Steven’s Store

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So I’m launching a new subsection, kids, in which I bore you with tales of my childhood as opposed to boring you with details of my adult life.

I don’t recall when I first heard about Stevens’ Store (I’m really thinking the name was actually “Stevens’ Store” or “Stephens’ Store,” but according to some yokels in my hometown , it was “Steven’s”), but I remember biking up the big hill many times into the more affluent part of North Kingstown, Rhode Island, cutting through the Davisville Elementary School grounds, where I attended kindergarten through 5th grade, then through some more neighborhoods to the nondescript gray 1950s ranch-style house that didn’t have a sign on it. But all the kids knew there was candy in it.

Inside the small, usually sunless porch sat Mr. and Mrs. Stevens behind a old-fashioned glass candy display counter, he on a stool holding one of those wee red change counters that I’m having trouble describing adequately because I haven’t seen one in about 25 years, and she standing by an ancient cash register, teeny brown bags at the ready. In a Seinfeld “soup nazi”-customerlike fashion, we knew to arrange ourselves in an orderly manner on the Mr. Stevens end of the counter. As we pointed and specified the amounts of the small candies that we wanted from the colored plastic bins behind the glass, Mr. Stevens would toss our candy into a basket and click the white buttons on his counter to tally our totals. It was enormously convenient not having to count ourselves, and the last time in our lives that we’d ever have a storekeeper hold our hands to that degree, making sure that we didn’t pick out more crap than we could pay for.

When we’d blown our wad — hardly ever more than $1 — he’d pass the basket down to Mrs. Stevens, who would take our money and empty our candy from the baskets into those little brown bags.

When I was really, really little, I liked hot balls and candy cigarettes and those gross pouches of sugar dust that you’d dip saliva-slicked candy tongue depressorlike things into and then lick them off. Oh, and Gold Rush gum. Now that was marketing genius…I actually have a pouch of Gold Rush gum in my kitchen junk drawer that I bought at the ironic hipster candy counter at St. Francis Fountain in San Francisco. (And like an ironic hipster, I haven’t touched it. It remains in its original packaging.)

But fairly early on, I decided that I preferred actual candy bars to sour balls (yuck), those stretchy, gelatinous gummy items, Tootsie Rolls (vomit) and other cheaper, grosser candies. So my friends would emerge from the store with these bulging little brown bags of assorted crap while mine invariably contained like, a Twix bar with maybe a small Bazooka gum or something too because I enjoyed the small, chalky comics that came in them and also so I could fit in.

The Stevens were pretty old and he was pretty overweight in the late ’70s/early ’80s when my friends and I patronized the store. In typical myopic kid fashion, I assumed that having the option of purchasing candy from this elderly couple selling out of their home was unique to my generation, but if you look at that random hyperlink above, apparently the Stevens’ Store had been around for at least a couple decades. Someone on that message board mentioned buying bread on credit from the Stevens during WWII, I believe.

Which endears them to me even more, incidentally, because someone in my own family did something similar when she immigrated from Ireland at the turn of the last century. My aunt Jenny, who always thought I was named after her (no one had the heart to tell her that my name was actually Ginny, not Jenny), was sent to America at the last minute after her older cousin chickened out and they made Jenny go instead. If I remember the story right, she was only 16.

I know a little more about typical experiences of Irish immigrant women of that period (I did a project on the subject in an urban studies class in college) than I did when I heard stories about my aunt Jenny, and it was common for many of them to work as maids or nannies, not run their own general stores like Jenny did. My mom always used to try to point out where she thought “Jenny’s Store” had been on this crappy block on Smith Hill in Providence, where I spent the latter part of my high school years, every time we drove by a particular small, dark door at the base of a Victorian-style apartment building. According to family lore, Jenny’s formerly thriving business died during the Depression, when she let too many people buy food on credit and they could never square their bills with her.

But evidently the zeal North Kingstown children had for candy was enough to keep Stevens’ Store afloat for generations. The Stevens weren’t especially kindly people; I don’t have any amazing memories of endearing stories that they told me or anything. We just took for granted that they were supposed to be there, that they would always be there. Looking back on it, it seems kind of bizarre and quaint that as a child, I biked to a house, left my bike on the ground outside and purchased candy for under a quarter. I mean, it’s not like I grew up in the 1930s.

But apparently it’s not as unusual an experience as I thought. My friend who’s a reporter in San Francisco told me that it’s very common in the projects, ladies selling candy to kids out of their homes. I had never heard of that before and thought it sounded kind of adorable, although surely the reasons for the private-residence candy stores exist as much because of the dangers of the streets as they do for the economic incentives for public-housing candy entrepreneurs.

Years later, I heard that Stevens’ Store had been robbed. The town was appalled. It was one of those innocence-annihilating experiences, particularly because it was such a dipshit, small-potatoes target, it was assumed the culprits were “kids,” or one or more of our own. I wish I could remember more about it, but I think the couple had actually been at home and didn’t reopen the store for a long time afterward because they were traumatized, according to rumor. I remember driving past the gray house with my mom and feeling sad and ashamed about it. It just looked so empty, but I guess it always had.

I imagine that no one aside from me or Dave would possibly be interested in this, but because I came up with only one measly, random link when I googled “Steven’s store + North Kingstown,” I’m publishing it anyway. If anyone else remembers the store and looks for info online, here’s my memory of it.

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Tags: davisville, north kingstown, rhode island, south county rhode island, stephens store, stevens store