The Small Neighborhood Grocery Stores

Before the modern supermarket gained widespread popularity in the 1950s, the small mom-and-pop neighborhood grocery stores played an important role in the lives of everyday people. These small stores made it possible for shoppers to walk a short distance from their homes to acquire whatever food and goods they needed, all without getting in a car. Some of the businesses even delivered.

Lorain had many of these small stores in the older neighborhoods, often on corner lots. Some of the businesses were part of a larger chain; others simply went by the name of the family that owned and operated them. The family usually lived above or behind the actual store.

(I’ve written about some of these stores, some of which were part of the Food Fair chain.)

Over where my mother grew up on Sixth Street just off Oberlin Avenue during the 1930s and 40s, there were several of these small mom-and-pop stores. 

One of them was just a few short steps away, at Fifth and Brownell. That’s a photo of it as it looks today at the top of this post. It has recently been remodeled and converted into some sort of residence.

Back in the early 1930s, it was an A&P. But by the early 1940s, it was simply Durham’s, run by Brundage Durham.

Mom remembers Durham’s pretty well, although it wasn’t the main store where her mother shopped for her groceries. Grandma seemed to treat it as a convenience store – as a place to send Mom to pick up a bottle of ketchup or something to get her out of the house.

One of the stories Mom likes to tell is how she remembers going there as a young girl, perhaps with a scribbled list provided by her mother, and telling the owner she wanted a can of Chicken Campbells Soup. Of course, Mr. Durham reacted quizzically before correcting her. “You mean, Campbells Chicken Soup.” (I still ask Mom if she’d like Chicken Campbells Noodle Soup for lunch sometimes.)

Grandma was kind of funny. Although Durham’s was only a short distance away, she preferred the grocery run by Clayton Miller over at 1009 Seventh Street, across Oberlin Avenue and next to Lorain High School. She even felt that the Hills Brothers Coffee that Mr. Miller sold was better than the Hills Brothers that, say, Fisher Foods was selling over on Broadway. “The cans are fuller,” was the way she explained it to Mom.

(The store next to Lorain High School no longer exists. It was eventually lost when the school expanded to the south.)

Grandma also shopped at stores run by the Aquilla family. John Aquilla had a meat market at 365 Oberlin Avenue. Here’s a photo of Mom (at far left) in front of it with some of her school friends.

Paul Aquilla had a small grocery store at 560 Washington Avenue, across from the old Lorain High School. I remember seeing the sign for it for many years during my trips to the library.

But getting back to Clayton Miller.

Strangely enough, when my parents built their house on E. Skyline Drive, my mother discovered that his daughter Marilyn and her family lived in the next block from us. I even played with her son. Their last name was Simpson, and they had a big, stylized ’S’ on the front of the house over the garage that remained there for decades after they moved.