Leland, MS remembered: The 400 block of North Main

By Guest Columnist Billy Johnson

Downtown Leland was a close-knit community when I was growing up. There were at least 40 family-owned businesses in the downtown area. My family’s drugstore, Peoples Drug Store, was in the 400 block of North Main. That street was originally Highway 61, and all the North South traffic came through there. There was a passenger depot across the street by the railroad track. In the first part of the last century, the Y and MV railroad hotel was on the west side of the railroad track.

On the 400 block of North Main, the Kazan family had a clothing store on the South corner and then was our drugstore. Next to the drugstore was the Main Street Cafe. Joe Smith had his taxi stand in that building, also. There used to be skin balls in Leland; gamblers came to play Georgia Skin at different clubs around town.

One year, Hollandale decided to have a skin ball. Asben Aaron, one of Leland’s best gamblers, went down there and won all the money. He called Joe Smith to come to Hollandale and pick him up. He got Joe to call my grandfather, Billy Condon, at 5:00 in the morning and asked them to meet them at the drugstore at 6:00.

When my grandfather got there, Asben told him, “Mr. Billy, I done brought Hollandale to Leland in two pillowcases. I need to put them in your safe.”

Needless to say, that was the last of Hollandale’s skin balls.

On the north side of the Main Street Cafe was Pinckney Shoe Shop. The Pinckney’s son, Roger, was drum major for Leland High School one year. They had a Homecoming parade that Roger led down Main Street. He stopped in front of the shoe shop, and the band put on a show.
Roger had on a tall white hat with a tall plume on top. He was twirling his staff and bent over backwards until the plume touched the street.

Mrs. Pinckney was proud watching her son perform.

On Saturday morning, Pinckney’s Shoe Shop was full of men getting their shoes shined – who would later get their hair cut at the downtown barber shops. All the guys that shined shoes at Pinckney’s were friends of mine: Carl Ambrew, James Blue, Jellyroll White, Clyde and Roger Pinckney. They could make an old pair of shoes look brand new.

The thread that held a lot of the older men together on that block was baseball. Information flowed much slower then than it does now. The morning newspaper would come to the drugstore. Their sport pages contained the scores from the baseball games the day before. In those days, a lot of people listened to the games on the radio.

My grandfather’s nephew, Linville Parker, lived with my grandparents and worked at the drugstore. He opened the store at 7 a.m. and always went to bed early. My grandfather would stay up late listening to the St. Louis Cardinals on the radio. He would write the score down on a paper napkin and leave it on the breakfast table for Linville. The next morning when he got to the store, he would tell the score to all the older baseball fans who would come in getting chewing tobacco and cigarettes.

Michael Koury had a clothing store farther up the block. His son Mickey, Mr. Kazan’s grandson David, and I, along with Edwin Yee, whose family had Leland food Market, played baseball across the street by the railroad tracks.

In the next building, H J Campbell opened the legendary juke joint, The Alley Inn. The door was on the back of the building facing Kent’s Alley. Son Thomas lived in the alley. He would sit on his porch and play for the people coming and going to the Alley Inn.

Harry Rueben had a grocery store and meat market on the north end of the block. He also bought pecans. My Aunt Victoria Farris and I would sell pecans to him. My Aunt didn’t trust him, so she’d weigh our pecans before we took them to him.

He had a set of those white ceramic meat scales. One time, he weighed our bag of pecans and said it was fifteen pounds.

Aunt Vic told him, “Put both your hands up in the air.”

I thought she was fixing to rob him!

When he put his hands up in the air, the scales went up to twenty-one pounds. Mr. Ruben would put his thumb under the scale platform, so it would only go down to fifteen pounds. He paid us what we had coming.

The sleepy streets of downtown Leland would come alive on Saturdays. The sidewalks would be full of people. The stores would stay open until midnight on Saturday night. People from all the farms around Leland would come to town to shop, visit, and get their food and supplies for the coming week.