My First Walmart Experience

By Tom Poland 

 

How many of you remember the first time you stepped into a Walmart? If you go to Walmart regularly, you’ve probably forgotten the wonder you felt stepping into a store where you could buy most anything. For me, my first Walmart experience came in Georgia when I was just a kid, maybe nine, but there’s a problem with that. Sam Walton opened his first Wal-Mart Discount City store in Rogers, Arkansas, July 2, 1962, and I turned nine in 1958 in Lincolnton, Georgia. So, the math and geography don’t add up.

While you sort things out, let me tell you about that first Walmart experience. The building was, to me, large and so was the parking area but that was through a child’s eyes. This store offered customers a place to buy all kinds of supplies. You could get new tires on your car while you shopped. You could fill your car up with gas. You could buy sporting goods such as Zebco reels and fiberglass rods and plastic worms that smelled like licorice. You could buy groceries as well, and you could even get your kids toys. Seems I recall you could buy real guns there. I want to say a Mossberg .410 I got for Christmas came from there.

 

 

For a while, the store even served as a venue for square dances, that folk dance where four couples do-si-do the night away. During World War II the lady proprietor operated a bowling alley there and served hot dogs and hamburgers. As the TV ads say, “But wait, there’s more.” You could also get a haircut there. Even back then (Figured out the year yet?), this store recognized that customers liked making just one stop to meet many needs.

This retail center was, indeed, special and it stood right at the city limits on Highway 47 in Lincolnton, Georgia. I’m talking about the first Walmart-like store I ever saw, Wells Oil Company. Miss Minnie Wells, proprietor, was a visionary. Why go into town? Much of what you needed was right there.

Today when I drive past that store, my mind goes back to the days of youth. I see men pumping gas, a large stack of tires over near a service bay, and the small barbershop where Miss Minnie Wells once cut my hair. The outside is busy. Cars and trucks parked everywhere. Men doing things.

Inside, Miss Minnie’s store was a treat. To the right were the grocery store and the small barbershop. To the left was a collection of goods that included baseball gloves, Daisy BB guns, and fishing supplies. Things that made a boy’s heart leap. I bought my first transistor radio there for $10, an Arvin with a leather cover that snapped over a large battery compartment. (Plastic had not ascended to dominance.) My first BB gun, a Daisy lever-action gun came from there. I bought my only baseball glove there (a first basemen’s mitt), a baseball bat, and baseball there. (Just last weekend I found them while working on my late parent’s estate.)

Miss Minnie seemed stern seen through the eyes of a boy. She always dressed as a business lady … grey suit, black shoes with thick heels, and hair pulled into a bun. When I think of her glasses, I think of John Lennon’s gold wire-rimmed glasses. She was all business, the kind of lady who had no time for anything unrelated to her enterprise, no time for tomfoolery. She was practical, living alongside and above her business. She was generous, providing the church she and I belonged to complimentary heating oil.

JT, her husband, I recall, was jovial, always laughing and always working. Ruddy and quick to smile, I remember how he and Dad shared many a laugh.

Wells Oil Company: that was my first Walmart-like experience. Stop one time; take care of many needs. I’m sure stopping at Wells Oil Company saved a lot of folks many a trip to Augusta. If one of us was sick and needed something on Sunday evening or late at night, JT would open the store for Dad. So, in a way it was a round-the-clock enterprise, just like some Walmart superstores.

It’s interesting to speculate what might have become of that operation had it spread to other towns and caught on. Who knows? Today, people all over the country might be going to Wellsmart and maybe there’d even be a Minnie’s Club.

It’s been years since I stepped back inside that old building. I know it must have changed. Why shouldn’t it? Many layers of dust have since drifted over childhood. My Daisy BB gun fired its last BB long ago and is lost in time now. That old Arvin radio? Gone. My first baseman’s mitt? I have it once again, but it’s stiff as an old fellow with a bad case of arthritis. That old glove, bat, baseball, and my Zebco 202 are my sole surviving artifacts from Miss Minnie’s, relics of childhood, you could say.

I suppose I could stop by one more time, go inside, and see what memories I might revive, but I won’t. No offense to the owners today, but I doubt I ever stop by again. I’d rather see it in my head as it existed and not layer a new memory over that.

Outside of my childhood home, stores hold a special place in the memories I gathered as a boy. Standing tall among them are an old country store (Icy Cokes bobbing around in a vat), a small grocery store with a pool hall (the first pool table I ever saw), my one and only Five & Dime (smelled of hot dogs), an old pharmacy with marble counters (Cherry Cokes), and my first Walmart-like experience, Wells Oil Company.

 

 

Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
Email Tom about most anything. [email protected]

 

Tom Poland is the author of twelve books and more than 1,000 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press released his book, Georgialina, A Southland As We Knew It, in November 2015 and his and Robert Clark’s Reflections Of South Carolina, Vol. II in 2014. The History Press of Charleston published Classic Carolina Road Trips From Columbia in 2014. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture and speaks often to groups across South Carolina and Georgia, “Georgialina.”