About Us

REYNOLDS -
By Cindy Mullet
Ranger-Review Staff Writer

When the United States entered World War II, Richard and Jack Reynolds were too young to be drafted into the military, but not too young to be drafted into the grocery business.

They were in the eighth grade, Richard was 14 and Jack 13, when they drew their first official paycheck from the F.R. Reynolds Company, Richard said. School let out at 2:30 p.m. and the boys went directly from there to the store where they delivered groceries and Jack helped in the meat department. It was not a 40-hour-a-week job, he noted. They often made deliveries until 9:30 or 10 p.m. They also worked all day Saturday and half a day on Sunday. Because so many area young men had been drafted into the military, their father, Frank Reynolds, had trouble finding employees so called on the family to help hold the company together.

Richard had started driving vehicles on the farm when he was 12. At 14, when he started delivering groceries for the store, he got his first license. It cost 75 cents, and he had to fill out a form with his name, age and height. No tests, written or driving, were required, he said.

Richard and Jack's older sister Rita, who later married a Reynolds' employee, Kenneth McGovern, said she started working at the store at about the same age as her brothers did. By the time she was 15, she was helping out in the office. She went away to college before Richard and Jack started working every afternoon and never worked full time in the store after that, but when she came home she always found herself helping out.

After graduating from college, she went to work for the Dawson County Review, but if she stopped by the store after work to pick up something, her dad would often say, "We're short handed. We need some help," and she would lend a hand filling orders, she added.

In those days, customers didn¹t grab a cart and go up and down the aisles, choosing their own items. They called their orders in or dropped off their lists and store personnel gathered the things they needed from the shelves to fill the orders.

Rita can still remember filling an order for a farmer and forgetting to put in his can of snoose. It ruined his whole week, and he let her know about it the next time he came in to the store, she said.

There were no credit cards in those early days but most customers had a charge account. They usually settled their bill every month but farmers sometimes paid their bills twice a year. Interest was never added on. Farm produce was often taken in place of cash. During the depression, the store carried a lot of people through the hard years.

"I still run into people who say they would have starved to death without my father's help," Rita noted.

Farmers seldom made it into town more than once a week, and their father never closed the store until the last farmer had finished his business and come by to pick up his week's supply of groceries, she added.

Most of the merchandise for the store came in by railroad boxcars. Since there was a difference in freight rate between North Dakota and Montana, a lot of their goods came to Beach or Fairview. Their dad had a couple of trucks and they would drive down to the railroad depot, unload the boxcar contents into the trucks and then deliver to the different stores, Richard said.

One time their dad bought a carload of bulk salt and they had to weigh it all out into 100 pound sacks and load the sacks onto the truck. That was a lot of salt, and he thought they would never finish the job, he added. During the war years, probably 60 percent of the beef they sold was local. Their dad would often buy an animal from a rancher and he, Richard and Jack would go out on the prairie, kill and butcher it and bring it back in to sell. The local sheriff would check their bill of sale, look at the hide and stamp all of the quarters, Richard explained.

Paper bags were hard to come by during the war and Rita can still remember trying to wrap up a bunch of cranberries in a sheet of paper. In December, they always had barrels of lutefisk at the front of the store, and she hated going to get it and wrapping it up, she said.

Coffee was one of the commodities that was rationed and was in great demand. One time a woman brought in a three pound can of coffee. She had used about three quarters of it, but complained that it was stale and should be replaced, and "Dad did it," she added.

The first Reynolds' store was on West Bell Street. The building had a full basement and one room down there was used to store tobacco and bulk candy. "I can still smell that combination," Rita noted.

While the store has seen a lot of changes over the years it has always been a "home town store," she said, adding, "We couldn¹t have been successful without the support of people in the community."