Quote:
Originally Posted by KegRiver
Hey, that reminds me of another store that no longer exists.
How many remember the T. Eaton's catalogue?
A lot of folks today think nothing of driving a hundred miles but back then such a trip was a big deal.
Few homesteaders could afford a reliable vehicle, roads were primitive compared to today and most of all, money was hard to come by.
Even at 25 cents a gallon/5 cents a liter, fuel was too expensive to waste it making non essential trips to town. So we ordered what we needed from the Eaton's catalogue.
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I remember the folks ordering something from a catalog. It might have been the S.I.R. catalog too. (I liked the SIR catalog a lot more than Eatons or the Simpson Sears catalogs.)
Then a week or two later we were having to go to town to the train station to pick it up. And we were only 30 miles from Edmonton. You could take the passenger train from/to places like Breton, Thorsby, Sunnybrook, Buford, Calmar and Leduc to Edmonton... the fare was what we consider pocket change today. You could take the same train from Breton to Lacombe to the main line. A person could go in the mess car on the train and get a hamburger, fries and a pop for 35 cents. 15 cents for the burger and 10 cents each for the fries and pop.