How many of you remember the first time you stepped into a Walmart? I bet you go to Walmart so regularly, you can’t recall the wonder you felt the first time you stepped into a store where you could buy most anything. I’m lucky. I know that feeling, and I’ve managed to keep it for a long, long time.

For me, my first Walmart experience came in Lincolnton when I was just a kid, maybe nine, but there’s a problem with that. Sam Walton opened his first Wal-Mart Discount City store in Rogers, Arkansas, July 2, 1962, and I turned nine in 1958 in Lincolnton. So, neither the math nor geography make sense.

While you sort out the math, let me tell you about that first Walmart experience. The building was, to me, large and so was the parking area. This store offered customers a place to buy all kinds of supplies. You could get new tires on your car while you shopped. You could fill your car up with gas. You could buy sporting goods such as Zebco reels and fiberglass rods and plastic worms that smelled like licorice. You could buy groceries as well, and you could even get your kids toys. Seems I recall you could buy real guns there. I want to say that a Mossberg .410 I got for Christmas came from there.

For a while, the store even served as a venue for square dances, that folk dance where four couples doci do the night away. During World War II she operated a bowling alley there and served hot dogs and hamburgers.

As the TV ad guys say, “But wait, there’s more.” You could also get a haircut if you liked. Even back then (Figured out the year yet?), this store recognized that customers liked making just one stop to meet many needs.

This retail center was, indeed, special and it stood right at the city limits on Highway 47. I’m talking about the first Walmart-like store I ever saw, Wells Oil Company. In a real sense, stepping into that store was a step into the future. Miss Minnie Wells was a visionary. Why go into town? Much of what you needed was right there by the little road leading to the Legion and fairgrounds. Your onestop shop: that was Miss Minnie’s.

Every time I drive past that store, my mind goes back to the days of youth. I see JT pumping gas, a large stack of tires over near a service bay, and the small barbershop where Miss Minnie Wells once cut my hair. The outside is busy. Cars and trucks are parked everywhere. Stacks of tires stood here and there, and men are busy doing things.

Inside, Miss Minnie’s store was a treat. To the right was the grocery store and the small barbershop. To the left was a collection of goods that included baseball gloves, Daisy BB guns, and fishing supplies. Things that made a boy’s heart leap. I bought my first and only baseball glove there, a first basemen’s mitt. And my first BB gun, a Daisy lever-action gun came from there too.

I bought my first transistor radio there for $10, an Arvin with a leather cover that snapped over a large battery compartment. (Plastic had not ascended to dominance.) For a long time I’d listen to the only station I could catch and that meant tuning in Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club, where every quarter-hour came the “Call to Breakfast,” a march around the breakfast table. Any of you remember that show? How long ago that seems.

I recall Miss Minnie through the eyes of a boy. Seems she always dressed as a business lady ... grey suit, black shoes with thick heels, and had her hair pulled into a bun. When I think of her glasses, I think of John Lennon’s gold wire-rimmed glasses. She seemed to be all business, the kind of lady who had no time for anything unrelated to her enterprise, no time for tomfoolery. She was practical, living alongside her business. She was generous, providing New Hope Church complimentary heating oil.

JT, I recall, was jovial, always laughing and always working. Ruddy and quick to smile, I recall how he and my dad shared many a laugh together.

Wells Oil Company: that was my first Walmart-like experience. Stop one time; meet many needs. I’m sure stopping at Wells Oil Company saved a lot of folks many a trip to Augusta. I recall that if one of was sick and needed something on Sunday evening or late at night, JT would open the store for dad. So, in a way it was also a round-the-clock enterprise, just like some Walmart superstores.

It’s interesting to speculate what might have become of that operation had it spread to other towns and caught on. Who knows? Today, people all over the country might be going to Wellsmart and maybe there’d even be a Minnie’s Club.

It’s been years since I stepped back inside the venerable old building. I know it must have changed. Why shouldn’t it? The world has changed since I last went inside. Many layers of dust have since drifted over childhood. My Daisy BB gun fired its last BB long ago and it is lost in time now. That old Arvin radio? Gone. My first baseman’s mitt? I still have it, but it’s stiff as an old fellow with a bad case of arthritis. That old glove is my sole surviving artifact, a relic of childhood, you could say.

I suppose I could stop by one more time, go inside, and see what memories I might revive, but I won’t. No offense to the owners today, but I doubt I ever stop by again. Doing so would destroy memories accumulated over childhood. I’d rather see it in my head as it existed and not layer a new memory over the top of that.

Stores hold a special place in my memories growing up in Lincolnton. Standing tall among them are Price’s Store (Icy Cokes bobbing around in vat), Clifford Goolsby’s (the first pool table I ever saw), Willingham’s Five & Dime (smelled of hot dogs), Crawford & Brezeale’s pharmacy (Cherry Cokes), City Pharmacy (books and magazines), Central Supermarket (Dot, Tech, and Omar), and my first Walmart-like experience, Wells Oil Company.

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