Stale Pop

One of the neighborhood grocery stores of my youth was the notorious “Galeno’s”— little more than a shack. Mr. Galeno was a purveyor of pop and candy who also had a few boxes of cereal, soap, toilet paper and other household essentials lining the shelves. When I was quite young I would make the two-block trek there to buy baseball cards, cards that would be worth big money now. They were probably the only things of worth that were ever sold there, albeit taking sixty years to appreciate.

When we were teens, the standing joke was that Galeno’s sold stale pop. We always wondered how he managed to stay in business for forty years; the picture above was taken in the mid 1980's, not long before it was finally condemned. Perhaps he sold numbers? He was always talking on the phone in the back room. For several years,  behind the store, there was a trailer that his daughter lived in.

We wondered about her as well.



Summer Re-run Series
First Posted September 2, 2006