A Little Bit Like Home

Making a Run

to Hoover’s

It seems like no matter where we travel, every town has one of those places locals know but passersby pay little attention to. In my hometown of Hopkins, that place was Hoover’s.

Hopkins had four places where a person could buy gas. On the south end of town was the Mobil station owned by the Stites family. Just north of the intersection of Route JJ and Highway 148 was the Standard Oil station operated by the John O’Riley family. A couple of miles north, almost on top of the Missouri-Iowa line, was the State Line Cafe, which also had gas pumps and a liquor store.

Then there was Hoover’s.

To someone passing through Hopkins, it may not have looked like much. The sign on the door might say “We’re Open,” and the gas price would be current, but otherwise the place did not exactly wave traffic into the parking lot.

During the day, the lights were not always on inside. There were enough windows to let the sun do part of the work. The building smelled like cigarette smoke, which made sense because Hoover almost always had one going. He was talkative and could carry on a conversation with anyone who came through the door.

That dog was part of Hoover’s, too. He stayed on the front porch, secured by a heavy chain that seemed thick enough to hold back something larger than a dog. As a little kid, I naturally assumed he was mean. I had no evidence, but childhood has never required much evidence before forming strong opinions.

One of my buddies said the dog was mean because the guys around there fed him gunpowder. I believed this completely and did not intend to get close enough to test the theory.

Our family did not have much reason to go to Hoover’s for what seemed to be its main line of business. I did not grow up in a house with liquor around, except for a little fifth of whiskey on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet. It had been bought years earlier on the advice of a veterinarian to warm up a calf. For reasons I still appreciate, the nipple was left on the bottle.

That was about as close as our house came to a liquor cabinet.

We did not drink beer either, so Hoover’s did not draw us in the way it drew in some of the men who stopped there rather than driving north to the State Line. But Hoover’s had something else: cold pop.

Inside was an upright cooler with a glass front door. It held cans of soda, which were fine, but the true prize was the 1-liter bottles of Squirt and 7-Up. On the right afternoon, after enough heat, dust, work, and sweat, few things sounded better than a cold bottle of Squirt.

A trip to Hoover’s meant all three of us boys in the pickup with Dad driving. Bill, Joe, and I were loaded into the cab and, on the hottest days, Joe and I may have ridden on the tailgate or in the back.

The trips were not frequent, but they were almost predictable on brutally hot afternoons when we had been working outside. When we put up hay, we usually had water jugs, and Grandma often provided cold lemonade or iced tea when we were back at the barn unloading small square bales.

The Hoover’s trips I remember best came during other kinds of outside work, especially building fence. There is something about trimming brush, setting posts, stretching wire, and working in the sun that can dry out anyone’s enthusiasm. A cold bottle of Squirt in the middle of one of those afternoons was more than a treat. It was encouragement with carbonation.

I am sure plenty of people drove through Hopkins and never thought twice about Hoover’s. Maybe they noticed the gas pumps. Maybe they noticed the dog. Maybe they saw the “We’re Open” sign and kept going.

They did not know what locals knew. They did not know Hoover would visit if you gave him the chance. They did not know about the glass-front cooler or the 1-liter bottles cold enough to make a hot afternoon feel survivable.

A lot of people probably drove by. Had they stopped, they would have found the coldest bottle of pop in town.

Tom Brand is a St. Joseph, Missouri, writer whose latest book, “You Have To Leave If You Want To Come Back,” is available at RichardsonPress.com. He still thinks of Hoover’s every time he enjoys a cold bottle of Squirt.