Capitalists I Have Known

Destiny and Dust

Capitalists I Have Known

The first two I remember owned
competing grocery stores. The Mercantile 
was run by Mr. & Mrs. Rumbaugh.
They carried everything from milk to .22 
shells, comic books to hair dye, liquor, 
peaches, wool socks, and nails: a mall 
under one roof. The other store was 
mainly a meat market. Bill Bestwick was 
the butcher-owner who also stocked his 
shelves with soup. bread, the essentials. 
Both businesses ran charge accounts we 
usually paid in full every two weeks. 
Although there were lean times when my 
dad was on the Extra Board which meant
he didn't have a regular shift, so his check
didn't cover all the bills. Neither store
worried about that. Our credit was good—
an incentive to keep shopping till we got 
paid. In those days no one charged interest.
Usury was a sin, what Jesus wouldn't do. 
Back when I admired capitalists, the 
Rumbaughs sold out to Cocky and Mary 
Smith, a young couple, who continued 
the practice of charging groceries. Some
called Old Man Bestwick (who wasn't 
too personable) “Mr. Personality” or “Sour
Puss.” And a few claimed he laid his thumb 
on the meat scale. Of course, he was English, 
so there was that innate distrust by any
Irishman, so we only charged at the Merc.

There were just two restaurants in town: 
Huseby's and The Silver Grill. The Huseby
family lived above the cafe which was like 
eating at someone's house, cheery curtains,
lots of light, except for sliding into the window 
booths (especially that big front-corner one)
then you knew you were somewhere special.
Huseby's Cafe & Cabins was a drive-thru
compound surrounded by a rail fence with an
archway pole-gate entrance so cars could park 
next to their cabins for the night. I remember 
a barber rented the cabin closest to Farr's 
Texaco where Archie delivered full service 
including mechanical repairs on anything with 
wheels. Of course there was a candy counter 
and pop machine along with clean restrooms
always open to us kids caught short on our way 
going anywhere any time of the year.

Two doors east and elevated off the street 
were The Silver Grill Cafe and Chadwick 
& Boyd's Tavern. Doc Johnson and Mrs. Doc
owned the Grill, but Doc spent much of his
time over at the Tavern. Their apartment
was behind the cafe and out the back door
of the bar. I don't believe Doc owned a car. 
Back then, the Milwaukee Road still ran 
passenger service, so they could ride the train
to Missoula or take a Greyhound if they had 
to go into the “big city.” Later in the sixties,
the Roats bought the Grill where we spent 
many hours eating fifty cent platters of fries 
and listening to rock-n-roll on the juke box, 
three for a quarter. They were famous for their 
hard ice cream milk shakes that gave you brain-
freeze. It always smelled like fried food upon
entering. We'd all heard about the door that 
didn't look like a door (save for the hinges 
and small pull-handle on the cut-out wall panel) 
that led upstairs to an old movie theater that 
had been condemned since World War II.

The Roats also operated Chet's Bar when
Chet retired. The neon trimmed back-bar
was classic perfection right down to the 
cracked mirror. The old Bell phone booth 
was straight out of the forties, and there 
was a burger grill, a piano and pool table,  
a shuffle-board/bowling-pin game along one 
wall, a few tables and a juke box loaded with
country standards. Both bars had card tables 
in the back. I preferred Chadwick & Boyd's 
when I was a kid because Gene would let me 
sit on the floor behind the bar, below the 
magazine rack to read all the outdated comic 
books he'd ripped the covers off before sending 
back for credit. I could sit at the bar with my 
dad, drink a pop and punch out the paper-wad 
numbers on the punch board (like the big boys).

The new cement block Post Office was next 
door to Chadwick & Boyd's, and across 
the side-street from the Montana Hotel directly 
across Main (US Hwy 10) from the Milwaukee 
depot. My pal's grandparents built the two-story
boarding house. His grandpa erected, sculpted, 
the rock fireplace in the lobby I marveled at 
each time I saw it. He also built their huge 
house atop Rose Hill just up the alley from 
the hotel. I spent a lot of time on Rose Hill, 
named for the cabins available to rent up there 
like the ones down at Huseby's on Main Street. 
Downtown was the core of “Alberton capitalism.” 

Although if you headed west you'd discover the 
Bearcat Garage originally owned by Floyd Chadwick, 
Gene's uncle, but I remember it best when Whitey 
Culp and Les Robinson ran it as a Phillips 66 
station and mechanics shop. My dad supported them 
since he'd been there previously with Chadwick 
and again after they'd sold it to the Deschamps 
brothers. That was when my brother worked for 
them and bought a Honda 55 with his earnings. 
Whitey was my classmate's dad, so we'd pop in 
there for the occasional Big Hunk or Mounds or 
Idaho Spud candy bar, the smells of oil and rubber.

Heading out of town west was Johnny's Mobil. 
It was situated before the last turn up a road to 
the town dump where we hauled our garbage 
and watched the bears feed each fall evening before 
their long sleep. I remember stopping at Johnny's
on hot summer days and buying nickel bottles of pop 
from the reservoir Coca-Cola machine that sat out 
front. We pulled those ice-cold bottles from the water 
bath, popped the caps and tipped them back, guzzling
fast like the gasoline nozzles hung in our gas tanks. 

But by the mid-sixties supermarkets and self-serve 
pumps undercut those small town merchants. Folks 
abandoned them for the adventures of mobility 
and marketing ploys. That's when corporate America 
reached out to rural America and strangled it with 
prosperity. The rapid rise and decline of an idyllic 
way of life began a half-century ago when small-
business capitalism was steam-rolled by corporations
merely trying to turn a buck, survive, be positive 
numbers on a page, and give the people what they 
wanted: what the ad men told them they needed 
to want. Funny, one of our favorite jokes was about 
those lemmings following one another off a cliff 
into the ocean. “So if your friend jumped off 
a cliff, would you follow them?” Well, no, it's  
subtler than that, right? What's trending now? 

Overpopulation, our appetites for comfort, 
gratification, ease and greed have charted 
an inevitable course, making our paradise 
uninhabitable sooner than was predicted over 
the last fifty years. We're ready to carve that 
penultimate notch in the gun belt of western man. 
The crowning achievement of capitalism, be it 
whimper or bang, appears to be our extinction 
on this planet. Peace, the great silence of space 
awaits mankind, the animal kingdom. We've 
imagined and projected our collective conclusion 
as far back as Revelations, been living with 
that real possibility for almost a century. Most 
likely we'll be the end of civilization if not
the species. Sorry kids. Yes, we dropped the ball, 
but as wise men once scrolled about us, the flock:
Lord, forgive them for they know not what they do. 

Mark Gibbons

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