In the 1940’s, towns like Framalopa were too small for chains like A&P and Piggly Wiggly.  Consequently, the landscape was dotted with small neighborhood grocery stores, usually mom-and-pop operations with little merchandising and a spare inventory.  You were lucky if you could choose between two brands of pickles.  The vegetables came mostly from local truck farms, and God only knew where small grocers got their meat.  As for chickens, they came from local farms—not gigantic chicken factories with cramped cages, fluorescent lighting, and assembly-line slaughtering—which meant they were fewer in number and therefore expensive.  (We had chicken every Sunday by way of celebrating the Sabbath, but never during the week.)

Constable’s Market was located on Osprey Avenue about four blocks from our house; and we bought most of our groceries there, though we also bought bread from Jay’s Bakery, when Mr. Jay would deign to sell it to us.  My father liked salt-rising toast drowned in butter, and my mother would stop by Jay’s every couple of weeks to buy two loaves.  Mr. Jay—whose real name was a 14-syllable, Eastern European word—would bake so many pastries and loaves of bread every day, sell out, usually by noon, and then head for the causeway, where he would spend the rest of the day fishing with a long cane pole.  Sometimes, grinning like a horse collar, he would hang around the bakery for a while, just so he could tell customers, “Too late!  All gone!”  My mother hated him.

Constable’s Market—a building of 1,500 to 2,000 square feet—had been owned and operated first by Billy Joe Slee, who failed to make a go of it and sold out to Eddie and Eugenia Constable.  Mr. Slee had greasy black hair—hair that stuck out in the back like a blue jay’s crest—and a perilously long nose full of blackheads.  His profile looked like a hammer.  He prowled the store with a round, open mouth.

I remember buying penny Guess Whats from Mr. Slee, as he bent over me, sullen and impatient.  Wrapped in a loaf of the cheapest paper, with question marks printed on them, Guess Whats contained two or three pieces of taffy and an inconsequential prize.  I suppose the poor man seemed sullen because he resented having to waste time watching me pick and choose from among paper loaves of penny candy while his note at the bank was accumulating a dollar at a time.  A dollar bought ten hamburgers in those days.

The inevitable moment arrived when Mr. Slee could no longer afford a hamburger, and the Constables bought him out at ten cents on the dollar.  This happened around 1939.

Unlike Billy Joe Slee, Eddie Constable had a quick wit and a friendly, confidential manner that charmed grocery shoppers, mostly women, without offending them by becoming too familiar.  Eugenia was pleasant and submissive.  Customers liked her without really knowing why.  And she had the good sense to stock a few “fancy groceries,” when no one else in town dared to run the financial risk.

But Eddie was the engine that drove the business.  He moved quickly to accommodate shoppers and somehow managed to serve two or three at the same time while making each believe she was the only customer in the store.  He was one of the few Southern men who spoke rapidly.

The two Constables worked long, hard hours.  If at nine o’clock you suddenly remembered you needed vanilla extract, chances were they would still be in the store, worrying over the inventory, and would cheerfully open the door and let you in.

When the War broke out, the store was beginning to pay off.  Women were driving from all over town to be seen there, buying virgin olive oil, anchovies, and (for the men) Cuban cigars.

From the outset, the War elevated the grocery business economically and socially.

Shortages of coffee, sugar, meat, butter, canned fruits and vegetables, and other rationed foods put people like Eddie in the catbird seat.  Customers were at the mercy of grocers and butchers, many of whom would hold back scarce items for their special customers, then treat them like beggars at the king’s court.  Radio comedians made jokes about imperious grocers.  Customers were obsequious when they shopped and angry when they drove away.

But not at Constable’s.

In addition to his wit and good humor, Eddie Constable had two things going for him that other grocers lacked.

First, he was uniformly courteous to everyone who came into the store.  He may have played favorites, but he never got caught at it.  He was soon known as the most fair-minded grocer in town, someone whose thumb was never on the scale when he weighed your ground round.

Second, he had only one eye and was therefore immune to the draft.  As the War dragged on, and draft boards dug deeper and deeper into the barrel for older and younger men, 39-year-old owners and managers, as well as 17-year-old delivery boys, were scooped up, sent off to basic training, then rushed to Germany and the Far East, to replace the growing ranks of the dead.  Suddenly, every grocery store was short-handed.

But Eddie Constable had no such worries.  He had tried to enlist at the beginning of the War, and a sergeant had laughed him out of the recruitment office.  “We need men to kill other men, but you couldn’t see what to shoot at, could you?  A Jap would come at you from your blind side, and you’d never know what hit you.”

At first, Eddie felt useless and rejected.  Gradually, however, he reached a point where he considered himself lucky.  He wasn’t in a foxhole or zigzagging up an island beach.  He went home every night to a safe house.  He had a woman to share his bed.  He’d doubled his list of customers.  He was getting moderately rich.

Then he got the letter: Reclassified.  I-A.  Report for physical.  He went dutifully, expecting to be rejected.  Instead, he returned home a buck private, with a couple of weeks to get his affairs in order.  He discovered to his surprise that he no longer wanted to join the Army.  He just wanted to jog along and keep on running a grocery store.  God intended for him to be a grocer, but the United States of America wanted him to be a soldier.  He seethed inside.

He told the same joke to everyone who would listen: “I heard they drafted a blind man and a quadruple amputee.  The blind man filled buckets of water, and the quadruple amputee told him when the buckets were full.”

They stationed him in Fort Gordon, Georgia, where he worked in a company supply room.  He wrote Eugenia long, bitter letters, complaining about everything from his mattress, to the chow, to the fact that the executive officer, a college man, called him “Polyphemus,” soon shortened to “Poly.”  For the rest of the War he was passed over for promotion every time, with the same four-word explanation: “Blind in one eye.”

When Eddie was finally discharged, later than most, he came home a different man.  The wit—which had always been benign and hence disarming—now had an edge to it, a razor dipped in vinegar.  He was no longer Will Rogers.  He was W.C. Fields.

Some of the women, my mother included, thought he was funnier that way and enjoyed his new cynicism, which lashed out in all directions.  Others were bewildered and at times hurt.  One or two took their business elsewhere.  But most stayed because Eugenia—pleasant, bland, and highly competent—had maintained the quality of the store.

By the time he was mustered out, Eddie, still the shrewd entrepreneur, sensed a change in the business climate.  The War had done what Franklin Roosevelt had failed to do: end the Great Depression.  Like half the population of Europe, every American under 30 was a Displaced Person.  Americans no longer settled down in the towns and cities where they were born and no longer married the girl next door.  They came home bringing wives and children with strange, grating accents who ate odd things for breakfast.

In addition, servicemen from cold New England and colder Minnesota remembered Framalopa as a montage of exotic flowers, blue bayous, and obliging girls, never dreaming that the girls in their hometowns had been just as obliging to Florida servicemen stationed far from home, just as passionate, and just as careless.  It was the era of carpe diem, which produced quick, desperate pleasures and, in many cases, lifelong obligations.  Hundreds, maybe thousands of men would be hauling these obligations to our town over the next few years.

As he drove up and down the streets, Eddie could hear the blam, blam, blam of hammers in neighborhood after neighborhood.  To him it was the ring, ring, ring of cash registers.  Everybody had to eat.  But he knew he needed to make his move quickly.  The supermarket chains were on their way down the Tamiami Trail.  They would arrive in Framalopa in a matter of months, a year at the most.  He had to get in ahead of them.

So he went to the Palmer Bank, the only bank in town.  Using the GI Bill, he borrowed enough money to triple the size of his grocery store and to quadruple the size of the inventory.  You had to drive to Tampa to see anything as grand and accommodating.  People came from all over the county to wander through catacombs of food cans and jars of fruits and vegetables; a bakery filled with rolls, croissants, baguettes, and even salt-rising bread; all sorts of meats in cool, fly-free refrigerators; fresh produce in huge bins, some of it out of season; a whole aisle of candy, cookies, and junk food; and four brands of ketchup and three of mayonnaise.  Constable’s Market was the Eighth Wonder of the Modern World for about a week.  Then it shrank down to its true size.

But Eddie had guessed right.  In six months, Constable’s no longer existed.  It had become the town’s first Piggly Wiggly, and Eddie Constable had become a very rich man.  Next, he built a market out on Fiesta Key—larger than the two filling-station-grocery-stores on the beach.  And eventually he sold that one to Piggly Wiggly as well.

Eddie and Eugenia moved into a grand old stucco house in Brasfield Estates and began to hobnob with the new-rich crowd, mostly Yankees who retired young or came down to take advantage of the postwar boom.  He joined the country club—the new one, not the old one—and learned to play golf.  His slice became legendary.  On Saturday nights, he stayed on at the club to drink and play poker with the regulars, was a cheerful loser and an apologetic winner.

He even joined the Episcopal Church, attended regularly, and was quickly elected to the vestry—too quickly, according to some.  On the other hand, members of the altar guild steadfastly refused to invite Eugenia to join, in large part because of her shoes and handbags.

The next thing we knew, Eddie was running for mayor.  He allied himself with the real-estate developers, the Chamber of Commerce, the apostles of progress; and he won with the slogan “A Businessman for the City’s Business.”  His opponent, a country lawyer of the old school—who still wore a white linen suit from Memorial Day to Labor Day—advocated controlled growth and no dredging.  Eddie won with slightly over 60 percent of the vote, to become Framalopa’s 14th mayor.

It was only then that he began calling my mother “Betty,” and she began calling him “Eddie.”  She would have preferred “Betty” and “Eddie” from the outset, but he apparently thought he had to earn that right.