Full Text of the Excerpt

ALLEN TULLOS:

And you say people used to come in here on Saturday night sometimes?

HERMAN NEWTON TRUITT:

Well, yes. The time that I've told you about this morning when we were talking was when my father operated the store. He kept it open late. We used to, when we started, keep it open till eight or nine o'clock in the night. But when World War II came along and goods were scarce, rationed and all, we started closing at six o'clock. We maintained that for the rest of the period when we were trying to do a full amount and do all the business that we could. We started our retirement nearly two years ago. I mean closing out the business two years ago. We started about January the first, 1977. So two years we've been on this. But when I was a schoolboy, along about the time I was in seventh grade—I remember particularly that—father would stay open until nine o'clock on Saturday nights. At that time they had a bunch of pretty regular customers who would maybe celebrate a little bit by…smelling the bottle, or tasting a little when they'd come by. Sometimes there was a jews harp, and a violin, what you'd call a fiddle. Play the fiddle and jews harp around on Saturday night. They'd sit around with—they had pig feet in the barrel, crackers in the barrel. They'd eat pig's feet and crackers and sausage and snack like a person drinking likes to do sometimes.