The corner grocery store where we played our prank is visible in left background. The garages are at the right rear. That's me at around age 8 or 9 with Duchess, Aunt Dorie and Uncle John Hofius's dog. My Uncle Paul's Ford is just behind me and Duchess.
By Bob Loomis
When I and my childhood best friend, Jimmy O'Sullivan, were about 14 and 13, respectively, we were old enough to begin to want something besides bicycle riding, toy soldiers and cowboy movies to pass summer vacation. In those days you got three months off, a lot of time to fill when you were tumbling into the grey area between childhood and adolescence. One day we came up with a practical joke that killed two or three hours. Its victims were Hugo and Max, who ran the corner grocery store we'd patronized for years.
So, a bit of back story about the grocery store and the state of food shopping in Bell, California, around 1950.
In those days there were no supermarkets as we know them now, no 7-11 or am/pm stores, and most gas stations didn't sell food other than maybe having a soft drink cooler and maybe some nuts or candy bars on display with the oil cans and engine additives. What would later become convenience store space at service stations was usually an auto repair area with one or two bays for car repair and lube jobs.
The very few larger markets in our area were independently run, not huge chains. I always picture the Owl Market, at Santa Fe and Florence Avenue in Huntington Park, an L-shaped building with a circular structure in the angle of the L. That part was shaped and painted to look like a giant, one-and-a-half-story owl staring down at the parking lot. Pretty neat, but far enough away from us that we seldom shopped there. There was another large market at the corner of California Avenue and Florence Avenue that we also infrequently patronized.
In contrast, we went to Hugo and Max's little store on the corner quite often. It was where my Mom or Grandma would send me when we needed a loaf of bread or quart of milk. In those days, memory tells me, a small loaf of soft, white Weber's or Barbara Ann white bread was 18 cents a loaf and a quart of milk about the same price. Jimmy and I and the other neighborhood kids also went to the store on hot summer days to buy a nickel soda pop or ice cream or candy bar if we had the money. We would save the empty bottles at home then claim the return deposits to add to our purchasing power. Royal Crown Cola (RC Cola) and Dad's Old-Fashioned Root Beer were my favorite soft drinks, Eskimo Pie my favorite ice cream bar.
The grocery store -- I actually can't remember its formal business name, it was just "the store" -- was in a two-story, red brick building that had three retail spaces on the ground floor facing East Gage Avenue at the corner of California Avenue. Grandma's house was at 6421 California, diagonally across from the store with a view of its back lot. I'd guess both Grandma's and the store were built in the 1910s or '20s. From east to west, the retail spaces housed a tiny shoe repair shop (ah, the scent of leather and shoe polish in there!), the grocery store and a fairly large corner space that was usually vacant.
I only recall two periods when that third space wasn't vacant. The first occupant was a sort of vaguely interesting (if you were bored enough) second-hand store selling mostly used furniture. It lasted longer than its successor after another period of vacancy, a truly awful greasy spoon cafe. The owners had acquired a used restaurant counter and stools somewhere and installed them along the longer east wall. The stools all wobbled when you sat on them and were too low because in their original configuration they'd have been elevated on a step-up riser. Scattered in the remaining space was a motley assortment of used and mismatched tables and chairs that also wobbled and tilted when you used them. It looked as though more furniture was needed, seemed somehow hugely empty, especially under the high ceiling that made everything look out of proportion, weirdly wrong, surrealistic even before I knew what that word meant. I ate a hamburger there just once, the burger of doom, for doom was the aura that emanated from everything about the cafe. It soon closed. Its owners, now only dim ghosts in chef's caps and blouses, and all the accoutrements vanished. It was vacant from then until I moved away from the neighborhood about three years later.
***(Photo here)***
Hugo and Max and their families resided in two apartments upstairs over the ground floor. The whole building was at the front of a long, rectangular lot that had an old, four-car garage along the eastern edge at the rear of the property. The rest of the lot was dirt and rocks, a large parking area that never had more than one or two cars in it. A clothesline strung on pulleys ran from the top landing of the back stairs of the apartments to a pole attached to one corner of the garages. On it, Max's and Hugo's wives clothes-pinned their weekly washings. Hugo and his wife had a daughter a bit younger than Jimmy and me. We never knew her name or the wives' names, though occasionally Hugo's wife would work at the counter in the store. We never socialized with the daughter. I have no idea what her name was or where she went to school, unusual since we neighborhood kids always knew everyone for two blocks around.
My Uncle Paul sometimes referred to the grocery store people as "kikes." I didn't exactly know what that meant at first, but could tell by the way he said it that to him they were not worthy of acceptance as fellow human beings. My guess looking back is that they were Jewish immigrants who'd somehow left Eastern Europe or Germany before the Nazis took over and prior to the Holocaust and World War II. They spoke English fairly well, with slight accents. I don't really know how long they'd been in the United States or where they were from originally. I think probably my Uncle Paul's scornful prejudice must have helped prepare the ground for our prank. There was a history of racism in the Love family. Grandpa William Love, Mom's and Paul's father whom I never met, was from Tennessee and lived and worked in oilfields, mostly in Oklahoma and Texas, for much of his adult life. I was told he referred to my father, a Spanish descendant of a historically important New Mexico family, as "that goddamned Mexican."
In any case, Jimmy and I didn't give much thought to the sociological or cultural aspects of our prank. We were bored, just hanging out in my Mom's and my apartment over the garages in the two-unit rental that Paul had built in the former Victory Garden area behind Grandma's house. He was always the best businessman in the family (a Capricorn) and he saw opportunity in the huge demand for housing in Southern California after World War II. It seemed everyone who'd passed through the state in the military during the war wanted to flee the snowstorms, tornados, hurricanes, floods or other miserable weather in their home states and move to the land of sunshine, orange groves and ocean views. Most didn't know or care that their very movement west would smother the best aspects of California living, wiping out the orange groves and jamming the roads with traffic, fouling the air with smog. Almost everyone focused on the short-term economic opportunities of growth and development. Money almost always trumped aesthetics and quality of life, especially in those days before anyone but the occasional maverick or sociologist began factoring in environmental consequences. Humans were rulers of this planet and expected to extract whatever they wanted with no thought to the future. It would last forever, an unending cornucopia. Nor were we thinking about any of that when the prank was hatched. We were just trying to find new summer fun and adventure.
The trigger was, as so often in my bookish life, a fascinating tome about spiders I'd been reading. It was a key factor in my overcoming my previous terror of them or at least seeing them a bit more realistically. The author, a scientist, believed spiders capable of extremely logical thought and behavior. As to the prank, the book provided its main feature in a chapter on an aggressive South American spider that is deadly venomous, large enough to attack and kill birds, and moves so fast that it can be extremely dangerous to encounter. Its name I forget. It is not the Golden Bird Eater, and now I wonder if memory has conflated what I read in the book with an article about a deadly arachnid that I'd read in a True magazine that may well have been creatively embellished by the author and editors. Whatever the case, reading about some such spider seeded our prank.
We formulated the plan and assembled the main prop: a shoebox filled with green weeds. We added a large yellow weed with long stems that we bent to look like huge spider legs. We punched a few "air holes" in the lid and headed for the grocery store, eagerly anticipating the reactions we hoped to see. We weren't disappointed.
We walked in nonchalantly, me carrying the box cradled under my left arm as we passed the counter.
"Hi, boys. Whatcha got there?" asked Hugo from behind the counter.
"A spider," I said. "I got it from a zoological supply company." As I explained what it was, Max came from behind the butcher counter just across the aisle from the checkout counter and listened intently.
"Can we see it?" said Hugo.
"I guess a quick look would be OK," I said, "but we have to be very careful and it'll have to be very quick. We can't take chances with it getting loose."
I set the box on the counter and snapped the lid open just a crack at one end, just long enough for Hugo to see the fake spider legs, then clapped it shut again.
"I shouldn't be risking that," I said, "It's very fast, very aggressive and very poisonous. One bite could be fatal. If it gets loose, catching it would be almost impossible."
"Then it shouldn't be in here," said Hugo, a worried look on his face.
"Don't worry, we just need to buy a can of soup, then we'll be out of here," I said, and we moved toward the back of the store even as he objected that he really didn't want us there with the spider. We stopped at the back shelf where canned goods were shelved, reassuring him that we'd be done quickly. Back by the soup shelf I pretended to drop the box.
"OH, NO!" I yelled, "It got away!"
"Got away?" exclaimed Hugo with fear in his voice. "You have to catch it!" "Nope, not us!" I replied as we headed for the door. "We're getting out of here, and you'd better do the same! That thing's too dangerous to take any chances with. We'll call the American Society of Archnidologists (something I made up on the spot) and get someone to come and trap it."
"And you better close the store till they get here!" said Jimmy as he followed me out the door.
Hugo was too stunned to answer more than a plaintive "Close the store?" as we beat a hasty retreat out the door and back to the apartment.
After a brief period of gleeful restraint, curiosity got the best of us and we snuck around behind the vacant service station across California from the grocery store, peered around the corner of the building and saw Max and Hugo standing in front of the store nervously awaiting the arrival of the spider rescue squad, which of course didn't exist.
I remember little of the rest of the afternoon. Now that the prank had worked, we lost interest and did other things. An hour or two later we again looked to see if Hugo and Max were still waiting in front of the store, but by then they'd apparently figured out the hoax and gone back inside.
After that, it was awkward to go back to the store. I put it off as long as possible. When I finally did go back on some errand for my Mom or Grandma, no mention of the prank was made by either them or me. An awkward and formal silence prevailed, the transaction was quickly completed and I left, greatly relieved.
I'd like to apologize here and now to Hugo and Max, but it's almost certainly a posthumous apology where they're concerned. They were older than my Uncle Paul and he departed this life years ago at age 82. The prank mildly embarrasses me now, but then again, it's the best, most elaborate practical joke I ever devised so my red face comes with a smile.
