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In smaller towns in rural areas local merchants often operated the town's Sears (or Montgomery Ward) catalog store. You went into the store, said "I want one of these" from the catalog and they called it in and it was there to be picked up in a day or two. Most of them were just a regular small town store front with a Sears or Wards sign out front(or in the window). I grew up near St. Louis in the 50s and remember some of the gas stations were: Conoco (different logo than today), Phillips 66(different logo than today-the "66" was actually crooked), Shell, Texaco, Cities Service and a few lesser known ones. Most of them were locally owned, but sold the big oil company's gas. Ofter the sign had the oil company logo and "Jim's Conoco" or something like than on it. The further away from the city you got the more likely you were to be able to eat an an "A&W Root Beer Stand" as they were called. I never saw one in the city or in the closer in suburbs. We never heard of pizza till the very late 50s even though Dean Martin had a song in the early 50s with the words "When the moon hits your eye like a big uh pizza pie, thats amore." We thought he sang "like a big uh piece a pie". When we did hear about pizza it was called "pizza pie". I don't remember any taco places. In fact, I remember our forth grade teacher telling us about her trip to Mexico and explaining that tortillias were sort of like Fritos. None us us had ever eaten a tortilla. We had ONE McDonald's that I knew of in the very late 50s and the sign read "over 1 million served". On dates we would go to Steak 'n Shake so we could eat in the car. Some of the "car hops" were on roller skates. The only flashy paint schemes on freight cars I can remember was the Missouri Pacific box cars in the roads passenger colors (and darn few of them). The car dealers were less likely to carry multiple lines than today. The Ford dealer sold Fords, but the Mercury dealers' signs all said "Lincoln-Mercury". You bought your Plymouth from a place where the sign read "Desoto-Plymouth", in fact "your Desoto-Plymouth Dealer" sponsored Groucho Marx in a quiz show called "You Bet Your Life". Along about 1957 we began to see Volkswagon Beetles and an occasional English Ford or Fiat. There was also the Renault Dauphine. Renault was pronounced "ree NALT" in those days, NOT "ree NO" as their advertising stressed in the decades to follow. If you model that radio station as mentioned above, remember than, generally speaking, call letters east of the Mississippi start with W, west of the Mississippi they start with K. There were exceptions, but only the older, long established stations (KDKA Pittsburgh, WIL St. Louis, WDAF Kansas City, etc. small town stations usually fell into the W/K east/west division. A sign WMRR would be WAY OUT OF PLACE on a layout depicting Colorado or the Southwest, for example. This is an interesting thread. It has pulled up a lot of things I'd hadn't thought about for a while. Incidentally, Radio Shack was around long before the personal computer. Charles Tandy purchased the small Boston based chain sometime in the late 60s and turned it into Fort Worth based Allied/Radio Shack and then finally just Radio Shack. I worked for them in the mid 70s when they introduced the TRS-80, the first Radio Shack computer. IBM brought out the PC in 1981 (according to the December 20, 2004 issue of US News & World Report). Radio Shack used to be where we all went to get ALL those DPDT center off toggle switches for our layouts before DCC, and where the more electronically inclined bought all those transistors, resistors, capacitors and such for those electronic construction projects that appeared in Model Railroader in the 70s. <br /> <br />Here's hopping you ALL had a very MERRY CHRISTMAS and found some time to spend in the train room over the holiday.
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