Editor’s note: We have heard from so many readers who enjoyed reading Bill Boyd’s columns about growing up in Marysville during the 1930s and ‘40s that we are going to rerun columns 1 through 52 on Fridays for the next year.
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Soda fountain memories
Growing up in Marysville during the 1930s and ‘40s was great. One of my favorite memories was the commercial area in the center of town, where there must have been 60 or so retail businesses. I’m talking about the small, two-block area along Main and Fifth streets. I recently took a 1940 mental walk through that section of town and I went inside each business to reacquaint myself with the stores and the people who owned or worked in each one.
One of the nicest mental visits I had was with Earl Chiesa, who operated a soda fountain, candy and cigar store on West Fifth Street, about where Dave Cook’s real estate office is. Earl’s father, who had immigrated from Italy in the late 19th century, operated a produce store in that location. When that business disbanded, Earl and his wife converted the store into a restaurant which they operated for several years. Then sometime in the early 1930s they converted it into the Chiesa’s that I remember.
The physical layout was not impressive. On your right as you entered the narrow store was a tan marble soda fountain. It was probably 15 feet or so long, and it was backed end-to-end by a mirror that made the small store seem larger than it actually was. There were no stools at the soda fountain, so customers had to stand to enjoy the ice cream dishes, milkshakes, sodas and fruit flavored phosphates. Or they could take them to the few booths that lined the walls further back in the store.
Directly across from the soda fountain were two large glass showcases, with heavily scratched tops that bore witness of the thousands of coins that had slid across them over the years. The first case contained a wide assortment of cigar boxes. When a customer wanted a cigar, Earl reached into the showcase, removed the entire box and let the customer pick out as many cigars as he wanted.
Sitting atop that showcase was an old “Midland Jump Spark” cigar lighter that obviously had a lot of years on it, and it fascinated me as a kid. The business part of the lighter contained a sparking mechanism and the tank that could be filled with white gasoline. All this was mounted on top of an oak box which contained two large dry cell batteries to power the unit. When a customer bought a cigar, he could push down on a lever and a spark would jump, creating a flame to light the cigar – pretty cool I always thought.
The next glass showcase was the one which really fascinated me because it held his candies. There were no Hershey or Clark bars or any other mass-produced candies. Everything in the show case was homemade. When the family produce store closed, Earl’s brother moved to Richwood and opened a confectionery. So on a regular basis, Earl drove there, where he and his brother spent the day making candy. At the end of the day he loaded the candy in his car and drove back to Marysville to stock his showcase.
Most of Earl’s candies were chocolates. They were all great, but I was always partial to his maple creams and peanut clusters. My favorite, however, was Earl’s taffy. It was made in large, white blocks about 18 inches long, seven inches wide and six inches high. It was hard as a rock, so Earl kept a small hammer on the shelf. When someone wanted taffy, he would strike the block and break off bite-size pieces which he put in a small, brown paper bag and weighed on a counter-top scale. Earl priced his taffy by weight, but I never heard anyone order it that way. I just asked for “a dime’s worth” or 15 cents worth, depending on how flush I was at the time.
It would have been a mistake to try to bite off a piece of that taffy as you would risk breaking a tooth. The correct procedure was simply to put a bite-size piece in your mouth and hold it there for a short time. It didn’t take long until that rock-like chunk turned into a soft, chewy piece of heaven. We’re talking about world class candy, folks (if there is such a thing.)
Now, a word about Earl Chiesa himself. He was a stout man, not fat, but stout … maybe five feet nine or so in height. I don’t believe I ever saw him when he wasn’t wearing a crisp white shirt, and a white apron tied around his waist. His arms were always bare, summer and winter, and he had a habit of rubbing his bare forearms as he spoke. Earl’s voice was loud, if not booming, and he spoke with the slightest hint of an accent. But it was what he said, not how he said it, that made it so much fun to talk with him.
He often talked with me about this country and how proud he was to be an American citizen. He served in the army in World War I and sometimes swapped war stories at the soda fountain with his friend Elwood Sawyer, another local World War I veteran. Earl told me once that some of his friends were trying to get him to go back to Italy on vacation to see his “homeland.” His response to me was that this was his home country, not Italy, and he wanted to do a lot of traveling to see this country before going anywhere else.
Sometime in the 1960s, after his wife passed away, Earl decided to close the business. An auction was held on the premises, at which they sold the contents of the store. I wanted to buy that Midland Jump Spark cigar lighter that I had admired as a kid, but the auctioneer told me it was not going to be sold.
A couple weeks later, I received a phone call from Earl. He lived in an apartment over the store, and he said he would like to talk with me. I went to see him, and after chatting for a while, he left the room and came back with the cigar lighter. He gave it to me and said he remembered how much I liked it when I was a kid, and he wanted me to have it. I am so glad he gave it to me, for although I can never go back into Earl’s store again, I can look at that cigar lighter and enjoy the memories it creates in my mind.