Sixty years ago finding a grocery store in many La Grande neighborhoods was as easy as walking two or three blocks in any direction.

La Grande had about 45 small “Mom and Pop” grocery stores in the mid-1940s, many a slice of Americana that could have been Norman Rockwell portrait material.

The small stores ranged from Sinden’s Grocery in the Y Avenue area to Hofmann Grocery Store at Fourth and C streets.

The stores are among those featured in a new book, “Charge It Please! A History Of The Grocery Stores In La Grande.” The book was compiled and published by the Union County Historical Society.

The book traces La Grande grocery stores back to the early 1860s. None of the earliest stores are still operating today. Some are still open. The oldest still running is Willow Grocery, 2011 Cove Ave. The store opened in 1928 and has operated continuously since except for a brief closure in 1940, according to Robert Bull of La Grande, who helped compile “Charge It Please!”

Bull said La Grande’s number of small grocery stores reached its peak in the 1940s because the city had grown to about 10,000 people and had only one large supermarket, Safeway, which opened in the early 1940s at Adams and Fourth Street.

La Grande did not have a second large grocery store until the early 1950s when Albertsons opened on Adams Avenue across from Safeway.

The Safeway that opened in the early 1940s was not La Grande’s first. La Grande had had small Safeway stores since the 1920s. At one time La Grande had four Safeway stores, all essentially small “Mom and Pop” operations. Each of the small Safeways were identified by number.

“Charge It Please!” features many submitted pieces from members of families who ran small grocery stores. They include a piece from LaCrecia (Hutchinson) DeVore, who grew up in a family that ran a number of small La Grande grocery stores. DeVore, who helped compile “Charge It Please!”, discusses life as a child of a grocery store family in the book’s introduction. Like many families running Mom and Pop grocery stores, the DeVores lived in the same building their business was in.

“All in all, it was a good life living in the back of the store,” DeVore wrote.

She said her family always seemed to have enough to eat while running the store.

DeVore noted, though, that they did not always eat the best of food. Oranges and bananas would get overripe and meat would spoil, forcing the family to take creative steps to avoid tossing food out.

“Lots of banana bread and orange juice was made since we didn’t want to throw away the profit,” DeVore wrote.

Many of the stores listed in the new book had charge accounts for customers, hence the “Charge It Please!” title. Many stores offered charge accounts to help them compete against larger stores. Not surprisingly, charge accounts sometimes made for hard feelings.

“There were times when the grocery store owner did not get paid and was stuck with the bill. This was sad at times because the customers and the owners had usually become good friends and the owners trusted that the customers would pay their bill,” DeVore wrote.

Some former store owners, in their submitted pieces, discussed creative steps they took to succeed. Ken Leavitt, the earlier owner of Ken’s Grocery at 2004 Spruce St., wrote that in 1975 he began making and selling sandwiches on the advice of two young customers. His sandwiches became a huge hit.

“It was like coming from a dark room and turning on the lights. It made the store’s sales increase many times over,” he wrote.

This was an understatement. Leavitt recorded each sandwich sold. Twenty-one years later the total was 600,000.

About 240 small markets are listed in “Charge It Please!”, which includes stores up through about 1990. The total number of grocery stores La Grande has had is actually much less than 240 since some stores had many names and owners. The book lists the chronology of the name changes at many grocery store sites.

One store that many children visited was at 2614 Second Street across from the old Riveria Elementary School. The earliest records found indicate it was named Riverside Confectionery and Groceries in 1923. The name was later changed to Riveria Grocery and then Holmes’ Grocery, Freeman’s Grocery, AandH Grocery, HandH Grocery and Jensen’s Market II before the store closed about a decade ago.

The Union County Historical Society compiled “Charge It Please!” after advertising for information on any of La Grande’s small grocery stores.

Members of the Union County Historical Society committee who compiled the book in addition to Bull and DeVore were: Anne (Metsopulos) Rodriguez, Dorothy (Swart) Fleshman, George Neer and Marian (Lester) Nice. Fleshman and Bull are among the committee members who wrote a large portion of the book’s copy.

The new volume has a number of light touches, including a poem by Neer, The Grocery Store. The poem’s opening reads:

The grocery store was on the corner or was it in the middle of the block?

One thing was almost certain it was run by “Mom and Pop.”

Copies of “Charge It Please!” are available at local bookstores or by calling Barbara McClure at 437-3031 or Joyce Grove at 910-4968, both of the Union County Historical Society.