Remembering Christmases past: Gainesville girl watched the square turn into a ‘magical place’ from the front window of her grandfather’s store

Pamela Carter Hutchinson remembers watching Christmastime unfold around the Gainesville square in the 1950s as she sat many late afternoons in the big window of her grandfather A. D. McDonald’s grocery store, now the Ozark County Historium. She recalls seeing simple strands of Christmas lights come on around the square, outlining store windows decorated with holiday scenes trimmed with spray-on snow and fluffy mounds of cotton (probably quilt batting).  The remembered scene creates a twinkling fantasy in Pam’s memory that still makes her smile, now 70 years later. 

“Western Auto and the hardware store always had dolls and wagons in their windows, and Rex [Johnson] always had the spray snow decorating the windows at Johnson’s,” she said. “The stores on the square stayed open later then, and when the lights came on, I just remember it as a magical place.”

Sometimes during the holiday season, Daddy Mac would don a Santa suit and walk the sidewalks around the square, handing out apples and oranges, Pam said.

During most of Pam’s growing-up years, her parents, Hayden and Beulah “Toots” McDonald Carter, worked in businesses on the square. For a while, they both worked in the store owned by McDonald (known to his grandchildren as “Daddy Mac”). Hayden was a meatcutter, and Toots worked at the checkout counter. 

Shoes were sold in the back of the store, and Pam remembers sitting on the bench one day “where people could sit to try on shoes. I was crying, looking at one of those little red primer books, the ‘See Dick run’ kind of readers,” she said. “I was crying, and Mother happened to walk back that way. She goes, ‘What in the world is wrong?’ I told her, ‘I’m gonna start school in a few days, and I don’t know how to read.’”

“Silly, that’s why you’re going,” Toots told her daughter.

“Oh, it is?” Pam remembers answering, feeling reassured. 

Growing up in Daddy Mac’s store

She started first grade in 1954 and walked to the store after school, which was on what is now Elm Street where the post office and Missouri Ozarks Community Health clinic now stand.

Pam often settled in one of the store’s big front window’s “the one on the right if you’re in the store looking out,” she said. But that wasn’t all she did in the hours while she waited for her parents to get off work when the store closed, often at 6 or 7 p.m. – later on Saturdays, she said. 

In the wintertime, “when the old men would be in the back of the store, sitting around the wood stove, whittling and chewing, I would go up in the balcony and sit and listen to them talk. I found out a lot of stuff sitting up there as a little kid,” she said, laughing. 

Ten years ago, when a group of people with a love for Ozark County bought the old store building and began its transformation to become the Historium, Pam donated funds to help restore the balcony where she had spent so many happy hours during her childhood.

Another part of the store where she played – the 20-foot-tall poles supporting the store’s high ceilings – didn’t need to be restored. Now, more than 90 years after the store was built in 1929, the original poles still stand, although they’re now enclosed in dry-walled squares that also include electrical wiring.

“I would climb those poles all the way to the ceiling,” said Pam, who was a tiny child and, as an adult, barely stands 5 feet tall. “That had to be dangerous. I can’t believe no one told me not to do it.”

She and her friends and cousins also played in the adjoining feed room. “We would play on those feed sacks and jump from one big stack to the other. Today’s kids would have to have a helmet and knee pads to do that. It was probably even more dangerous than climbing the poles,” she said.

Like her fellow “town kids” in that era, Pam was allowed to roam the nearby area without parental supervision. She especially enjoyed going three doors down to what was then the Bank of Gainesville, which still operated in its old building next door to Ford’s Village Market (now Bouquet Palace). 

“I loved going into the bank and going back where Madge Brown and Juanita McClendon were working. Of course, Daddy Mac let me have all the pop I wanted at the store, but the bank had a Coke machine, and I thought it was so much fun to get a Coke out of that machine,” she said. 

In the summer after she finished third grade, Pam and her parents moved to Kansas City, where Hayden went to barber school. “I cried every day, I wanted to come home so bad,” she said. “The kids weren’t friendly, and I don’t think the teacher ever knew my name.”

When Hayden finished school, they moved to Springfield, where he got his first job as a barber. “We rented a little house for two months near SMS [now Missouri State University],” she said. 

Then Gainesville’s longtime barber, Homer Reynolds, died, “and I guess they asked Daddy, ‘Would you like to come back to be the barber?’” Pam recalled. 

Rufus Luna and his son, Joe, who operated the Gainesville-based Luna Truck line picked up the Carters’ furniture to haul it back to Gainesville. “Daddy Mac and Grandma came up to help, and I rode home with them,” Pam said. “We got home at noon, and I said, ‘I’m going to school.’”

Her mother’s sister, Pam’s aunt Genelle Breeding, taught third and fourth grades, and Pam happily returned to her aunt’s classroom and settled in. She graduated from Gainesville High School in 1966.

Hayden moved into the barber shop that was just around the corner from Daddy Mac’s store, where Doris Sayles’ House of Angels operated most recently, and Pam resumed her after-school ritual of watching the world through the big front window of her grandfather’s store. 

Alva McDonald developed health issues a few years after the Carters moved back to Gainesville; he died in 1961, shortly after his son-in-law, Gene Luna, took over the store.

Pam continued hanging out at the store, with her dad cutting hair two doors away and her mother either working at the store or at Gradie’s, a dry goods store on the north side of the square. Sometimes she was joined by a younger friend, Shirley Rhine, whose mother and stepdad, Betty and Doyle Garfit, worked at the store. 

“When we saw the lights going up in the store windows, we knew Christmas was coming,” Pam said.