A Simple Life

Just thinking. On January 1, 1941, my parents, their young daughter in tow, took possession of a small country grocery a mile south of Pine Bluff, Arkansas on what they called back then “The New Warren Highway.” I doubt if a Walton offspring has ever been as proud of a possession as were George and Mable von Tungeln of that little store.

They didn’t buy it with inherited money. In fact, a short time before, they were sharecropping on someone else’s land over to the east in the small community of Ladd. On an impulse, George purchase a hog and with skills learned from his father, began to supplement their income peddling pork from a beat-up van to customers in the city. That turned out to be a successful venture and then the store came up for sale. They bought if from a named Case. The rest is history.

Three kids grew up in the house connected to the back of that store. The family never got rich, but they lived a comfortable life. The couple rose early to catch the morning workers, and stayed open late to serve them going home. Saturday nights would find them “waiting on” the crowd heading home from a day in the big city. A small Phillips radio would blast The Grand Ole Opry and the kids would fight sleep until sleep won.

My father was not what you would call a brilliant marketer. I don’t think that appealed to him. He refused to stock the front counter with “impulse items,” believing that a person shouldn’t purchase what they didn’t need, much less what they couldn’t afford. I never heard him push a customer to buy an additional item.

But he never refused a family food when they needed it, money or no money, white or black, known or unknown. The only time I recall his refusing a request was when a man, after drinking up his salary, sent a hungry child down for a sack of feed for his deer dog.

A tornado ravaged the community in 1947, killing 32 people and destroying any number of homes, including those on either side of our place. George responded by giving away his entire stock to those in need. He faced bankruptcy and they had to start over. The newspaper in Pine Bluff recommended a monument, under the headline “George said ‘if you need it, come and get it.’” The small community of Lonsdale, near Hot Springs, collected some $40 and sent it to him after reading the newspaper account.

The couple never refused lodging to a relative in need of a place to stay. A storage area above the garage lay filled with GI bags of sailors and marines who had returned with no place to go. They furnished homes for both grandmothers. They never refused a child anything they had to have to compete evenly in life.

It’s a simple story. It would have been more interesting I’m sure if the one grocery had led to another, then a chain, then a place on the New York Stock Exchange.

I’m not sure they would have sought that even if they had envisioned it. Mable was satisfied with her family and the latest Elvis record. He seemed satisfied to sit around a wood stove in back of the store, during the morning’s gap in trade, and gossip with the deer hunters and fishermen. Sometimes they might even share a joke if they knew Mable wasn’t listening beyond the screen door that separated store from home.

They ran the store until 1980. By then, country grocery stores had become “convenience stores,” and there was still money to be made. They made some, retired and had a few good, restful years before blindness, cancer, and depression took their awful tolls.

There’s only a handful of direct kin left who remember this kind and gentle couple. The young ones don’t know a thing about them, probably never will. America will never, though, forget their kind.

With one more later, this was
all they ever needed.