in 1948, postage stamps cost three cents, Coca Cola bottles came in six-packs, and nabs were packaged in cube-shaped four-packs.

In the ‘50s, downtown Kenansville was busy. Cars parked diagonally on both sides of the main street. Our car was always parked in front of the Duplin Times, and later on, when I was in college, my mother backed her car out of that space and bumped into a car one morning. That afternoon, she did the same thing – to the same person’s other car! That was the only wreck she ever had that was her fault, so I guess she wanted to make it count!

Back then I could ride figure eights all over that street on my bike after the town went to sleep at five o'clock. The town was small, and I knew every inch of it, except for the “crack” between the Duplin Times building and the building next to it, which was just wide enough for a child to walk through to the back of the building – if that child had the nerve!

There was a grocery store called “Your Store” that had a big scale in the back room. It was like the scales in a doctor's office, with the sliding weight, but it was very large. Maybe it was for weighing boxes of food or something, but Mamma weighed on it all the time, because she was on a diet all the time! They gave out S&S Green Stamps at the store and I licked them and stuck them into the little books.

The Kenansville Drug Store had a marble soda fountain where you could get a Pepsi with a squirt of cherry or vanilla for five cents, and you could watch all your classmates approach the store from the table and ice cream chairs in the front window while reading ten-cent Superman, Wonder Woman, Archie, Little Casper, Mighty Mouse, and Katy Keen comic books.

It was an awesome town!