Red & White Store Ads, West Groton, MA

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Grandpa Bissell's West Groton Red & White Store Ads:

"We'll See You Next Week"

Link to Index of Advertising Columns Below

Among his many careers -- tree farmer, lumberman, operator of his own trucking business, property manager, construction contractor, carpenter and home builder, Town Clerk of Groton, a Justice of the Peace -- Richard Bissell also owned and operated the Red & White grocery store as a "general store" in West Groton, MA from 1945 until 1949.

During those years, he wrote a series of advertisements for the West Groton Red & White store that were published in the local newspaper, The Public Spirit in Ayer, Mass. Some of these ads, from 1946, '47 and '48, have been collected and indexed by George H. Bissell and appear below.

Richard bought the store in 1945. According to the Massachusetts Historical Commission description of West Groton's buildings, "...the small, front-gabled, wood frame grocery store" was built about 1880..." or perhaps about 1878, for C. H. Bixby. "A flat-roofed store front with display windows and vintage sign above appear to be unaltered from the mid 20th century."

A more accurate record is the deed that Grandpa Bissell kept which recited that the lot, "with buildings thereon," was originally sold to Charles and George H. Bixby from G.T. Shepley in February 1882; by the end of World War I, it was known as the Bixby Webber company. Eventually it was sold from George Webber to Richard Bissell June 1, 1945 and later sold by Bissell in March 1949.

Note: All of the picture ads that appear on this page are generic newspaper and magazine ads from about the same time as the text newspaper advertising columns below were written by Richard Bissell. Most are either Red & White brand products or are other brands mentioned by Grandpa Bissell in one of his columns. I don't know whether any of these pictorial ads were running in the local newspapers when Grandpa Bissell owned the store in West Groton, but we know that he coordinated one of the columns below with a Red & White store-sponsored program running on the radio and it's likely that these kinds of pictorial ads were in the local newspapers, like the Fitchburg Sentinel.

The building that is now the Post Office in West Groton once operated as part of the grocery store across the street, including pumping gas from a pump on the front right side of the building.

What is now the Post Office in West Groton, at 1 Pepperell Road, was first used as a storage building for the Bixby store. During the 1940s, oil, kerosene and other similar products were stored there, as the general store operated the gas pump that was in front of (to the right-hand side) what is now the post office. Uncle Meredith Bissell remembers getting gas at that pump in the car in which he was a passenger on his way to high school at Lawrence Academy over in Groton, probably about 1946 and after, when a gallon of gas cost 18 cents for "hi test." While the store itself contained the post office during the Bixby-Webber era, it was not part of the store when Richard Bissell operated it.

Meredith notes that the only remnant of the post office in the store when Richard Bissell owned it was the clock on the wall and, for awhile, the floor space where the post office counter had been. The historical commission report mentioned above notes that the store was "run by the Bissell family in 1945." The report is online at http://books.gpl.org/gpldl2/WestGrotonFormA.pdf.

As will be seen from reading these columns below, they are much more like a small-town newspaper editor's commentary about life in Groton and about national events than they are like grocery advertisements. Some of the columns say virtually nothing about the products carried by the store, but plenty about Dick Bissell's view of life in West Groton, and about his character, his humor, his intelligence and his values.

A few other interesting bits of information about Grandpa Bissell's work during these years and his operation of the store should also be noted, some of them coming from Uncle Meredith. Long before he bought the store, one of the things Richard Bissell did was operate his own trucking business. He had operated trucks of all kinds as a young man in the Berkshires, including very large town snow plows (so big that the assistant to the driver would pull in the blade on the curb side of the truck when approaching a light pole). He talked occasionally about hauling logs from New Hampshire down to manufacturing plants in Worcester, MA. and he may have also hauled timber during World War II to Thompson's Mill in West Groton where it was made into large wooden spools for cable.

Richard must have also hauled lumber out of the Kemp Woods, owned by Adelaide Bissell's step-mother Flora W. Kemp Boutell ("Mother Flora" as Richard called her, "Grandma Boutell" to Richard and Adelaide's children), in West Groton. The Great New England hurricane of September 1938 was the most devastating hurricane in New England's recorded history. The last big hurricane had occurred in New England in the late 1860s. The 1938 hurricane had the fastest forward speed, 60 miles per hour, ever recorded in hurricane history, anywhere. Catching New England by surprise, it had sustained winds of 120 miles per hour, with peak gusts over 180 miles per hour. Over a period of less than a week, along with a rain storm that preceded it, the hurricane brought more than two feet of rain. As a result, very large and very old trees of all kinds came down in the forests of New England, including in the several hundred acres of Flora Kemp Boutell's woods on Kemp Street in West Groton.

Dick Bissell often worked for Mother Flora, tending to the homes she owned and rented out in West Groton and taking care of her woodlands. So much timber came down in the Great Hurricane that Bissell set up a small saw mill up in the woods and over the next two years worked with a crew of men who timbered more than 2,000,000 board feet of lumber (a "board foot" is a board 1" thick, 12" wide and 12" long; so if 2,000,000 board feet was envisioned as 1 inch thick boards, one foot wide and 10 feet long, the pile would more than cover an NBA basketball court -- 94 feet long and 50 feet wide -- to a heighth exceeding 30 feet). The resulting saw dust piles from the late 1930s were so mountainous that Chip, Carolyn, Betsy and Clyde Bissell played on them in Kemp Woods 20 years later.

One other story about that hurricane lumber: in 1962, Dick Bissell helped Gwen's husband Earl Kimball get some chestnut logs, killed by the chestnut blight about 1926 and felled by the hurricane in 1938, out of the woods and cut it into lumber which Kimball used to build a table. The logs had been caught up in a snag too small to bother with in 1938. The chestnut blight that wiped out the American chestnut tree began shortly after 1900 was finished by the 1940s. The chestnut once covered the Appalachian Mountains from New England to the deep south, providing one-quarter of all the hardwoods in the forest, with trees that grew nearly 100 feet tall, more than 9 feet in diameter (like the one pictured on the left) and whose leaves if placed on the ground side by side would cover an acre. Several hundred survive today outside its normal range, mostly in northern Michigan.

Dick hauled the old chestnut logs out of the woods with his tractor and took them to someone in West Groton, probably Eddie Cutler, to be cut into boards. The logs were shipped to Earl in Winthrop, Washington where he built the table (having ants pour out of the boards as he put them through the table saw). He later got some shorter boards that had been cut from the same logs and built a sugar bin. Gwen and Kim still have both pieces of furniture as of 2016. And we learned at Grandpa Bissell's funeral service in the West Groton Christian Union Church in 2003 that Dick had taken some additional pieces of that chestnut to build a small gate to the church organ in the sanctuary.

Before Dick Bissell bought the Red & White store from George Webber, he had hauled coal for Mr. Webber. "D & H" brand (for the Delaware & Hudson railroad) anthracite coal would be purchased by the train car load and shipped to West Groton via steam locomotive (like the D & H train pictured at the right) where a rail coal car or two would be parked on a railroad siding on the Squannacook River side of Townsend Road (near the small park across from the store today, and up a few yards towards "Thompson's Mill").

Once the Red & White store customer ordered a load of coal, Richard Bissell would shovel a truck load of coal out of the railroad car, then deliver it around town to the customers who had purchased it from Webber's store. And then when Bissell owned the store, he followed the same pattern, ordering the coal by rail car full, then unloading it by truck as it was sold to individual households and businesses. In fact, in his February 6, 1947 column below, he mentions shoveling a load of coal. The coal that was not delivered immediately was stored in a wooden shed just across the Squannacook River from the store, in Shirley, MA. George Bissell reports that some of the lumber used in the first house built by Richard Bissell along Townsend Road was taken from the coal storage shed in Shirley when it was torn down.

According to Meredith, one of the other tasks undertaken by Grandpa Bissell in his trucking business was taking sand by the truckfull from a particular sand deposit from the Allen family property, down near what was Strand's Garage on West Main Street. According to George (who was also apparently one of the "groaning" shovelers), the trucks were unloaded into a rail car on the same West Groton siding, down near the store, where the coal came into town. The sand was transported out of town for use in metal casting plants, as this particular sand was especially good for molding metal castings.

Meredith worked in the store during the time he was in high school, which was most of the time that his father ran the store. George worked in the store some, when he wasn't away at school. As Roger tells it, Roger also worked in the store from time to time, re-stocking shelves or doing other chores around the store. When things were quiet, he would dust the shelves. He may have also helped with some of that shoveling work involving loading the truck with coal or sand. On one occasion, Roger was retrieved by Gwen from skiing up in the woods, who told him that his father wanted him to help out down at the store. Roger went to the store and did his work and when he was finished, his father gave him one dollar for his pay. Roger told his father that he thought he needed a raise, so Richard said, "Well, we'll see about it at home tonight." That evening at dinner, Richard turned to Adelaide and said, "Mother, better pile some more mashed potatoes on Roger's plate, he needs a raise, so we'd better raise up that pile of potatoes!"

And a little bit more context for the time period here. During World War II, which ended in August 1945, the government had worked at educating American families about good nutrition. Government food rationing decreased as the war ended, finally ending in June 1947 when sugar was the last product taken off of rationing. Americans at last had some extra income to spend on food, prices changed and the products available increased as rationing and price controls were gradually eliminated. And new food products, including many frozen foods, came onto the market.

According to the website foodtimeline.org, "After the war, many new products were introduced to the American public. These "convenience foods" (dehydrated juice, instant coffee, cake mixes, etc.) were the result of military research. Not all of these were embraced enthusiastically. Some traditional home cooks preferred returning to the "old fashioned" way once rationed ingredients re-appeared on their local grocery shelves."

New food products introduced between 1940 and 1945 included Cheerios and Raisin Bran, M&Ms and Tootsie Rolls, Chiquita bananas, Kraft Parmesan Grated Cheese and Constant Comment Tea. Between 1946 and 1949, new products included Pillsbury Pie Crust mix, frozen french fries and frozen orange juice, Ragu Spaghetti Sauce, Reddi-Whip, cake mixes, V8 vegetable juice, Nestle's Quik chocolate milk powder, and Kraft sliced American cheese. These were significant changes in what American grocery stores had on their shelves.

Index of Recd & White Store Advertising Columns

Index of Red & White Store Advertising Columns