By William "Bill" Peck

Once upon a time Hillside had a store-two if you counted Darnall's. So did Congress, Skull Valley, Kirkland and Yarnell. But, all that Bagdad had was a commissary. These were real honest to goodness general stores that stocked meat, fruits, vegetables, Blazo, kerosene, rabbit feed, Levi's, gas and an assortment of veterinarian supplies. Bag Balm was used most likely as hand lotion even though the label didn't specify it for people.

There were other things not specified for people such as Coke and aspirin, the forerunner of recreational drugs that the daring swilled when there was a nickel left over from payday after the groceries were bought. 

Rice's store sat nestled against the Santa Fe Railroad track, a mere 20 feet from the team track in the wide spot in the right-of- way. Due to its location, the building was over 100 feet long and a scant 30 feet wide. When I was only 12 years old, I clerked in that "Lum and Abner" establishment, cut beef, stocked shelves and was the most powerful 12 year old in Yavapai County in 1942. I got to hand out contraband butter, meat, bacon, shortening, sugar and various canned items that were the staple items from under the counter to favored customers. 

Wartime rationing dictated what you could buy. Butter required 12 red ration stamps and for beef you needed 5 stamps per pound. Oleomargarine or oleo as we called it, required only 5 red stamps. It came in a tub uncolored and bland white like lard. The coloring came in a separate envelope that had to be kneaded into the oleo until the dye was evenly distributed making it look a little more like food and less like candle wax. This was a job usually thrust upon some poor kid that required almost as many calories to do as winning the better butter from warm cream. 

The oleo came this way because farmers had more votes than Kraft Foods who made Parkay. Despite this disadvantage, most of us used oleo because the saving in red stamps was so great--only half the price of butter. Actually the taste wasn't so bad, especially, if compared to some of the local rancid butter that suffered from lack of refrigeration. 

Sugar was allotted about a pound a month per head and things such as bacon and cheese were equally dear and often not available because you didn't have the ration stamps even if you'd foregone butter. 

There were 3 classes of gas rationing priorities: the A stamp for those of us not important, the B stamp for someone who needed his vehicle for work like farmers, ranchers and a higher class of important people such as politicians, the C stamp was reserved for other people who needed their cars like doctors. All I can recall is that an A stamp entitled you to 4 gallons of gas a week, just enough to get you from Bagdad to the nearest store and back. No wonder Rice's store flourished. 

At Rice's, we grossed about $3,000 a month, a huge amount considering a dollar bought a pair of Levi's and two bits or twenty-five cents would buy a gallon of 67 % octane gas. This was self-serve gas that you pumped into the glass tank above the fuel pump until the level stood exactly on the measure mark. Any excess gas was drained back into the underground tank. We were all honorable people and didn't fudge. Al Rice was watching with his binoculars from inside the store anyway. 

We Westerners, as distinguished from city folk, had a distinct advantage in the ration stamp system since a large part of the food sold by Rice's store was local butter, eggs, beef and pork. We weren't quite so honorable in the matter of the ration stamps since we collected them from outlanders and fudged upon turning them in to the local ration board. This gave us buying power with the wholesalers and resulted in a considerable surplus of scarce items that we doled out to the previously mentioned better customers. I learned at a very early age about patronage and should have entered politics. 

Tires were definitely inferior, even to the standards of the day. They were made of 'S3,' a rubber made synthetics and reclaimed rubber. They were the first of their kind and guaranteed to blow out if you ventured over the national, wartime speed limit of 35 MPH. 
We could scarcely manage 35 in our jalopies downhill over the roads we had to travel so all of that was moot. 

A trip to Hillside from the mines was considered by our patrons to be a great bi-weekly adventure where one could indulge in the local luxury of seeing the evening passengers train disgorge its cargo of people while sitting in the shade in great sophistication on Rice's verandah sipping Barq's root beer and speculating who the passengers were that disembarked from the Pullman car. Chair car passengers didn't intrigue us so much. 

It wasn't a "superstore" that ended all of this; it was a national chain grocery store. When they opened a full-size Safeway store in Prescott, we knew we were all doomed. When the war started and people left the boonies for the armed services and the coast, they returned at war's end with money to spend on newly acquired appetites for such things as nylons and frozen foods. Rice's couldn't compete. One by one the country stores folded, in some instances turning into bars and later into convenience stores. 

Now that the roads are better and we drive 35 through the school zones, it's a different world. The passenger trains are gone and we wish we had them back. This new, even greater sophistication of watching television has replaced the old, leaving something to be desired. The plots nowadays don't have much imagination. Though the jets fly over my house on the hill, they don't fly under the telegraph lines or clip 10 feet off the top off of the cottonwood tree in front of Darnell's store as they did in World War II. 

(William Peck is a long time resident of Hillside.) 



Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number: (bui234p). Reuse only by permission.
Although the fashions and supplies may have changed since this photo was snapped of this unidentified store around 1920, a similar atmosphere was probably found at Rice's store in Hillside, Arizona in the early 1940. Once very much a part of the landscape, these stores have almost been entirely replaced with modern big box grocery stores.