By Valerie Sliker, courtesy Wagener Monthly
Feb. 8, 2018
The building that housed CE Tyler’s Red & White grocery, one of South Carolina’s first and last Red & White stores, is in the process of being repurposed. Closed in the Summer of 2001, the store located next to Blizzard’s Funeral Home on Main Street, has remained empty and under the ownership of Charlie Tyler and LeMyra (Tyler) Young for fifteen years.
“We never felt good about selling the store until now,” Charlie Tyler, son of the building’s proprietor, told me recently as he and his wife Ann talked with me in their home in the room that formerly was a covered porch where his grandmother would sit and collect greetings from Wagener residents as they did their weekly grocery shopping across the yard.
“The store was like our living room and this house was like our living room; didn’t matter, you were home either place.” Charlie’s grandparents spent much of their time on the sun porch. They could sit and watch the people come and go and wave to the people who were calling out, “Hey Ms. Myra!”
“We live so close to the building and we will have to live closely with whatever goes on over there,” Tyler explained. After fifteen years standing empty, the sixty-year-old building that housed a ninety-seven-year-old store has been sold to its neighbor, Blizzard’s Funeral Home. “Wilson’s (Blizzard) daddy was in the store every day. He would either sit with my mother in the office or go back in the meat department with daddy and talk. We have a long standing relationship with the Blizzards. We’re like family. When Wilson called about purchasing the building, I didn’t have to hesitate. I feel like this is a perfect thing to happen to this piece of property. It’s been a blessing and an answer to prayer.”
Seemingly, each step in the dismantling process reveals another home-spun story from Wagener’s “Glory Days.” CE Tyler’s Red & White has been through five generations of Charlie Tylers and their families. “It’s been emotional,” Charlie continued, talking about the demolition. “But Wilson is a very good neighbor. He sent us pictures as it was coming down.” Ann Tyler said, “He took down that building in a way that was respectful to us. Wilson told us he would not want to do anything that would not be honorable to Mr. Gene and Mrs. Frances (Tyler). He loved them. It is much more than bricks and mortar. My kids, all the kids in our families grew up in that store. They grew up with parents, grandparents and cousins all around them every single day.” Charlie smiled, “We’re very proud of our roots. I feel like we’re (the property) still giving back to the community. I don’t know what Wilson’s plans are, but he loved our mama and daddy.”
In the month-long process of demolition, people have been stopping by to watch the store go down with many tears and many stories.
Charlie and Ann have enjoyed hearing the stories and seeing old friends again. Many storytellers were just teenagers when they worked at the store. There was a kitchen in the back of the store where employees would cook lunch every day. Mr. Gene (the third Charlie Eugene Tyler) would donate the food and everybody would go back there to eat during their lunch break. LeRoy Dodson was the store manager for many years back then and he often cooked both lunch and dinner there.
“Ms. Geneva Benjamin came in every single day,” Ann told me. “She taught whoever was running the register the proper way to pack her groceries. If they had it out of order, she would make them change it. She would tell them where to put everything.” Sadly, Ms. Geneva passed away during the demolition. She was a tremendous pillar of our community. In fact, a South Carolina governor declared March 9 to be “Geneva Benjamin Day.” CE Tyler’s Red & White fostered a family environment for the whole town, a lifestyle that Wagener proprietors continue to nourish.
“There was a lot of intimacy,” Ann continued. “You knew your employees’ children and loved them like your own. They brought their problems to Big Daddy (Mr. Gene) and grandmamma (Mrs. Frances) for advice if they were in trouble or if they needed loan. If they were sick, we took care of them. Big Daddy had a four-wheel drive and could get out even in the snow. They were his employees, his family.”
The people stopping by during the demolition tell a consistent story. “This is where I learned a work ethic.” The stories coming out now include stories of marriage problems or problems with kids. An employee would pull up a chair beside Mrs. Frances while she was doing her bookkeeping and she would impart her wisdom. “And a lot of times,” Charlie said, “Mama might say something like ‘When you come in tomorrow, bring me that shirt.’ She’d fix a button or a torn seam.”
One woman who still lives in this town worked at the Red & White for many, many years. As Charlie tells it: “One day, daddy asked her, ‘Don’t you want to run a cash register?’ She didn’t think she could do that. He said he would help her through it. Daddy was very encouraging. When I saw her recently, she hugged me and said, ‘Your mama and daddy saved my life.’ The people that really needed a job – daddy tried to help them learn how to work. He wanted people to learn the value of work and respect and to be part of a team.”
“One former employee told me that when he was marrying another former employee, mama asked if they had any furniture. When they told her they had no furniture, she bought them a bedroom suit from Tyler Brothers. They never forgot that. I didn’t know my mama did that.
“Mama and daddy were a good team. They complemented each other well. It never ceases to amaze me. Everybody was so tired from work, but they’d sit down around the table and eat a meal together. You went around the table and talked about your day. I learned a lot from that. You could ask my parents anything about anything and mama wouldn’t mince any words. It amazes me the upbringing we were afforded and a lot of it had to do with our lives being centered around the store. We got to meet so many wonderful people and serve so many and be appreciated by so many. This community has always embraced that business and we did our best to try to give back.
“I saw the same people on Monday, the same ones on Tuesday. Coming in the same day each week, they would talk for thirty minutes or more. Sometimes I’ll see somebody in Aiken and it will be one of the sewing room ladies from the (Wagener) manufacturing plant. She’ll say, ‘Charlie, is that you?’ I would have cashed her check every Friday at 4:30 for fifteen years. You just develop a relationship with those people, mutual respect, glad to see each other. They say they miss coming in the store. It was so hard when they shut that shirt factory down.”
The Wagener Manufacturing Plant (“shirt factory”) was built in the late 1940s and employed hundreds of Wagener residents. When CE Tyler’s Red & White grocery store was ready to expand to its fifth location, it made good business sense to put the store right in front of the shirt factory. On Fridays at 4:30, when the ladies got paid, Mr. Tyler spoke through a microphone into a speaker that faced the plant’s parking lot. As the ladies came over to cash their paycheck, they could hear Mr. Tyler telling them what was on sale that day.
“It was like a party every Friday,” Ann said. “Like a social hour from 4:30 – 6:30. Tyler Brothers’ Piggly Wiggly and our Red & White were inundated with people because they had just gotten paid. It was ‘Glory Time’ in Wagener, it really was.” At that time, the Piggly Wiggly was just a three-aisle store in the downstairs level of Tyler Brothers Department Store and Ed Carver was the last manager at the Wagener Manufacturing Plant. The plant was owned and operated out of New York and had, among others, contracts with LL Bean and Land’s End.
When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came along, Ed told the third Charlie Eugene Tyler, “Mr. Gene, we’re going down.” Ed reported that they could send their cloth to Nicaragua or Honduras and it would be cut and shipped back here with more than half of it thrown away due to poor sewing and they could sew it again cheaper than it could all be done here. Common sense told him the plant could not stay open in Wagener. The Red & White lasted about a year after the factory closed.
“It was time.” Charlie quietly explained, “Daddy was 75. He asked me, as the younger one and with a business and education degree, and I told him I thought it was time to shut it down.”
Charlie’s great grandmother, Donie Rice Tyler, began the first Tyler store after her husband, the first Charlie Eugene Tyler, died in his thirties after a burst appendix, leaving her with two young sons. He was the oldest sibling in his family and John Tyler, who started Tyler Brothers, was the youngest. Donie began selling Lydia Pinkham’s medicine, a woman’s medicine, to people traveling from one town to another on the train. Once she got her mortgage on the family farm paid off, she opened the first grocery store beside Gunter’s Pharmacy across from today’s Security Federal Bank where the former Kwik Karry was located.
When her son, Charlie’s grandfather, the second CE Tyler came home from World War I, he married Myra Dukes, a Columbia College graduate, and moved the grocery store to where the Little Bake Shoppe is currently located. Second generation and second location for the store. He and Myra later moved the store to the intersection of Highways 302 and 39, in the middle of town, currently where a Christ Central building is located. They lived on the upper level and had the store on the lower level.
It was at this location that the first commercial loaf of bread was sold and it was also where the first refrigerated cases were placed in a grocery store in Wagener. Fresh chickens were sold from the coop in back of the shop. Customers would stand at the front door and request the items they wanted. Store employees would go get the items piece by piece and bring them to the customers at the front of the store. All the employees had aprons with pockets where they kept change. At the end of the day, they all took money out of their pockets and counted what the take was for the day and some days they would remain open until 11 or 12 at night.
In the 1940s, Mr. Charlie and Mrs. Myra moved into the Pope William’s house further down South Main Street, next to Hubert Blizzard’s Funeral Home, a house where their grandson, Charlie, currently lives with his wife Ann. Shorty Tyler (“Uncle Shorty”) then built a 3500 square foot store between the house and the shirt factory where CE Tyler’s Red and White grocery store was relocated in 1955. “The store was ahead of it’s time,” Charlie said. “It contained glass-fronted meat cases and customers began walking down the aisles getting items on their own. This was a new concept. Red and Whites were independent stores, not franchised, and eventually that was the downfall of the business as the big box stores took over.
Thirty years later, in 1985, the third CE Tyler “Mr. Gene” and the fourth CE Tyler “Charlie” added on about 7,500 square feet. This is the remaining portion that Wilson Blizzard did not demolish and will eventually repurpose.
“When daddy was building the addition,” Charlie continued, “I just wondered if it was the right thing to do. That was in the 1980s and 90s and the economy was really booming. Then daddy got old. He continued to go to the farmer’s market, religiously, on a Tuesday at 4:00 a.m. up until the week before the store closed. He dealt with a company that is still in existence to this day, the V.B. Hook Produce Company. He also dealt with Price Banana house. A man named Todd, at VB Hook, said he learned so much from my daddy. My daddy was very particular about the produce.” Ann laughed, “We always said ‘Big Daddy, you’re gonna die over the banana table.’” The Tyler family still has people commenting about things Mr. Gene sold that they can’t find anywhere else.
Mr. Gene also did business with grocery wholesaler Thomas and Howard Company, also still in business in Columbia. In 1955, when they built the new store, Thomas and Howard financed everything and they never, ever had a written contract. Even in the final days, there wasn’t a single written agreement between CE Tyler and Thomas and Howard and they always paid their bills on time.
Discussing the demolition, Charlie reported, “I took my two sons (the fifth CE Tyler “Chet” and his brother Todd) through the store once they got it back down to the bare bones and I showed them where everything was located in the original building. There was a little tiny office in the back and it had a cutout with bars across it like a window at the bank. That’s where the sewing ladies’ checks were cashed. After that, there were two different offices at the front. At one time, Mama had a big board that she set up on one of the check-out stands to do her bookkeeping. One check-out would be running and she would move the board if they needed to open a second one. All her files and her bookkeeping was kept up under that register. She didn’t have an office proper at that point in time.
“I showed my sons the little place where the dry goods were loaded off the truck – it was just a tiny place – I remember loading stuff into that little area. There was one walk-in cooler. We eventually had three walk-in coolers and a huge unloading area, a huge produce prep area – all in the new part.
“My parents just got up and went to work every day, stayed there as long as they had to in order to pay their bills, give good customer service, and give money to the church. Daddy said if you believe in God, you’ll get through any circumstance. He was a critical analysis kind of person. He would go to bed with a problem and wake up with an answer. He was very patient and taught so many people all kinds of stuff. Daddy started running the store when he was twelve. He went to the Citadel and called his parents to tell them school was too slow for him. At 18, he left the Citadel, came home and married my mother. They honeymooned in Columbia for two nights.
“Granddaddy put a lot of faith in my daddy. They had a curing house and they grew sweet potatoes at the farm. Granddaddy would send him with a truck loaded with sweet potatoes to King Street in Charleston. Daddy would park and sleep in the truck for two or three days to sell all the sweet potatoes -- at 12 years old. He had that strong of a work ethic even then. He loved it.
“My parents raised us that we were put on this earth to help other people, never to hurt somebody else. Daddy was a very religious person and he always gave God the glory for any success. Any failures were his. Daddy said, ‘I kept my faith in God and never looked back.’ Daddy preached revivals and preached a lot down at the Methodist church in Branchville, SC, but it got to the point where he couldn’t do both and he was committed to the grocery store, he had to stay with it.
Mr. Gene and Mrs. Frances built a modest home and a pond on Highway 302, less than a mile from the store. They only had one vehicle, the store truck, so Mrs. Frances stayed at home with her children LeMyra (Young) and Charlie until they were in school. While the kids were home, Mrs. Frances would cook lunch for the sewing ladies at the shirt factory. She and Charlie would walk up to the plant with a box full of food to sell. This was her extra money to buy fabric and sew. LeMyra was in school by then and probably running the cash register at the store afterwards. Charlie laughed, “Daddy probably put LeMyra on the cash register when she was in third or fourth grade.” You can read LeMyra Tyler Young’s stories in this paper each month.
“In those days,” Charlie explained, “Hog and cow feed came in cloth bags, very brightly printed materials. Mama would go with daddy to get the hog feed so she could pick out the bags. Once the feed was dumped out, she’d put the bag in the washing machine and then sew clothes out of it. She could have afforded material, but it was a challenge to see how beautiful a thing she could make out of nothing. She was so creative.” After Mrs. Frances’ death, Charlie and Ann found two matching quilts she made and labeled for their sons, Chet and Todd. They never knew of its existence. She probably meant to give it to them on their wedding days.
CE Tyler’s Red and White played a significant part in Wagener’s history. The Blizzard Funeral Home now owns the property and will use it for parking and extra storage. They are doing some remodeling in the chapel this year and will use the Red and White for storage and expanded parking.