great to be here tonight in belmont the best part about being in belmont that i had not only that i like this area very much i lived in both lexington and arlington about a different life time ago but way way back but you know so many nights i find myself returning from book talks from southern new hampshire southern maine rhode island this is great it's going to take me less than an hour to get one hundred and ten thank you for that and while we're on the subject of thank you's obviously i want to thank the belmont public library but  particularly want to thank the both the historical society and the friends of the belmont belmont public library for sponsoring this talk jointly tonight you know libraries these days cannot have enough good friends  so belmont is blessed clearly to have some wonderful friends so thank you thank you all for that thank you for coming out tonight how many of you were this is my nd trip to the library here how many were at my st talk oh it's good not enough but this minute i'm going to be talking about my rd book all about an iconic new england institution you know everybody a chronicle knows that there are there are actually two new england  iconic institutions that i cannot pass by in all my travels all around new england one of them is a authentic diner born in new england and the other is also born in doing on an authentic new england general store now i started to notice about i would say just under maybe twenty years ago more than one thousand and fifteen years ago i started to notice that the diner seemed to be making something of a comeback now why the diner began to disappear i know a lot of you folks here have a fondness and a taste for history so you probably are not hearing anything you don't know you know me the diner began to disappear with the advent of the fast food franchises nationwide in the late fift mid mid fifty's even and by the sixty's mid sixty's late sixty's you know the diet the fast food franchises right the golden arches scopes because getting a hamburger for zero dollars twenty cents on a highway this was brand new this was exciting this was different this was cheap right and so there's no there's no mystery about why dine it why diners begin to think ahead but there's also no real mystery to me why diners also began to make something of a comeback because if you fast forward twenty years from when the fast food franchises st appeared then you know the newness and the gimmick part of it was wearing off they began to reappear they began to come back because not only was the newness gone but people realized that although you might be spending only zero dollars twenty cents on a hamburger you generally weren't running into people you knew when you ran into a faceless franchise on the highway and yet even if you paid a little bit more for him burger at the local eatery the local diner there was an added value to that yes you were supporting a local business but beyond that you were being part of your community you were seeing and interacting with people from your community that's the nature of what we call rd places in american life and places like diners places like general stores now in terms of general stores they began to disappear nil but after the diner did only there what looked like would be a glide path to obscurity for the general store looked like greased lightning compared to the disappearances of the diners because general stores began to disappear in large large batches they also have made a comeback but the fact that the general store has had a resurgence has combined that really perplexed me that's what's behind my wanting to write the book about it but because when it comes to diners they're unique they're unique in all the world they're unique to america and they're unique in if you like a diner how many of you have a favorite di yet if you like a diner like i do and you're on the highway and you are lured by that beacon in the night when the neon beacon in the night it's not like you say to yourself or your partner you know wow we could stop here or we could drive a little bit more see if maybe we come across a fancy french restaurant it's not like that right the diner is unique if you want a diner there's no substitute for a diner but guess what when it comes to a general store there is nothing not thing not a single item on a single shelf in a single general store in a single town in new england that sells a single item that you can't buy somewhere else nothing often cheaper so why would it be that the general store after sliding to what looked like certain extinction should come back because it has the same thing to do with diners coming back community that's why they've come back that's what i want to talk about tonight that's why i wanted to write this book because st what this book is not so it's a relatively modest leaf in volume but it would be thicker if it was a comprehensive listing of all of new england's general stores it's not so if that's what you looking for i'm not going to be offended if you leave now it's not a comprehensive listing it is a narrative of wide general stores of mattered so much to the development of our culture in new england why they began to be threatened with extinction and more importantly why they have come back and why today there are towns all over new england that are lucky enough to have an authentic old one general store that count them as more valuable than ever before why would that be well let's you will not find a dodo bird in the face of mother earth today this is an example of a presently endangered species that is not extinct and so is this now when it comes to the type of predator that hunted the dodo to extinction here's an artist's rendering of what that might have looked like a grisly stuff when it comes to the type of predator that has threatened the general store with complete extinction i'm going to tell you right now none of our hands are clean you may have consorted with one of these predators recently i know i have just in the past week right right but here's the thing there's a reason why it shows these two mm very modern iterations of the big box store right in fact when the general store began to look like it might be driven out of existence sam walton was still running things out of a single store in missouri so how far back is that that's more than half a century ago more than fifty years ago so i want to call attention to the fact this is not new the general store being threatened with extinction is not new is not new you know i always like to point to one of my favorite chronicles of american popular culture who noticed this he was like the canary in the coal mine with a pool when he noticed this this is john steinbeck at his home in sag harbor new york as he was about t sixty two steinbeck set out in gross in one day with his best friend charlie and they circle navigated america look what steinbeck noticed more than fifty years ago and he had a perfect vantage points knows this right because he was traveling as is his want though he you know these small towns he wasn't interested in the big cities for the most part and look what he noticed more than half a century ago that the small towns somehow seem to begin smaller the big cities bigger and those distinctive stores of all the different varieties including general stores seem to be disappearing more than fifty years ago now when steinbeck was growing up in salinas california this is one thousand eight hundred this was a scene that was instantly recognizable to virtually every american and if you didn't frequent a place like this once or twice a week maybe once or twice a day you almost certainly did when you were growing up and if you didn't when you were growing up your parents definitely did and yet when you go fifty years out from one thousand nine hundred fewer and fewer people a general store at a whole never mind once a day so what happens fifty years after this picture a completely life changing event we don't think of it that way because it didn't happen all at once happen very gradually enough about how much the automobile changed every aspect of american life we think of it in terms of how it changed the way we move about it was much more than that it changed the way americans had relationships it changed the way americans went about their work where they were why they work if they wanted to change jobs in a way they would never have done prior to the automobile because of the mobility that it gave them it changed the way americans thought in terms of where they want d to live how frequently they might move and it changed obviously the way americans went about commerce if you go twenty years out from this picture you have the mushrooming of the interstate highway system by the and seventy s and then if you are in a small town the kind of small town that steinbeck was describing and this is the choice of a little local store that he was describing and now you can jump your driveway and drive it in an exit or two on the interstate and have this choice yeah makes it kind of tough if you're dealing with this choice but a funny thing happened on the way to extinction and this is kind of the central irony that made me ultimately want to write the book i was interested in general store of my wife's you know i think there is very little and it's true there's very little written about doing on general stores a couple state by state but no sort of threading them all together but i wasn't sold and but i was looking at it i was looking at the some of the history and i was reading some of the cultural changes that seemed to impact general stores and then i realized that was th happens is the same forces that we're talking about that seem poised to extinguish the general store end up being like the diner the same forces that save them in the end how is that that's what we're going to talk about so by the time you get to the late sixty's early seventy's again slowly because of the automobile you have the rise of suburbia in a way that it never existed before the suburbs have existe since the mid ninety eight hundreds but now because of the car the suburbs you have in every metropolitan area this is california but you know this is this happens coast to coast you have the suburbs  are evolving and growing and mushroom in ways they never existed before you have these what i call super suburban communities where the boomers are now starting families of their own living in houses with square footage is that their parents could only dreamed about and a lot of these wonderful super suburban communities have often great school systems and great athletic programs and all kinds of community amenities and community and recreational programs and in the morning you drive your car along x number of different strip malls and have your choice of twenty seven or thirty different places to get any number of different types of coffee and life would seem to be a modern day utopia right so it turns out it turns out that within maybe a decade of the rise of these super suburban communities mid to late sixty's early seventy's there are lots of people living in these super suburban communities that actually begin to miss something with all these amenities they actually begin to miss something anybody guess what that might be who said that yes it was community it was community lot of people were missing a richer sense of community perhaps that they had grown up with write it so it turns out that you can have you can the twenty feet from your next door neighbor you can smell it you're actually on a brisk walk for dinner but it doesn't necessarily mean you feel part of a close knit community so it turns out the community is the find by something else something that's not just about how many people live in a given spot it doesn't seem to be just the fine by volume or density the seems to be another quality that the fines community and a lot of people were missing that they were missing that one person in particular was consumed with the idea of community in america and he's somebody who i feel deserves more recognition then he has most people have no idea who he is i didn't before i was researching the book but it corn to term called the rd place in american life and he spent a decade researching community what community means in america the reason that he was interested in doing that is kind of i mean when you think about it now it's kind of dark because community was changing again right because of the way that life was speeding up people mo mo bar you had many more two parent families where both parents working full time you had a lot of single parent families and the people were more people were moving around more for work and so forth and i'm not telling anything you don't know you know by the seventy's the notion of community was changing in america it was fracturing it was going away in a lot of metropolitan suburban areas and radio oldenburg decided to study community because his thought was that if communities as we've known then become extinct then he will have a body of research to point to what people once called community in america and he spent a decade studying community and in one thousand nine hundred and nine he published his findings he published it in a book called the great good place and in it he had something that was truly revilla tory that he had foun it was this no matter how free as a bird we think we are as americans we move where we want right we do what we want we work where we want go where we want we still he found spend the vast majority of our lives in one of just three places that said oh sure we may you may take a cruise you may go to europe you may bum around your for three and a half years but that's negligible in terms of a whole life span which is what he was looking at and what he found was american spend the majority of our lives in one of just three places that's it the st place you can probably guess home family right nd place you probably also guess work it's the  place that radio limburg zeroed in on like no one ever had before because it's these rd places he found that we need and they were disappearing a rd place is not one particular place a rd place could be many different kinds of places where in one right now a rd place can be a house of worship their place can be a place where you go to get your hair done a beauty shop beauty shop barber shop their place could be a general store it could be a public library may the good lord bless you mean people could be a neighborhood bar where you meet a friend for a drink after work where they really do know your day right yet the thing is about a rd place you may go to a rd place to do an assigned task right you may go to get a carton of milk you may go to return a book you may go to get your hair done you may go to have a drink with ed right but when you go to these rd places they all have something in common even if you're going to do an assigned task you also have even if it's  unconscious thought that you will interact with people you know from your community and these were disappearing and what really oldenburg found was that's not just like an add on it's not just a nice if i run into it would you know it's not just nice we need that we need that it validates our choice of where we've chosen to live when we meet other people who've made the same choice who we know and like we needed and they were disappearing which didn't mean we needed it any less we just didn't have them as much and rail them or put his finger on it and what was happening in a lot of these school communities was that people were missing this in these big suburban communities and all these metropolitan areas a lot of the boomers as they were starting families of their own and bringing up their own kids a lot of people felt like you know what i really want to live in a pace town with the pace is a little bit slower maybe and where people really know each other and interact with each other you know in i believe it was one thousand nine hundred and seventy five the might have been one thousand nine hundred and seventy three life magazine published a nationwide poll that a lot of people found deeply upsetting disturbing and it was that a clear majority of americans more than sixty percent said they had only sporadic or infrequent contact with their next door neighbor right that's what a lot of these people were feeling they were living this close they were living this close and they had only been free how can you have only infrequent kohn how could you not bump into your next door neighbor me go out their car in the morning but they were interacting in any meaningful way and a lot of these folks in these suburban communities who were feeling like they wanted to have more of a sense of community for their children as they started their own families moved moved now i'm not saying it was one of history's great mass migrations mind you but it was sizable ago and they moved to a lot of small towns all around new england in search of these smaller tight knit communities with these wonderful thriving rd places where people gathered as neighbors they moved to south acworth new hampshire they that these rd places had never stopped being these wonderful rd places these community gathering places they never stopped the barn a general store was the same genuine community gathering place in one thousand nine hundred and five as it was in  and five as it was in two thousand and five as it was last fall when i was up there but then you jump forward about twenty years and a lot of these boomers by the way people who move to these smaller towns all around the women they walk the walk they bought a lot of these small general stores night and then you go about twenty more years into the future from their mid sixty's late sixty's eight seventy's eighty's you get to the late ninety's and now lot of these people getting older they're thinking maybe i'd like to slow down maybe i'd like the interest somebody else and buy in the store take a little time off sounds like a good idea the economy nationally is doing this people are not buying general stores and so a lot of these stores a wave of them aware of them if you look at the data it's a wa close well than half the general stores closed in an eight year period and now it really does look like the general store had a little flash a life there thank you boomers it looked like right it might come back and now it looks like well you know the bar to churn isn't coming back either had a good run and i think that if it weren't for one small south central new hampshire hill town more than fifty percent of the general stores that exists today in new england would be god would be gone because one small town decided that sometimes to use another hackneyed cliche but i use that advise of the because just like a game changer with the automobile in and fifty there's no other way to say that sometimes it took a village to save the general store and it certainly did in south acworth new hampshire i don't know if you're familiar with south acworth it's one of those forgotten little hill towns that a lot of people are familiar with i wasn't familiar with the area until about five or eight years ago and then it became one of my favorite parts of new hampshire think jumping over the border in southern new hampshire go a little bit west peterborough but ok and i'm not now go a little bit and there has been a general store in south acworth for almost one hundred and fifty years all the general stores in this book have been around for at least a century and three quarters of them to twice that long more than two hundred years all of them have always been a general store and never anything else but they all of the pied that same physical footprint for all of that time except one which would be the last that we'll talk about but most importantly every store in the book is a genuine community gathering place there are no places in the book or would be in the book that simply call themselves the general store they are all rd places they are all genuine community gathering places and this was certainly true in some in south acworth but you know the owners of the store there had owned the store for thirty seven years way more than the average and by the time you get to two thousand they also raided slowdown they hope to find a buyer for the store couldn't do it they tried to sell the store couldn't do it in the wake of nine hundred and eleven two thousand and one as you know one of the aftereffects was that tourism was off more than ninety percent in some parts and illegal people just were traveling and for some of these small general stores that's vital the tourism traffic is vital for at least two or three seasons a year and the store closed and the town had to deal with the fact that they had lost their one single genuine community gathering place their only one but nobody seemed to be able to come forward by the still and finally at a meeting one time and somebody was taught was speculating they said you know what if we could do collectively what we don't seem to be able to do individually what if we all pooled our money look they'd already pulled their money to put in put an ad in the new york times sunday magazine for someone interested in owning a general store that didn't work they said what if we put our money together and we bought the general store as a town together i know sounds very socialist sometimes that works ok call me a socialist sometimes there's no alternative but to come together right we do it to help somebody out in dire straits right well they came together to help out there still are which was in dire straits and also important to them and also like a member of the family they came together they did something that had never been done with any general store in america and that was to come together and form a co op and own their own general store it was just like a food car you put an x x amount of money you get x amount of discount on your groceries if you put in x amount of hours in working in the store and they did they formed a co op people went to work in the store they came up with all kinds of other creative ideas they they built a pizza oven out back to bring in more money they started these wonderful quarterly harvest dinners that today bring in visiting chefs from all over new england the  today is thriving like never before but more importantly they created a template they created a model that other general stores all around the one that would find themselves in the same position could look to and say look what they did in south acworth if it had failed if there wasn't a model i believe to be fifty percent fewer general stores in new england today and i hope the lights don't go out there any time soon but in shrewsbury vermont a very different story about a village coming to the rescue of their village store because here it wasn't only a small town going up against the bum economy and a store that it closed they also had to deal in a major way with mother nature now when this picture was taken marjorie pierce on the right there was in her mid seventy's and at that point her family because there's two people but you know but if you go up twenty years in the mid ninety's marjorie pierce was in her mid ninety's and at this point she would like nothing so much as a chance to take a little time off thank you very much ok can i please get out my damn feet already ok problem is that if marjorie piers is not there to open and run piers is still a closes at six o'clock the storm is going to be open so she wanted somebody to buy the store just like in south aqua and she could not find someone to buy the store and the store closed and just like in south acworth the little town issues repopulation eight hundred and forty two had to wrestle with the fact they had lost their one community gathering place well marjor terrible it wasn't like she could reopen the store she still couldn't stand their feet all day but she did call up one of her best friends who happens to be one of my favorite new englanders now that the store was closed  i bet a lot of you folks who i have a fondness for history as and you would love paul broun paul broun is the creator in the executive director of the preservation trust of vermont and what the preservation trust does today all across america they started doing in vermont and what they do is they help cities and towns all across the country hold on to their history and they don't do it out of an overdeveloped sense of sentimentality ok they do it out of a very developed sense of economics because what they have found it sounds simple right it sounds self evident but try telling that to the number of cities and towns that go tear down historical properties all the time and they almost always end up ruining what they've done right the gospel that paul broun preaches is that if you preserve historic property we could be talking about a historic main street a shopping district we could be talking about a historic movie theater a library a general store a perfect example is in mill complex right a mill complex that is abandoned shut down yes they even you know ask a vault perfect example it's like my favorite example you know like so many mill towns all around the way that matter where north adams one socket was to fall river by the time you get to the sixty's the mills of shut down right textile industry all moved on and you're sitting on these mill complexes that are falling apart they're havens for drug use and crime and these cities wanted nothing so much as to be able to take a huge wrecking ball the size of chicago and obliterate these things when those buildings were not made to be torn down but and many of those cities like april found that it was going to actually cost more money to tear them down than it might to develop them so they sat they sat and they sat ask the mayor have ruled today if he's glad they didn't hear those buildings down because today is a thriving bedroom community for boston of all places because the commuter rail runs right through there and in a fraction of the cost of living in boston you can live in a condo in what was once a mill complex that's the gospel paul broun preaches don't tear it down and leave a vacant lot because developers are not interested for the most part often in try to imagine what they could put in a vacant lot just like home buyers would almost always rather be able to imagine what they could do with the property they can see now that well that's no margery pierce wanted to talk to paul broun about but it was in a way so she it's pretty much all the money out and i don't expect to need it too much my lot so paul had to explain to marjorie that this is not with the preservation trust it's they don't own they're not property owners right they help cities and towns invest vero own properties they help them raise money they help them find grants they help them find lowing low interest loans they help and get federal funding state funding local funding but they don't own property outright and marjorie appears listen and she said what i hear paul broun tell it it went like that back and forth about thirty five minutes about thirty five minutes later paul broun is back in his beat a prius making his way back up to burlington and guess what the preservation trust only the st piece of property out right runs the historical society he had tipped off the historical society he wanted to meet with them at the store so there they are they met at the store and he told them he said look i have a change here i realize he said you know and it's true he said i i hold the deed to pierce but i'm not going to be here i'm not going to be run the store and they said well who's going to run it and he said you walk and they said wall while they were freaking out they were like paul whoa whoa so he sold it to the store but they didn't want to run a store he said for lax he said we've done this before we'll do it again we're going to take lots of field trips you can have a lots of homework you're going to learn how to inventory  store you're going to learn how to order a product you're going to learn you're going to learn how to renovate a two hundred year old general store and i think i did a pretty fine job don't you right now i'm not saying it didn't go off without a hitch ok because just before they reopened i two thousand and nine they went back before the town and they asked for another one thousand five hundred dollars now this is a community of eight hundred and forty two dollars people that already raised sixty eight thousand dollars that's a lot of money but they want to one thousand five hundred dollars more they said if we're going to be a genuine community gathering place through thick and to do the worst of amount to confront us we feel we need to have an emergency generator so the lights will always stay on the community can depend we can meet here it could be that kind of gathering place if need be and you know there was a lot of two years never i said mother nature weighed in right well ironically ironically it ends up being the worst that of ramana summer could throw at that not a winter because in august two thousand and eleven hurricane irene barreled up the east coast it had been downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it reached the mountains but no matter right it doesn't matter if you're packing the seventy five mile an hour winds of the official hurricane or the sixty seven mile an hour winds of probable storm irene you're still going to blow  two hundred year old covered bridges like so much driftwood and he did the st day irene hit vermont which is still the with the state's worst natural disaster in its history power went out virtually all over mine lights went out all over for mine including little shrewsbury for a month with one exception because in shrewsbury vermont marjorie pierce and her crew talk about the historical society saving the day they people were like coming out of the woods seeking out the light and they got to the store in the lights were on in the coffee was hot and the wife i was working and people were able to call their relatives and tell them everything is ok and you may not be surprised to learn nobody's ever bellyache up a bed emergency generator ever again so now we've reached we've reached we've reached a pivot point we've talked about why general stores matter early on and when that's history why they would threaten how they begin to disappear and how they began to be saved right but now you reach a point by the mid two thousand with the national economies doing this now right now it's booming now it's doing good so now all over the weekend when you have cases where general stores are closing there are now some individuals who can come forward and can singlehandedly save the general store in a chapter i call honey i bought the store i like to kid my friend larry deerfield yeah anybody been to firms in carlisle just a little west of here yup yup i like the kid larry that he's the only person in the chapter honey about the store who actually said those words verbatim to his lovely wife robin honey i bought the store he came to my st book talk actually and he corrected didn't say honey i bought this i said i thought you did what did you say he said no i said honey i'd like to buy the store i said larry that words i said you're very lucky where i didn't say honey i hope you didn't throw out the receipt but you know the great thing about larry and robin they sold the store this past year and they could have the store any time over the last one thousand five hundred and twenty years they really almost needed to have sold the store for a variety of reasons in the last two years and they still didn't because they were determined to find a buyer who would commit to keeping the store the general store so they get a huge huge round of applause for me in my book but my favorite honey about the store involves i think it's safe to say the most unlikely general store owner in america steve cordasco so yes a genuine bona fide hollywood celebrity you know if you watch the office probably better known as the world's worst boss you know steve carell grew up in acton massachusetts just a little bit west to hair right and when steve was growing up there now that i've talked to him on the phone i call him steve  steve was growing up in act and there was a it wonderful general store unfortunately long gone but he said it was the st place that he was allowed to go all by himself as a little boy on his bike probably with his own allowance money journalling around  saddle bag of his banana seat bike to buy candy all by himself how many of you had the same experience how many of you for how many of you was at a small local store where you were allowed to go st all by yourself right i love asking that because so many people a majority usually in the room where i could have had that same expect same thing for me same thing for me i grew up a little east here i grew up in boston harbor and winthrop or as i think they refer to it the charming little seaside town at the end  cish went out to hollywood over christmas time to visit her sister and famous brother in law while she was there she told nancy turning into the condos and at that point steve overhearing this went into the kitchen where they were talking long story short again when nancy sr test returned out here to boston that christmas time she had with her a blank check to purchase the mar hills general store and it is an authentic new england general store in ways that some general stores that still exist elsewhere new england don't even have anymore it still has on the far right there it still has a working post office attached to it time was that the post office was an integral part of every single general store but the u s p s is not real fond of that arrangement anymore you don't see it much anymore it's still the case in marshfield mills on the rd floor of that little attic cuple room during the civil war they stitched union army uniforms up there and i think the corrals did a great job of maintaining the historical integrity of the store don't you look at those lines very very similar they kept the historical integrity and steve did make his sister not jewish the general manager of the store she runs it today today the carousal house in cohasset they're out every summer and no summer no summer today marshall hills is complete without a confirmed corrodes sighting at his store as you can see so so far we've talked really about saving the general store saving but you know as i put this stuff together i also felt like it was important to pay some oh my gosh if you'll permit me to use a fancy french w to some stores they have never needed saving but they deserve a little bit of credit and attention to these a stores that are so ingrained so interwoven into the fabric of their community that in these towns it's impossible to imagine this store being up for sale why would it be up for sale we live there everybody does right these are stores i call tried and true they're all remarkable i'll just give you one for an example one of my favorites is up in warren vermont so kind of up there in the green mountains kind of distant between waitsfield warren you know ski country up there and it is the heart and soul of warren that do that that's what my kids do when they're watching t v actually they say stuff to  but yeah i get a lot of the you know dead to make a better story than a window it is really one of those general stores that when you go in anybody ever been there yet have you ever had a sandwich from there places that just draws you in when you're in there you don't want to leave i was last in there so this is funny actually i was last in there three weeks ago when i was shooting a main street story for chronicle that will air just before thanksgiving but before that it was very easy for me to recall exactly when i'd been in there because of what was happening nationally before three weeks ago i had last been in there in the spring of two thousand and sixteen march th so it was whether you care to recall or not it was a presidential kind of a little fun contest to want to name the word stuff you know it does get awfully awfully slow by the time you get to march in vermont it's so i said really really i said well have you had any candidates for a new name and he said funny you should use that word so it turns out that literally just about a week before i'd been up to the store a nother long time friend of the store in a rather famous for monterey his own right had also dropped and jack told him about the stove and contest and i'm to say i was actually surprised he was around because he was pretty busy at that time in his life i don't know man i thought maybe used a home doing laundry in burlington but he dropped into the store and obviously quicker on his feet than i am he said he had an idea he said i have a suggestion consolation in many different ways small and big small and big but you know there are also some general stores that i love to point out there all of the above these are like the combo platter of general stores the one the one of a kind because they are everything they say they have never been a for sale i don't think they ever will be up for sale they are tried and true and they are also each in their own way have something about them that is so unique that they needed their own chapter now one of my favorites is as it happens also in vermont and it is in norwich from mont which is kind of the upper valley area right so magine like hanover new hampshire and then go west a little bit just jump across the connecticut river and you're business was great they were very confident they put the sign in the window you've probably seen variations on that sound before right but i always joke at dan in which it might actually be true ok so they did really well they wanted to expand ok they wanted to expand problem was they were very limited in terms of their expansion options right they couldn't expand on this side because of the norwich in they couldn't expand on that side because a street so their only option was to expand directly behind the building in exactly the same physical rectangular footprint of the original building in almost three quarters of an acre that was back there so that's a lot of land for a small store to occupy but occupy it they did so what makes dan and whit's so unique is that when you walk in you know it doesn't look any different then what you would expect to find in a small new england general store it's kind of cluttered kind of claustrophobic and in fact the distance from the front door to that back wall where that guy and his son are standing is not any further than where i'm standing right now certainly not any further from this store to that door but if you go just to the left there is another doorway it's just and there's no door there's no sign but if you go through that door you're in a very different place you're in the back you're in the back where it just seems to go on and on as well it should if you're walking down an aisle that's three quarters of an acre right and so what you have that makes then and with so unique you have in the front you have the cluttered little new england general store and in the back you have now kind of like a general slow version of a big box store so you can imagine that you might get lost back there it's very maze like it comes down level it comes winter afternoon dan frazier the original dance grandson was showing me around and he said listen sure he ended i got a gym bag out front you're welcome to walk around i did five hundred and ten minutes you know and then i was ready to leave and go back out front and every single direction i moved did not get me back out and you know it's not it's not alarming is much is it is really embarrassing because you know where you are we're going to start yelling right right it's like being lost in a court maze you know what i mean you know when you are you sterling massachusetts if i could jump on an extension lead are probably see my car you know thirty feet away but you still like getting out any quicker finally i think it back out i went to the front there and i found there and i said then i close to the public then the ski patrol goes up right and its keeper troll in a woman goes down every single trail and slope to flush it out right to make sure god forbid nobody is to hurt left behind after dark at nine o'clock every night at three sixty seven main street in norwich vermont a dand wets they send somebody out to flush out the back so i said the day and i said that is crazy i said i mean it's not like you find people back i said that's not good he said you know what's really odd though this is off the record he said what's really odd is that half the time we know for a fact that their parents left like an hour ago garage like general store through the twenty's thirty's forty's did very well wanted to expand by the one thousand nine hundred and fifty s who could blame him just like in a way very limited in terms of how he could expand he couldn't even expand in back there's a little brook back there so he expanded vertically ok so he created the now three story commercial colossus that is as he's in windsor may and he created a gigantic basement level and an equally gigantic ground floor level and an equal tick nd floor level what makes hussies unique literally in all the world is a certain combination of things that they sell now so you can imagine if you're going to run in there and you're getting something like an oil lamp wick you know or a pair bootlaces you might think well geez i'm going to need some guidance and so there's a lot of ground to cover here and it's the stuff everywhere so you figure you might need some sort of you know sign  and they and they have one and they have one so if you start reading the sign from the bottom up you'll mine it for maximum humor value ok so so far nothing crazy right wood stoves home and garden shows the only general store in the world where you can buy the combination of guns guns and beer basically your one stop shopping for a shotgun wedding which all kidding aside is what harlan has his granddaughter kristen valentine had some fun with a new wedding day here's the only bride in her wedding picture and she's holding her wedding bouquet a six pack and are against it and the groom is holding a brand new twelve gauge so as we fish as we finish so this is interesting because this element that i want to share with you to finish w h was not part of my book talk never mind a year ago it wasn't part of my book to even six months ago but it is not is this is the rd book talk i've put together and what i have found invariably and it was true this time too which is what i'm sharing with this with you now is that you know you put a book talk together at least i don't know how other people do it but in my case you know you think about what would be really interesting to people from the book in and you think of a narrative that the good way to tell it you know and put it together and then invariably you go out you share it and you find out how stupid you are because half the things you think a fascinating seem to make people's eyes gloss over and have the things they seem to want to hear about you have not put in the book talk so i have learned to be a little bit flexible and to know that when i asked for questions as i will tonight that part of what that does especially early on with a book is it gives you some clue as to what people find interesting about this topic right and so when i started giving this talk to year ago wasn't surprised at all by the question what surprised me after two or three months of getting this question every night was my answer because it never varied it never varied and after a couple of months of why have i not shared this because it's perfect at the end because this general store is the quintessence of my favorite stories that i've done for chronicle which is to say that i've done many stories and they're not all this topic but probably my favorite or most memorable stories the ones that i'm really drawn to are stories about underdogs underdogs they could be underdogs in terms of people who have overcome sometimes horrible crippling setbacks obstacles and yet found a way to continue their life with dignity and respect and success and they can be an underdog a city or town you know a waterfront the new bedford of gloucester that has had to reinvent itself a mill town like fall river a north that ems towns where their prosperity has long since moved on and they have had to deal the scourge of crime and unemployment and drugs and they find a way to continue what are you going to do that your town that's your town right and you want it to continue and these are the underdogs that have been drawn to and then i realized this general store is the ultimate underdog as a general store it has been beaten down more times than rocky and it's found a way to get back up it has found a way to save it general store even when its general store was dead and gone and i mean gone so there's been a general storm partly vermont to over two hundred years seven hundred and ninety six incredibly am courser o ne of only thirteen general store owners in over two hundred years and it has always been a general store it is often looked just like it looked all through its history and it has always occupied the same little spawn just above little sackets broke in the middle of partly vermont except when it did remember i said there was one store that didn't occupy that same spot that same physical footprint for all that time well this is the store the st time it almost wasn't there was on a terrible night in early may two thousand and eight when faulty wiring in the attic caused the fire to break out about one o'clock in the morning and thank goodness for volunteer fire departments because they were able to muster very quickly and although it looks terrible they were able to save almost two thirds of the building and it fell to again the local historical society jumping into the rescue she called up paul broun who jumped in his beat a prius and drove this time down upon me and he surveyed the situation said well lisa st thing we need to do is make the town owners of the store in terms of the historical society  because the owners of the store had had no insurance and they decided to take it as a complete loss right off and they left town so paul broun made the point persuasive that you know in his experience he said i have found that even when disaster strikes a town cannot leave town so right thing about that so he helped them and working with bernie sanders and pat leahy they found federal funding they f state funding they found low interest loans they help them write grants they help them raise money town of just under a one thousand people raised almost one hundred thousand dollars and they were able to rebuild the store they were able to rebuild the store and you know when the roof went on when the roof went on traffic ground to a hot home party everybody got out of their car some cases the cars were still running and everybody got out of the cars and started clapping because the beating heart of little puppy vermont was beating once again and all was good in and people breathed a big sigh of relief that their store was open once again but almost before they had a chance to exhale it was gone and as bad as this looks it's worse how could it be worse well this is an eighteen alarm fire it wouldn't have mattered if it was one hundred and eighteen dollars alarms because nothing would have put this fire around to burn down to its foundation stones in less than forty five minutes but that will happen when you have a fire helped along by massive accelerant arson so now the little town of plenty vermont population nine hundred and sixty seven people had to deal with the punch not only had they just lost the heart and soul of their little town for the nd time in less than two years but the person who did this horrible thing might be our neighbor who knows that's the terror of arson so the store was gone it felt to people in putney like there'd been a death in the family i can't tell you how many people express that in just those terms to me like a death in the family they say you know you'd find yourself driving home by by the time that the sun went down early in mid early november and you know you'd be driving home and you'd turn in a corner thereby sackets brooke and it was dark and for a moment you'd forget you'd think that you know maybe i'll run in get a cup of coffee see of steves there's the if sylvia is there behind the counter and instead you turn the corner and there was just blackness and they said it was crushing and l our friend paul brant again and this time paul he jumped in his prius he came down again he drove through the night he got there at six in the morning the medical little stone church across the street from where the store and stood he was very he had sobering news for them he said i already been on the phone with bernie and pat leahy and he said i have to tell you that the federal funding is in the pipeline but it's dependent on collateral which is the store the collateral is gone the funding funds are frozen so there was a lot of frustration there was a lot of tears there was a lot of anguish after about half an hour you know it's a small tightly knit word got out that they were meeting at the church about the store and within an hour there were over one hundred people they had to move the meeting out into the cold open air and after an hour or so an older gentleman whose family goes back five generations and partly stood up in that little ost little low stone wall that meets the street right there by the corner and he said he said i just have one thing t he said i don't care about the rest he is but i'm going to tell you i will be god damned if an arsonist will define my town and he sat down and paul broun kind of that his words can hang in the cold air and he stood up and he said well if i understand my friend correctly here i think we need to rebuild and they did and the one single silver lining of this awful tragedy is that it was such a tragedy th made front page news all over the world the picture of the putney fire was featured on the front page newspapers literally around the world from paris to rome to jerusalem it led some evening broadcasts of america new shows and money poured into play they had more money than they knew what to do with more money than they needed to rebuild the store they formed an endowment they were able to rebuild the store they were able to rebuild the store bigger they were able to rebuild the store safer and more secure now they still needed somebody to run the store the town known did the summer run it they lucked out they found a wonderful person who just seemed like he was made to be there at this moment to run the store because was he had been an immigrant he's a pharmacist and he said that you know when my family moved here and we barely spoke english and we didn't know a soul we'd go to the store and everybody accepted us like family and i want to give something back they said well what do you have in mind he said well if i can run my pharmacy out of even a little corner on the nd floor that you don't use i won't take a dime from the store and they said that sounds like a good idea so he did he opened his pharmacy on the nd floor and all was good again and whole again in partly vermont until new year's day twenty seven te no no i told you this was an underdog story right rocky doesn't bounce up and knock out apollo creed it looks like he's never going to be able to win the fight because on new year's day two thousand and seventeen this lovely gentleman die and neither is adult children who moved elsewhere or had any business any idea that they wanted to come back to put me in the store and the store closed again but this time paul broun got the jump on potty he called the police in the basement and he said of reality here you know we've talked a night about saving the general store but i don't like to do this truckin and leave people with it with a false sense of optimism because general store still close all the time in the window to the tune of about twenty five dollars every year closed down in new england and they will continue they will continue to do that probably the most significant loss if you like history was six years ago in the little compton little village of adamsville rhode island where gray's clothes went greatest clothes and twelve it was at that time the longest continuously operating general store in american history two hundred and twenty four years or just about twenty years less than the country had been in business so that's a hell of a run and perhaps even more poignant this is a page from my book when the book went to the publisher last fall the monterey general store of monterey in the berkshires was alive and well and today it's gone so these will still close more will still close and i think that the one thing that now will is saving a lot of general stores is a new breed of general store owners but general stores need someone to own them they are not museums i know we love them some of them for their some of their historic in the style value they are not museums a museum is a museum they are a business and they need someone who can run it successfully as a business and preserve this wonderful history and there is a new breed of general store owners that are doing this and what makes them particularly fascinating to me is their relative youth not everybody but many of them are young people of that age may not have the same feeling for a brick and mortar pillar of a community that perhaps their parents or their grandparents them but many of them do and thank god i like to call my poster children of the new breed of general store owners and white film ain and terran marcus the perfect perfect picture of the new breed of general store owners and what so perfect the bottom they never want to own a chair or ever you're looking at farmers they met at agriculture school in washington state they moved back to white feel when they graduated because ben's family was from there they thought maybe they'd be able to afford a few acres of land to farm they looked and looked couldn't afford it finally a guy in town came up to one day said listen i know you guys are looking for some land  he said i'm going to make you a crazy offer he said i will give you give you five acres of prime farmland they said what's the catch he said the catch he said the catch that there's a long closed general store on their property he said i was stuck maybe i would reopen it but i don't think that's going to happen but he said if you will reopen the store and keep it open for two years the land is yours food for the store that we like to eat you know because the thinking was when this whole crazy thing goes out they surely it will we can personally liquidate the inventory right if you want to go food shopping for two years but that didn't happen it didn't happen i mean the lamb produced  don't get me wrong incredible organic produce carrots the the link the a forearm and people were suddenly lining up at six in the morning on friday morning to buy their produce and then it a certain point six months in ben and tara looked at each other they said would it be great if instead of one of us driving hundreds of miles every week to hit every farmer's market in southern new england which is what you have to do now would be great if you can find somebody to open up like a little cafe in the store to use a produce and they did they found a great person to open up a little cafe in the store and now people were lining up not just the buy their produce but for breakfast and for one and then and then they decided they would add all kinds of new services and things they had never been seen in a general store and this is where the new breed of general store owners actually have something in common with public libraries today because you know the good public libraries today know something they know something that a lot of people don't think about all the time and that is a little inconvenient truth that public libraries today and by that i'm a passionate lover a public libraries but public libraries today know it is not just about books anymore it can't be just about books anymore but you have many different ways to get a book you do not have to schlep to the public library to get a book road it is done right but it's better if you don't however the good public libraries the creative ones the ones that have gotten this trend have added all kinds of things now that libraries never did before all kinds of added value all kinds of services programs like this one right the new british general store owners get that too guess what nobody has come in to buy a general it any general store knowing one in twenty five years or more to buy an anvil or a sledgehammer most general stores don't have any hardware anymore because you can go to lowe's you can go to home depot to buy a sledgehammer she is like emma you know what you can't get at home depot you can't get over it i see where your priorities are you can't get twenty minutes tearing over a cup of coffee with your friend in town ok and that's what they've realised so they have on they are now offering things that were never done in a general store open mike night they've had wine tastings they have yoga classes they have daycare they have now the st small lending library within forty five miles and because of what they've done now the general store is thriving now it is again popular with young families and young and old and it gives hope and what gives more hope about the future for general stores of the reopening of hope gen in two thousand and sixteen that because of this new breed of general store owners i now have guarded optimism about the future of new england's general stores and that is new in the general stores thank