You Know You Live in a Small Town When.............

General store plus farm machinery parts yard next to it.

I am in to find a used starter for John Deere tractor.
Owner says his used parts guy isn't in , but he will take a quick look.
Says to me.............."I'll be right back"
A young guy in cowboy hat comes in and opens cooler where half a ham, a big knife, half a loaf of bread are. He takes 2 slices of bread, cuts a thick slice of ham and makes a sandwich. He then walks behind front counter and takes a Copenhagen.

At the end of the counter is a tablet, wooden pencil, and a paper holder that resembles an upright nail. He writes down his purchases, rips off paper and puts it on nail and slowly leaves while opening his snuff.

Owner comes back in ( he found me a starter) and I tell him he had a customer.
He looks at paper and says.............." Troy stops in here a lot
 

Last small town I lived in had the post office, liquor and beer store, video rentals and restaurant all in one building..... revolving door of course.
 

When you finally have the option to pay by card at the pump at the only gas station in town ...that happened 10 years ago after I'd moved back from the city and was I ever a happy camper!

Watching as a kid when the parent's bank rolled a branch bank into town on the back of a semi ...then out again within a couple of years because there wasn't enough business.
 
"You call a wrong number and are supplied with the correct
one."

That used to happen all the time to our (now) fiends. Our small town only had one telephone prefix-263,but right around the time we moved here 28 years ago,they added 262. Since we were new here,we got 262. Our kids had their own phone line and apparently kids used to call our (now) friends constantly,as they had the same number as our kids,except 263 instead of 262. All the local kids were still used to 263 being the only prefix. I can only imagine what Kevin and Traci must have gone through...in 2012,my hubby started working with Kevin and we became close friends. They bring up every so often what it was like to get all those calls. They were good about it though-they would tell the kids,"No,you want 262,not 263....
 
Pool Hall served as news center for ranchers, feed store owners and the town's movers and shakers in the early A.M. hours

Pool Hall opened at 6-7 A. M. ,so ranchers who had to get in early, buy feed... stop by pool hall to gossip about beef prices; merchants would drop in to gage prospects of increasing inventory...Pool Hall was a congregation hall for those that ran the town.

About twice a year, the banker would canvass pool hall, telling those that
had outstanding loans:
"I need money in the bank by tomorrow, the state auditors are coming next week and were showing a deficit!

Those that had loans, would scrape up a few hundred dollars each, so
the banker would not be in trouble with auditors.

It was a tiny bank, but it was the hub of economics in this town of less than a thousand people.

Can you imagine today, a banker soliciting money at a the pool hall?
The compliance rate was close to 100%, the bank was a community venture.
 
Dynamite was a required item in my tiny town which set on a granite. The whole county set on a outcrop of granite.

Western Auto store sold dynamite, I was there one day with the boss who was purchasing dynamite.
We walked to back of store where he keep the dynamite. He had a few boxes, the one he had open and wanted to sell the boss dynamite from was old, very old.

dynamite is wrapped in paper, which is dry (oily resides means the dynamite is becoming unstable)
Boss told merchant, 'no you open one of those new boxes which contained dynamite with dry paper.'

We got the dynamite, departed; boss cussed merchant, 'that %$#_! was
trying to sell me dynamite that was five, ten years old. all it's good
for is killing anyone that messes with it.' Oh he was hot!.

We waited for the Western Auto Store to explode and disappear, never did.

Also, can you imagine buying dynamite today? The restrictions are tight,
I don't know how construction firms obtain explosives: I'm sure it requires gobs of paperwork...
 
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