Grocer Eben Payne: 1918 • Cobb Corner
Courtesy of The Truro Historical Society, Cobb Archives
We finally arrived at Truro Depot, one and a half house late! As we all stood on the platform our maid took one look at Truro and burst into tears. (This kept on for two or three days and in desperation we sent her back to New York.
A vintage Model T took us aboard, buried under baggage, boxes, crates, and mail bags. Ephraim, our pilot, asked where to and we tried to tell him, but his reply was, “Uncle Sam comes first.” Couldn’t argue about that because there was a war on. Peaceful enough around here, so much so that our maid burst into another spasm of tears. First stop was the post office to get the mail unloaded. Lo and behold next door was another building. Over the door was a sign that a certain Eben Paine sold groceries. An oasis in a desert! At that particular moment I thought the word groceries was the most beautiful and poetic in the English language.
The building itself sort of leaned away from the wind and that effect was heightened by the fact that the roadmen had graded the road so that one end of the building was slightly in the air and the other was on the ground. You approached this emporium up two sets of steps, going to the door over which was a sign “EBEN PAYNE, GROCERIES” done somewhat in the manner of a ship’s quarter board, but it didn’t quite come off. On each side of the door were plastered posters advertising all sorts of things like – Horseshoe Plug Sweet Canoral Cigarettes, Bull Durham Tobacco, Kickapoo Indian Medicine – all left behind by travelling salesmen in the hope of stirring up some business. They gave this drab building a rather festive look.
We went into the store full of hope to be greeted by Eben Paine himself, full of smiles. For a man who lived a life of quiet desperation, he kept up a good front. He was of a slim and wiry build with a clean, pinky complexion, white hair, droopy mustache, topped off wit a battered top hat known in those days as a boater. The boater was festooned with cobwebs. It was a hard job to duck them in the rather gloomy room.
The interior was a large rectangular room with counters on each side. Back of the counters were shelves with canned goods and canisters of various kinds of tea. Then there were coffee in bags, barrels of crackers, the usual ball of string hanging in an iron container over the counter, not much in the way of wrapping paper – the Boston Globe did the trick. Perhaps a ham, a half-wheel of cheese and, of course, the usual glass-enclosed penny candy assortment. The smell that pervaded all of this was that of kerosene. It hit you right off as you came in the door. Everything you bought here seemed to taste of it, even the canned goods. Oil stoves were coming in and the old wood-burning kitchen range was going out.
We wanted meat, we were hungry. Getting a piece of meat here was quite a business. Paine kept his meat in an enormous ice chest. The ice came from the ponds and was full of greenery and sand. Quite decorative but not too appetizing. The meat was buried in the is in this chest which opened at the top. Out came a chunk. Chunk describes it perfectly. Eben took a long look at us and decide how much we could afford and started cutting away. When he got to the bone he grabbed the same hatched he used for chopping kindling and hacked away. Then we bundled ourselves and our groceries into the Model T and started off for our cottage on the beach.
On arrival there we could hear the breakers but couldn’t see them because the windows were sand-blasted. What we wanted more than scenery was some food. Into the kitchen we went and found an oil stove. Hadn’t the remotest idea how to light it. Rh proprietor came along in the nick of time and things began to look up. When the meat got to the table it smelled pretty good (at that point a fired old boot would have been nectar) but it tasted of kerosine! That was our first day on Cape Cod in mid-June of 1918.
(Adapted from Edward A. Wilson, guest columnist in The Cape Codder, circa 1950’s)