RIVER CITY JOURNAL: LIFE IN A SALES STAND BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD

The newspaper photograph showed two young Cape Girardeau girls engaged in a business enterprise. They were selling flowers at a sidewalk stand. The spring blossoms had been harvested from the yard.

Many of the key ingredients of a successful retail operation were evident: attractive merchandise display, high-traffic location, easy-to-read pricing information, helpful sales personnel and handy access with curbside parking available.

From the looks on the faces of the two girls, however, business was, perhaps only momentarily, in a slump.

You know the feeling?

The scene brought back memories of the summer in the 1950s when you tried to become the vegetable mogul of Highway 34, the serpentine blacktop that clings to the Ozarks ridges between Greenwood Valley, where you went to school, and Kelo Valley, where you lived on a farm with a big garden beside the house.

In youth, gardening is rarely considered fun or, for that matter, useful. Once upon a time, of course, gardens were critical sources of food that would be canned, preserved and stored in the cellar for winter. Even so, gardens meant summer chores that interfered with school-less summer fun.

City dwellers and suburbanites today regard gardening as a hobby. Modern gardeners who tend vegetables often do so out of nostalgia over the gardens of their youth. Or maybe it is guilt over all those ripe tomatoes you used to splatter the fence post at the far corner next to the orchard. Whatever.

Your cousin from St. Louis was making his annual summer visit during the height of garden production that year when Eisenhower was president, electricity had finally arrived and the Edsel was still a dream in some car designer's mind.

Between trips to the river over the hill or exploring for quartz crystals in the dry creek bed that ran the length of the farm or forays to the lake to go swimming, the two of you had the brilliant idea of gathering the biggest and best vegetables -- tomatoes, onions, green beans, cucumbers -- to sell. The traffic count on the dusty gravel road in Kelo Valley was about what you could expect with all of three families, including yours, as permanent residents. So the decision was made to carry the vegetables a mile up the hill to Highway 34 for a roadside stand next to the mailboxes. This would result, it was earnestly believed, in instant wealth that could be shared with the Ben Franklin dime store in your favorite home town, plus a matinee and treats on Saturday at the Melinda Theatre.

The plan was put into motion. Vegetables were gathered and washed. The bright red beefsteak tomatoes were globes of luscious brilliance. The cucumbers were a cool green. In all, it was a magnificent display.

On the way up the hill to the highway, you stopped by the old pond behind an abandoned house to try to catch bullfrogs. The vegetables, left in the sun, suffered a bit, so you used some mushy tomatoes and squishy cucumbers as missiles to attack the varmints in the old cistern.

Back to business. You set up shop on a stump close to the highway. What passer-by could possibly resist stopping and making large purchases of luscious fresh vegetables?

The answer, of course, was just about everybody, because they too had big gardens producing so many vegetables that no amount of canning or pickling could possibly keep up with the supply. Much of the produce was being fed to the hogs. Pay money for vegetables? Not likely.

And, it turned out, Highway 34 in those days wasn't exactly a superhighway of potential customers. It still isn't, for that matter. The only activity you could absolutely count on was the postman covering Rural Route 3, and his own garden over on Webb Creek Valley was doing so well he didn't know if he could look at another tomato on his dinner plate.

You and your cousin thought there was an outside chance your aunt and uncle who lived on Greenwood Valley might pass by and take pity on you and buy out your entire inventory, even if it would be at heavily discounted prices. But it was a weekday, and very few folks went anywhere except on Saturday.

The vegetables wouldn't last until Saturday, so you started back down the gravel road, chucking onions at squirrels and birds and lizards along the way.

This may be why you are a journalist today instead of a farmer. Your cousin? He owns and operates a landscaping business in Washington state. Probably sells garden supplies too. Go figure.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.