If home-baked cakes in Hinsdale did not fall flat in the 1930s, then housewives and their families with cravings for something sweet to eat had Joe Nessel and a handful of small, family-owned grocery stores to thank.
Nessel of Oak Brook worked as a deliveryman for Leatherman’s, a store that sold mostly meat.
The stores, locked in friendly competition, provided a degree of customer service unimaginable today and kept at bay the minor household catastrophes their customers faced.
“I remember one time a lady called and she said, `Oh, I’m making a cake and I don’t have any yeast,'” Nessel said in an interview before his recent death at age 84.
Nessel saved the cake–and the customer’s day–when he selected a pack of Fleischmann’s Yeast from a shelf and rushed to deliver it to the customer’s home four blocks away.
At the time, the yeast cost 3 cents.
In the era before large chain stores dominated the marketplace, the local stores would likely have added the cost of the yeast to the customer’s personal charge account that was paid monthly.
These small groceries succeeded in building loyal customer bases by making deliveries and paying closing attention to customer’s needs, Nessel said.
The stores and their employees were driven by competition, but they also developed camaraderie. “I used to go roller skating [at area rinks] with all of the other delivery boys,” Nessel said.
If a store did not carry a particular brand of canned tomatoes or had a head of lettuce a customer needed, then the deliverymen would simply get the item at another store.
“You had to go to all these different stores,” Nessel recalled. “It got to the point where they knew me and I would just go to the cash register and ring up the sale myself.”
Customers doing their own shopping also would have made several stops, perhaps going from Leatherman’s, where they purchased a roast, to a nearby bakery for fresh bread, he said.
Stores played important roles in Hinsdale’s history. An Irishman named Lewis Morley opened the first general store in 1866. Another store, Fox Brothers,welcomed customers in the mid-1800s and was such an important fixture of the local scene that it provided a gathering spot for such organizations as the Village Board.
In his book “Hinsdale” (Hinsdale Doings, 1976; out of print) local writer Timothy H. Bakken reports that a pound of limburger cheese was 11 cents and 10 pounds of sugar was 55 cents. Those prices seem inexpensive, but, Bakken wrote, a good weekly wage was $15 at the time.
Oak Brook, which was not incorporated as a village until 1958, had a Jewel Food Store in what now seems an unlikely spot.
“It was quite large. I think it was on the spot where Talbot’s is today [in Oakbrook Center],” said Audrey Muschler, a past president of the Oak Brook Historical Society.
Although specialty stores–from ones that carry only breads to others that deal in exotic brands of coffees–are part of today’s retail landscape, some practices of the past seem to be gone forever.
Home deliveries are mostly obsolete and the advent of credit cards–along with the cost of bookkeeping–means that personal charge accounts are, for the most part, no longer available.
Hinsdale, however, still boasts a small grocery store called Kramer’s and the store still makes customer service a priority, said Tom Harris, a manager there for 28 years.
He said Kramer’s will hunt high and low to order items it does not usually carry for customers. Whether it’s hot peppers from New Mexico or herring from Alaska, “we’ll special order anything,” Harris said.
“If we can get our hands on it, we will.”
