Early trips to the store

One of my first memories is being old enough to travel to the store to buy bread and milk. The neighborhood store that I would be sent to was known as “Preppas”. It was located at the corner of Third and Crowe in Fort Frances.
“Preppa” was a bit of a surely gentleman. He had the patience of a grandfather who doted on the neighborhood kids. It wasn’t a big store but he carried the necessities for the neighborhood bread, milk, butter, candy, some meat items and some canned goods.
A loaf of Maple Leaf white bread and a loaf of cracked wheat or whole wheat were the usual for me.
On a trip for bread, the loaf would cost 23¢ leaving 2¢ for penny candy, which could fill half a bag with candy. “Preppa” would take longer to fill that bag of candy for 2¢ than I care to think about as we made decisions on whether to buy five jaw breakers for a penny, or three mint leaves, or five dark babies for a penny. It was difficult making those decisions.
He even had a Juke Box at the front of his store for teenagers to plug their nickels and dimes into to listen to 45’s in the morning, at lunch and after school.
It was the easiest store to reach from our home in the new subdivision of Third Street.
When I was eight, I received a “two-wheeler” for my birthday and my travel distances became longer. That let me travel further for bread. As an early riser, my mom would remember that we were out of bread for breakfast and I would get on my bike with two quarters in my pocket and head for “Rostes’” Bakery.
The bakery might not have opened until 8 in the morning, but the smell of baking bread could be picked up early. The counter may not have been manned, but if you walked in at 7:15 in the morning with two quarters in your hand, Mr. Roste would wait on you and would slip into the side room to slice still warm bread and sell it to you. Sometimes he would come out and tell you the bread was still too warm to slice and I would buy the full loaf knowing that when I got home, the slices would be even thicker.
With the two loaves of bread, I would peddle as fast as I could to get home before the bread cooled. Everyone was usually awake by then, and we would launch into that bread and spread hard butter and peanut butter onto the still warmth of those white loaves. “Maple Leaf” bread was the biggest bread in the district and was delivered across the Northwest filling the shelves of every grocery store.
Cracked wheat, whole wheat and Maple Leaf white were always in the bread drawer. No bread could be better. It didn’t last long enough for mould to grow on it. A treat in the family was when my father stopped into the bakery on a Saturday morning and brought home a crispy loaf of Rye. The bakery was famous for it and we would make sandwiches topped high with meats, cheeses, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce and even radishes.
With the closing last weekend of the “Dough and Deli” another family business disappears from the community of Fort Frances. The memories of their breads and later meats from the Deli will linger with patrons. However, the smells of baking bread that drifted across the east end of Fort Frances will be gone forever.

–Jim Cumming,
Publisher