My career as an employee at the Heber Store began quite early. One vivid memory I have is of the “Grand Opening” of the new Porter’s Shopping Center after Uncle Donnie Porter bought it from Uncle Thomas Shelley and expanded it to its present size.
This Grand Opening was to be a very big event. Heber had a brand new “Shopping Center” and people would be coming from miles around to take advantage of the great sales associated with a Grand Opening. Sure enough, there were lots and lots of people there. Some of the special deals were really good. There were two that I remember very well. One was Refrigerator Biscuits and another was Frozen Bird’s Eye Lemonade. Both were on sale for “ten cans for a dollar”. You couldn’t beat it. In case you haven’t figured it out, that’s only ten cents a can.
Since there were so many customers, I was hired to be a “carry out boy”. Some other boys were also hired to help carry out bags of groceries. We thought it was pretty neat to be a part of the event.
The new store had wide isles, wide enough for two shopping carts to pass, and there were even shopping carts to be used by the customers. Since there were a lot of people shopping in the store at the same time, people would hurry and pick up the special sale items and then do the rest of their shopping. This was a good idea except for the canned biscuits. As people were shopping, we started to hear explosions. At first no one knew what was going on. When someone noticed biscuit dough oozing through the bottoms of some of the shopping baskets the explanation became evident. The refrigerator biscuits had heated up sitting in the baskets and had begun to expand to the point where they were bursting the containers they were in. Unfortunately, guess who got the job of scraping the dough off the floor and off the baskets? It is an event I will never forget. I also never purchase refrigerator biscuits first when I go shopping.
The second memory is about the frozen lemonade. One of my friends figured out that for ten cents we could buy a can of frozen lemonade. That frozen concentrate was just that, “concentrated”. It was STRONG!! We all bought a can of frozen lemonade (regular or pink) and sat out on the front steps of the store with a popsicle stick for a spoon. We pried the lid off and then stuck the popsicle stick into the lemonade and licked it off. WOW! WHAT A ZING!! One can of lemonade concentrate was about all we could eat during our break if we ate fast. We had discovered a new snack. Everything went OK until almost all of us started feeling a little sick to our stomachs. I guess the concentrate was a little too much for them. Anyway, we were all sick but survived. Eating frozen lemonade concentrate never appealed to me again. As I think about it, I guess it didn’t do me any harm but I wonder whether that concentrate somehow changed my genes so that my children prefer STRONG lemonade or punch. I guess we will never know.