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Remembering Town Talk Supermarket: Our Neighborhood Store

 

When Amy Lee Bell heard a local grocery store in the community was looking for help, she told her son Roosevelt, who was 15 years old at the time, to go down and apply so he would have money to be able to help himself.

L.A. Gladdin owned the store. At the time, he was working as a manager for a grocery chain called Selpzer when he decided to go out on his own. He opened a store called Sachamo Meats, and once he got Sachamo’s established, he opened Town Talk Supermarket on the corner of W. Silver Springs Blvd. and Southwest 20th Avenue and was looking for help.

“Luckily I got the job,” said Bell, who got hired as a bag boy.

Bell, who was in ninth grade, could only work after school and some weekends because he played basketball for Howard High School Wild Bulls. It was his first job. He worked Friday evening, all day Saturday and Sunday morning. The first paycheck he got was $12. “That little bit of money came in handy,” he said. “I started buying clothes because I didn’t have many back then so I could dress nicely.”

Back then the store manager was white and only two of the 12 employees working there at the time were black. He said the meat department was very popular back then because they had very fresh and reasonably priced meat. They had three or four employees working in the meat department, three cashiers and a lot of bag bags because they had a lot of business in those days. He said very few whites shopped at the store and 80% of the folks were black. Bell said blacks could work at Winn Dixie and Selpzer, but they wouldn’t be hired for a top job, but could only work in the stock room or as a bag boy like him.

After he graduated, Bell started working full-time at Town Talk, and he saved his money to buy a car. He was very proud of his first car, a 1955 Chevrolet, which he kept for five years. Next he bought a 1961 Convertible and just about every year after that, he bought a different car.

 

In it’s heyday, Bell said although they competed with Winn Dixie and Selpzer, Town Talk did very well. So did he. He was promoted to produce manager and eventually he was managing the store, a position he held for 15 years. By then, he was making about $250 a week and was always paid in cash. “It was beautiful. Most of our customers were very nice to me,” said Bell, who everybody knew as Shane Bell. “They were proud of me because I had that position, so I tried to do the best job I could.”

 

Although there were several other grocery stores, Mary Monroe said Town Talk was a nice little store and she went there for the vegetables and the meats. “They had good meats, real fresh foods,” she said. “They didn’t play with their food.” Monroe, who moved to Ocala in 1958 from Deland with her husband, would send her two sons, Dwight and Gregory, to the store to shop for the family. “I taught them how to shop. They learned to shop at Town Talk,” she said. “I used to give both of them money. I told them, one of you get the bacon, the other one get the eggs.”

 

Monroe said Town Talk seemed to close suddenly after everybody started going to the big grocery stores. “It was like bam, and they were gone. There wasn’t much notice,” she said. “I just remember hearing someone say “looks like we can’t afford to hold the store open now.”

 

Monroe said she misses small stores like Town Talk because people were really friendly back then, but it’s not like that now. She remembers being able to go to the store, stand right in the door way, talk for hours and nobody would say anything to you. She said customers coming in and out would just go around, but nobody ever said a word.

 

“That was the nature of Town Talk,” Monroe said. “It was a place that when you went to Town Talk, everybody knew you at Town Talk.”

 

Bell said he doesn’t remember exactly when Town Talk closed, but said it didn’t stay open long after he left Ocala in 1975 to run a grocery store in Miami. Like Monroe, he said he was sad when the store closed too because he always wanted to buy the store but didn’t have enough money at the time Gladdin was selling it. “It was my fault. I should have saved my money,” he said. “I needed about $40,000 and I only had about $9,000. Instead of saving my money, I was buying new cars and stuff.”

 

For a while, Bell said not being able to buy the store was one of his biggest regrets, but when he moved to Miami, he really blossomed. He said when he came home to visit, he ran in to Gladdin once or twice. Gladdin’s wife tried to get in touch with him when he died to ask him to be a pallbearer at her husband’s funeral, but he wasn’t in town and couldn’t attend the service.

 

“I do miss it,” Bell said about working at Town Talk. “ It was a good experience for me.”