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Today in History: Monday, Feb. 13

<p>Ever lift a wooden case full of glass bottles of soda and carry it 20 yards or so?</p><p>After that feat, how&#8217;d you like to go back and haul some more?</p><p>In my parents&#8217; store I did that a couple of times a day. I guess that since I enjoyed a frosty bottle once in a while I was the logical choice for keeping our huge soft drink cooler brim full.</p><p>Today you can toss into your shopping cart a pasteboard tube with a dozen lightweight aluminum cans in it. I dealt with cases made of thick hardwood, often full of splinters, bearing 24 thick glass bottles.</p><p>That wasn&#8217;t the worst.</p><p>A case of 12 1-quart bottles was way heavier than the 12-ouncers or eight-ouncers.</p><p>There is one good thing I&#8217;ll say for being the master of the soda room, though. It was a great form of weight lifting, with the added problem of making sure you didn&#8217;t end up with wooden slivers sticking into your hand.</p><p>In fact, the more I reflect on my family&#8217;s old variety store in Wilkes-Barre&#8217;s Heights section, the more I&#8217;m convinced I learned a lot there: not academic knowledge but habits that help a person through life.</p><p>I saw that technology was likely very helpful and should be welcomed, not fled from as the devil&#8217;s work. In fact, every time I punched in a price and pulled down the big handle on our new adding machine, I thanked fate that I did not have to do what my parents had done years earlier - total up the purchases with pencil and paper, and then do one of those horrible percentage problems for the sales tax.</p><p>Multi-tasking? I think the old neighborhood stores developed the concept. After all, you had just the family and there were about a dozen different things to be done. While waiting on a customer who kept changing his mind and putting stuff back you also had to deal with the guy from the wholesale house who&#8217;d just told you that the 10-cent school tablets from last year that everybody liked were for some reason now unavailable.</p><p>Perhaps I should have become a concierge. If a loud and angry fellow from across the river stopped in, not to buy something but to call you &#8220;Mac&#8221; and ask where the furniture store was, you had to resist the temptation to say &#8220;you passed it in that block down there, Columbus&#8221; and ooze courtesy. You also had to know somehow that he meant &#8220;this&#8221; furniture store and not &#8220;that&#8221; furniture store even though he didn&#8217;t know the name of either one of them.</p><p>But I learned also that there are a lot of really nice people in this world. There&#8217;s no bonding involving a store clerk wearing a plastic name tag. You do bond with the older fellow who comes in every evening for a cigar and a magazine after his 10-hour shift. You know that the lady who rushes in for a pound of cheese three minutes before closing is probably on a tighter schedule than you are, and you hope her brood at home thinks of her when they&#8217;re eating the sandwiches tomorrow.</p><p>These days, I believe that the folks who kept those old stores ought to be awarded posthumous college degrees in management or philosophy or human relations or something like that.</p><p>And maybe the entrants in the soda case lift should get Olympic medals too.</p><style>
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<div class="neCaption">Remember When </div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/web1_TOM_MOONEY-2.jpg</photo0><caption0>Remember When </caption0><photoCredit0></photoCredit0></div></div>
<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>Tom Mooney</p><p>Remember When</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Tom Mooney is a Times Leader history columnist. Reach him at tommooney42@gmail.com.</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Remember When: Life lessons learned at the old family shop