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In a season of neat holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, I think I can afford to pass up celebrating National Fast Food Day on Monday.
				Oh, I enjoy a good cheeseburger with a slice of onion plus bacon and vinegar fries as much as the next person. But I&rsquo;m reserving my travels and my cash for a different day this month &#8211; the 28th, which is Small Business Saturday.
				Maybe it&rsquo;s just nostalgia. My family twice owned a small business. The first was a grocery store in the Rolling Mill Hill section of Wilkes-Barre back around 1940. I don&rsquo;t remember much of that, but I do recall vividly our second store from the 1950s and 1960s &#8211; a variety emporium (for want of a more accurate term) on a now-vanished block of the city&rsquo;s old East Market Street.
				It&rsquo;s unfortunate that today we have to designate a special day to recognize the many thousands of small businesses from our neighborhoods all across America.
				But times have changed. Once if mom wanted to pick up the fixings for the day&rsquo;s lunch and dinner, she&rsquo;d hie herself down the block to a little grocery store. You wouldn&rsquo;t believe what they could pack in a tiny area: a refrigerated case with everything from sliced cheese to pork roasts, plus any kind of canned goods or cereal you could want and &#8211; maybe best of all &#8211; a whole section of the store devoted to some of the best reading matter of the day, everything from &ldquo;Woman&rsquo;s Day&rdquo; to &ldquo;True Crime&rdquo; to &ldquo;Bugs Bunny.&rdquo;
				In fact, conducting your life 1940s-1960s style seemed like endless visits to one small business after another.
				Even medical care was localized. Feeling ill? Head over to the neighborhood doctor, likely a guy who practiced out of little extension on the side of his home. Get a prescription and take it down to the neighborhood pharmacy operated by a fellow who could read script that looked like Phoenician. He&rsquo;d have what you needed. If you were in the chips that week, you might stop at the pharmacy&rsquo;s soda fountain.
				Time to get the car&rsquo;s oil changed? Saturday was the day to visit the service station, where the owner &#8211; between trips out to man the pumps &#8211; would get you all set up and then wash the windshield and fill the gasoline tank for you.
				A phenomenon of the time was the neighborhood shopping district. Often there&rsquo;d be in the middle of a residential section a street lined with smaller shops of all kinds &#8211; something like an early version of the mall.
				You could buy a living room set, a gas stove or washer, cans of paint, packs of nails, a console radio, a TV, all of them in separate stores, each owned by one person or family whom you&rsquo;d see in church or at PTA meetings in the nearby elementary school.
				Back then, nearly every day was small business Monday or Tuesday or Saturday or whatever.
				Our store was probably typical. Need a package of hair pins or a pack of smokes or a paperback mystery or a root beer at 9:30 in the evening? Hey, we had it. We also offered the opportunity to run into somebody you knew and talk baseball or the kids or whatever you wanted. Since we were right where the customers lived, there was no parking problem.
				Many of the old places are gone. But there are successors. Look for them.
				And that&rsquo;s why &ldquo;Small Business Saturday&rdquo; should be one of the biggest days of the year.

Remember When: Small businesses served the neighborhoods