When Pops and Gran moved to Pryor, they opened a little grocery store on our block.  You could do that back then--because there weren't laws against it.  Pops got his saw rigged up and turned their garage into a store, on the corner--open to the street.  Bread, milk, flour, oatmeal, sugar, cheese, etc.  Just the basics that everyone needed everyday.  Pops had a big heart and knew how hard people had making ends meet during the war, so he let people who ran out of money keep a running "tab" until payday.  Half the neighborhood owed him money.

But come payday, most of them caught up.  If they didn't, they lost their "tab."  Except for the children.  He doled out penny candy to kids who would never have money to buy anything sweet.  And for Bill, Ann and me, he would put Coca-cola in the freezer and rotate the glass bottles until the cola  turned to slush.  He seemed to know the right moment to take them out before they blew their caps.  Every day when school was out, we would run to the store to see if he had slushed us a cola.

He kept lunch-meat by the roll, with a slicer and scale.  You could buy one slice, or a dozen.  Thick or thin.  And when he got to the end of the roll of lunch meat, he would save the end pieces for us three grand-children.  Bologna and frozen Coca-cola.  It doesn't get any better than that.  The bologna was wrapped in some kind of "skin" which was tied off on each end with a piece of white twine, so that you had to work at chewing the last bits of bologna out of the end pieces.

And banana popsicles.  He usually had those in the freezer as well.  However, our mothers set limits on the sweets we could have.  There was a limit.  But if it wasn't our day to get a slush, Gran would have cookies in the kitchen in the house.  I have no idea how we kept our teeth intact.  Gran and Pops were a regular sweet shop.

Carolyn's folks ran the theater.  If I had known her then, I could have gotten in free.  As it was, we went every Saturday--for a dime--and if we were lucky and hadn't spent our quarter allowance for the week, maybe a bag of popcorn.  Roy Rogers, Hop-along Cassidy, Gene Autry and serials that ran for a few minutes and ended when somebody was ready to fall off a cliff--you had to come back the following Saturday to find out what happened next.  And the news.  We had no TV, so all the war news was on film at the movies.  That's when we got our weekly dose of reality.