PAPA'S STORE

Our mailing address was simply “Complete, Mississippi,” since we picked up our mail at the Complete Post Office which made its home in the M. J. Stone General Store. In fact at one time, before I was born, Papa was postmaster since he and Mr. Jim Cody had originally built and operated the store as McArthur and Cody General Store and Wagon Yard. The general store carried a wide variety of merchandise, much of which was still on the shelves when I was growing up. I remember that there were shelf after shelf of old discolored shoe boxes. Whether they had shoes in them, I don’t know. There was also hardware and groceries, of course. During my young days I bought a lot of nails by the pound there to use in my various building projects. As time went on the business became primarily a grocery store as there was more competition and faster transportation into the big department stores in town. One of the nice parts of the old store was the fact that you could charge all of your purchases and little sales slips were filed in a big metal file cabinet on the counter under your name. At the end of the month all these sales slips could be manually added up and hopefully paid. I remember in later years some of our neighbors ran a store and my Papa indicated that they owed him money that was never paid.