Starnes Store
Starnes store was located on Highway 155, between Church Street and Dallas Street. I don’t know when it opened, but I remember it from the 1940s when I was a child. It was full of everything not only the home of everything a general store should sell, but it showed B-westerns on a sheet in back of the store on Saturday nights, sold fire crackers and once when I was in town in the winter, had a warm and wonderful stocking cap. In 1971-72 it was an all purpose hardware store and, apparently, the site of a non-stop domino game. Whenever I visited, there always seemed to be four or five players at any given time. I don’t remember very much about what was going on in the store at the time I took these photographs, all with a Pentax 35mm camera, using natural light, but my guess is, not very much.
I do remember a conversation I had with one man who worked there. He said that just the week before somebody had come in and bought up all his Model A Ford headlights. The store was closed when I visited Winona in 1989 and had probably been closed for years. The building is now in very poor condition. I have recently been in touch with relatives of the founder/owners and the family has saved some of the wonderful cases and fixtures that were used for so many years.
