My Uncle Marcus Hanna was one of those unique characters that you just don’t see anymore.
He was born shortly after the turn of the last century and grew up in the edge of Georgia in an area called Hanna Town. Hanna Town is about four or five miles west of Faceville.
He married one of my father’s sisters, Odean. They were married for over sixty years when Uncle Marcus passed away back in the late 1980’s. My Aunt Odean passed away about four years ago at the age of 94.
They had a son, Aubrey, and three grandchildren that are along about my age.
Uncle Marcus and his brother Delmas owned a store on South Adams Street in Quincy for many years.
They had bought the little store back in the 1930’s.
I remember Uncle Marcus telling me that the first grocery order they bought from Higdon Grocery was about $30 and Mr. Burl Higdon had called on them for the order.
I remember a lot of things about the store, it had a unique smell.
You smelled it as soon as you walked in the door. It was something like the smell of smoked meat, peppermint candy and tobacco mixed together.
It was in the days before self-service and most of the groceries, tobacco and medicine items were behind the counter.
The cash register was one of those with the big numbers on the keys and sitting next to it was one of those hand cranked adding machines.
By the time I came along, Cecil “Joe” Tolar had set up his watch repair service in the front of the store.
Mr. Joe always had a handful of watches he was working on and to this day I have always wondered how he kept all of those hundreds of watch parts separated.
By the way, Mr. Joe is still around at 95 years old.
I always liked to go with my Dad to the Hanna Brothers store. I always went to the candy counter first and usually Uncle Marcus or Uncle Delmus would give me a piece of hard candy.
I have many stories about Uncle Marcus, but one about the store I want to share with you.
Like any two brothers, Uncle Marcus and Uncle Delmus had their moments. It was during one of these moments the following happened:
Uncle Marcus, in addition to owning the store was an insurance man for Southern Life Insurance. He would come by during the middle of the day and work in the store and help on the weekends as well.
Uncle Delmus ran the store on a day to day basis.
Whatever the rift happened to be, I don’t know, but at some point during the morning the two of them had disagreed about something and never settled it.
Both of them chewed tobacco. Uncle Marcus usually had a half chewed cigar in his mouth.
If you chew tobacco you need some place to spit and that was usually at the back door.
This particular morning, however, they didn’t want to speak to each other so they stood at different ends of the building.
Uncle Marcus was standing at the back door and while he was there he remembered he needed some change for his insurance collections.
Without checking on his brother, he walked across the back lot and into the back of Chester’s Grocery.
He was making the rounds of stores before he went to the bank.
From Chester’s he walked across Jefferson Street and into Kwiliski’s Hardware Store. After visiting there he walked out the back of that store across another empty lot and into the back of the Citizens Bank (where the Guy A. Race Courtroom Annex is now).
Through the bank he visited with several people until he reached the cashiers in the front.
When he finally made it to the front of the bank there stood Uncle Delmus getting change for the store from one of the cashiers.
Both men stood there staring at each other.
“Who is minding the store,” they both blurted out.
“You are,” they both answered.
Needless to say, the two brothers got back to the store as quick as they could.
Two customers were there patiently waiting on someone to take care of them.
From that point on, Uncle Marcus said, it didn’t matter about an argument, somebody was always left in charge of the store.