Granma's Market, Gibbs & Main, Hancock Wisconsin, USA, Planet earth and out of this world produce!
I spent the summer I was 5 w/my maternal grandparents in Hurley Wisconsin. Twice a week Grandma Buckner would take me by the hand to go to market. We'd cross the Iron River Bridge into Michigan and walk the 4 blocks to "Little Italy", where 1st & 2nd generation iron miners lived. These were dirt side streets, shaded with many elm and maple trees. In their back yards were large gardens where families grew the vegetables that were sold and bartered with neighbors. Grandma mostly bought our fresh berries and veggies, except on Saturdays.
On that morning we took the toy wagon on Monsterret street to a small Butcher shop. My grandfather referred to that byway as Dago Road. Coming from any other non Italian in Hurley, those were "Fightin' Words." But not from Grampa. At age 5 he effectively moved out of his family's home and was generously looked after by an Italian family living on Monsterret street. Within a year he spoke Italian more fluently than German and very little English until a school official corraled him into the newly established Hurley Public School System. How all that came to be will make a tale for another time.
So Dave Buckner at age 5 was not known around town as Davey, but as "The Little Dago." Dave Buckner was a popular man in town for another reason when Mom, my new baby brother Bill, older brother David and I moved in upstairs from his place of business : The Kenosha Tap.
Dave Buckner was a short muscular gruff sort of a man with a big soft heart. The iron mines had hit hard times and many of the local work force could get a drink or three on credit at the Kenosha Tap. All the Old Timer businessmen were no doubt in the same boat as Dave Buckner : long tabs, short on cash.
So that brings me back to 7:30 Saturday morning sitting in a wagon rolling down to Main and Monsterret. The unlucky cow or pig having just been slaughtered, the store not yet open, Celia Buckner was pulling a wagonload of Jimmy up to the back of Negri's meat market. A knock at the door and from out of grandma's purse, 2 or 3 bottles of some distilled concoction later we were swiftly heading back to The Tap where grandpa was filling the antique ice box with 2 fresh blocks of frozen Lake Superior. We were to have meat on the table for as long as the ice held up. Sometimes there was room in the bar refrigerators for 3 or 4 pork chops to snuggle in between a case of Joseph Schlitz's and Theo Hamm's finest brews. That would allow us the luxury of a "Pork Chop Thursday."
The above photo is just about how I remember those long ago forays into Little Vittle Italy.