Recently an area newspaper told the story of the S.S. Kresge’s store that was in downtown South Bend for many years.

This brought to my mind my experiences with the store. First to get there it was necessary to take the bus to South Bend, which ran every day. We only had one car and my mother didn’t know how to drive. It was a treat to ride the bus, even thought it was dusty and had no air conditioning.

In Edwardsburg the bus stopped at the drug store at the corner of United States 12 and Cass Street. Tickets were purchased inside the drug store. The bus ran down Michigan 62 to the state line and on in to the South Bend bus station, which was on Western Avenue.

Upon arriving in South Bend, we would make our way down Main Street to Michigan Street where the store stood.

I did not know until the recent article that the reason the store had two entrances was because one side was the five and dime and the other side was the dollar store. My favorite place in the store was in the basement where the record shop was housed. You could go down there and play your favorites records all day in small booths made for listening to records. Then the records were 78 rpm, heavy and made of celluloid. I still have some of my favorites that I have saved but they are beginning to deteriorate.

I remember buying my mother a Mother’s Day present at Kreges. It was a very small bottle of perfume, about the size of a thimble and an embroidered handkerchief. I probably spent less than 50 cents for the two gifts.

The other place I visited was the H L Green Dime Store that was located on the other side of Robertson’s Dept. Store. The reason I went there was because my aunt was the clerk behind the electrical counter. In those days each clerk had a counter assigned to them. It was their responsibility to keep the counter organized and filled with merchandise.

The counter my aunt worked behind had lampshades and lamp parts. Each clerk collected the money for the purchases from their counter and each counter had a cash register. There were other popular stores like our many dollar stores of today. There was Woolworth’s, McClennans, McCrorys, Ben Franklin and my all-time favorite, G. L. Perry.

The real reason I went to South Bend was to go to the movies and have lunch at either the Moderne or the Philadelphia. My mother let me go to South Bend by myself but the bus would stop at my girlfriend’s house on M-62 and she went with me. The bus stopped at many houses on the way to South Bend and picked up anyone standing beside the road. Some women who rode the bus worked in South Bend and took the bus to work.

My fear was that I would miss the bus and not have a way home. The bus station was not a place for young girls and was always kind of scary to me. I always thought that some of the men lived in the bus station. A young girl’s imagination can think of many things.

The Edwardsburg Museum just received a copy of the bus schedule.  I’m not sure of the date but probably around 1950. That was the last of Edwardsburg public transportation. The bus stopped in the late 1960s.

 

JoAnn Boepple works with the Edwardsburg Area History Museum.