Good afternoon from Butler & Bailey Market!
We have another nice week of weather made even better by beating the crap out of Alabama last Saturday! It was one of those rare weekends when just about everyone I wanted to lose, lost or in more positive terms, everyone I wanted to win, won.
I think we did good business this past weekend. I haven’t really figured out our new computer system up front yet, so I can’t find the sales numbers in the computer I’m accustomed to looking at to be sure of this. I’ll just wait for Patrick, my computer guy, to print them and put it on my bulletin board back in the office. He not only gives me total sales but creates a spreadsheet that breaks them down into subcategories. He also shows trends and other fancy stuff real companies look at. I guess we are a real company, but I have a more simplified approach. Do we have enough money to pay the bills and keep the store open? The main criteria for this is the bank balance. I can pretty much tell everything about the business from looking at total sales and our bank balance. In my simple, perfect world, both of those things just keep creeping up. It hardly ever happens that way but that’s the goal.
The main factor that has affected outcomes at the store is inflation. It has been a hot mess since 2021, with food costs leading the way. Everyone has an opinion on why it happened and what or who is to blame. As you might expect, I have an opinion on the matter, but my wife thinks I should stay away from politics and religion when I write these. Well, since it is our anniversary month and her birthday month, I’m doing my best to honor her wishes. Come November, all bets are off! Anyways, I will tell you it is harder for our business to make money when inflation is running hot.
Speaking of inflation, I went to a movie this year. Actually, I have been to three movies this year. I probably had not been to a movie in ten years. That’s kind of my average, one every ten years. Anyways, my friend Mitch, who is easily the biggest Elvis fan I know, called to tell me I had to see EPIC, which is the latest Elvis movie. He specified I needed to see it in IMAX, whatever that is. So off we go to Turkey Creek with another couple to see EPIC.
If you haven’t been to Turkey Creek, don’t go there thinking it’s like Rocky Hill. It’s not. It’s more like trying to drive around on UT’s campus an hour before kickoff, except you don’t have beating the crap out of Alabama to look forward to.
So, we make it to the theater and go in to get tickets. Come to find out, after looking around a while, you don’t buy tickets from a person, they have machines you go to get them. So, I punched around on the machine a few minutes trying to figure it out before my wife, sensing my frustration, came over, took my credit card, and proceeded to make the purchase. She’s more woke than I am, so knows how to do things like that. Probably a good thing because two tickets, two waters and a small popcorn cost seventy-two dollars! Yep, that’s not a typo, that’s real dollars. I was sure she made a mistake and was complaining because movies cost ten dollars in my mind and, as always, she said, “Tom, where have you been?” I think that’s her nice way of saying, you have no clue to what’s going on in the world. I think I do have a clue. I just choose to tune out about ninety percent of it. One of my bad habits.
So, the movie was really good, especially if you are an Elvis fan. And don’t you know, we were back a few weeks later with the same couple, to see the Michael Jackson movie. I’m not sure of the name of that one, maybe Michael Jackson? I don’t know how much that one cost because my wife wouldn’t let me near the dumb machine that takes your money. I wandered the lobby while she was doing that and discovered a beer counter with a real person behind it to take your money. I knew how to operate that and headed that way. My friend showed up at the same time and bought me a beer, so I came out smelling like a rose financially at that movie. I never bothered to tell my wife I didn’t know they sold beer at the movies. She would have judged me again.
The last movie I went to see was the Greg Allman movie. His fame came from being in the Allman Brothers Band, and he was also married to Cher for a while. It only played for one day in Knoxville and was at the Downtown West theater. The girls didn’t go to that one, just us guys. I guess the theater knew it was going to be a guy movie, so they had a real person to take your money for tickets. It would have been an ugly scene if you had a bunch of simple-minded old men lined up out front trying to figure out how to use a kiosk to get in. That theater is a lot closer to Rocky Hill, a lot more user friendly and about a third of the price.
I have one more movie I want to see this decade, if it ever makes it to a theater. I’ve seen the trailer but it hasn’t been released. It’s a movie about Peter Frampton. He was a famous rockstar in the seventies. He became famous in 1976 when he released a live album called Frampton Comes Alive. I would guess it is one of if not the best-selling live albums ever. I could look that up but am already taking too much of your time. He had several hit songs on that album, but the one I remember the most was called “Do You Feel Like We Do” – a classic 70’s rock anthem.
I guess I was 10 or 12 years old at the height of the album’s popularity. I can’t remember for sure. What I do remember is, wherever you went, you heard that album playing. This was long before all the portable speakers, Bluetooth, headphones, and AirPods were available, so if you wanted to listen to music, you played it in a car or at your house. I guess it was also a rule back then that, if you played Frampton, you had to turn it up as loud as you could and open the windows of your house or car. It also could have been because everybody smoked back then, so they opened their windows to let smoke out. Smoking and loud music were what made you cool in the seventies.
Anyways, if we were out playing in the yard, you would hear that album playing from someone’s house with their windows open. If you were playing ball at Rocky Hill ballpark, someone would be driving through there blasting it out of their car windows and no doubt smoking. You always heard it getting dropped off or picked up at school or waiting at the bus stop.
In the summer I would go to the pool at Deane Hill Country Club. For those of you newer to the community, the club encompassed all the land from the corner of Morrell and Deane hill drive all way to the to the back of the Kmart shopping center on Kingston Pike, which is now a furniture store, I think. It also followed along Deane Hill drive for probably a half mile. Now, that land is filled with apartments, houses, shopping centers, and restaurants. The club had a golf course and nice clubhouse, but I was only allowed to use the pool, not sure of the details of that. Anyways, my buddies and I would find a way to get dropped off at the pool as often as possible. It was where all the cool teenagers from Rocky Hill hung out in the summer, which is why we wanted to be there. We were aspiring to be cool teenagers once we aged out of being dumb kids. So, at the pool there was kind of a pecking order. The coolest, oldest teenagers hung out on the pool deck surrounding the pool. From the pool deck, there was a retaining wall and above that was a grass lawn where the next to coolest teenagers laid out their towels and hung out. Towards the back of the lawn area, up against the fence is where me and my buddies set up shop, since we weren’t cool teenagers yet. We would have never thought to bring towels to sit on so we just sat on the grass. It was actually mostly weeds and clover back by the fence, so we ended up getting all itchy and sweaty and attacked by sweat bees most days. I’m not sure anyone was at the pool to swim. Everyone was just there trying to be cool enough to join the next group up in the pecking order of cool teenagers.
My group would strategize about getting the attention of the girls in front of us. I’m sure those girls were doing the same about the guys in front of them and so on until you got to the super cool high school seniors down on the pool deck – the top of the heap. Everyone kind of stayed in their group until the right song came on over the PA system at the pool, and that song was “Do You Feel Like We Do” by Peter Frampton. It was like the mating dance of the Andean Flamingos when it came on. All the girls would immediately coat themselves with Hawaiian Tropic tanning oil, light up a Marlboro Light 100, because it was cool to smoke, and start prancing or dancing around the pool deck mouthing the words to the song hoping to grab the attention of the older boys. Well, we didn’t have any cigarettes or tanning oil, so we decided our best hope at gaining the attention of the girls was to go jump off of the high dive. The pool had three diving boards, if I remember correctly, two pretty low ones with the high one in the middle. I’m not sure how high it was, it seemed like 200 feet. I could be off a little either way. At some point, they changed the height of diving boards to the metric system, which meant no one in Rocky Hill would ever be able to figure out how high it was. Anyways, we sure wouldn’t jump off it for fun, because if you didn’t hit the water just right, it really hurt or knocked the breath out of you or both. The only reason you did it was in hopes of capturing the heart of the cool girls prancing around the pool deck smoking cigarettes. Well, the song was well over ten minutes long so that was a lot of jumping off the high dive. It never failed, eventually one of my buddies would land wrong, make a big splash that hit the girls on the pool deck, knocking out their cigarettes and dashing all our hopes of capturing their hearts. We would then venture back to our spot by the fence, strategizing and waiting for Peter Frampton to come back on the PA system, giving us another chance.
I’m not sure we ever had a chance, but we always thought we had a chance, so we would spend our summers finding a ride to the pool, waiting for Peter Frampton to come on, and making our move on the cool teenage girls, smothered in Hawaiian Tropic oil, smoking Marlboro Light 100’s.
Well, Rocky Hill has changed a lot from the seventies. Smoking isn’t cool anymore, the pool at Deane Hill is now pavement and buildings, the radio is full of three minute dumb, pop country songs instead of thirteen-minute rock anthems, and most people listen to their music on AirPods in their own little world instead of throwing open their windows and blasting it for the whole world to hear.
Music and memories…the soundtrack of a Grocery Life
Thanks for letting us be a part of your community!
Tom Butler