Comments on: Prescott Fountain–Hunderups

By: mrt48

mrt48 — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 04:48:41 +0000

August Hunderup ran a fine establishment. It was the next best thing to a neighborhood tavern for kids. All of the free cokes you could drink either on the sly or charged to his Ledger. Kids used to go in there and drink soda pop and leave the empty bottles by the stools. I remember going in there one time and there were three empty coke bottles which August found. He thought he could fool the kids and so he removed the opener from the coke machine. You guessed it… the kids would bring their own openers from home and use them when he wasn’t looking. The poor guy couldn’t win and I think he was too old and tired to do much about it. He really did like the kids and their company however.
His special drink was a graveyard which was a mixture of all soda flavors mixed together. It was a popular drink. He was always well stocked with smoothies, JuJuBees and licorice.
It is hard to imagine that most of the kids in the immediate vicinity had the equivalent of VISA and MASTERCARD. Charging $1.50 of comics and candy was …. priceless. Profitless too for that matter.

By: sat50

sat50 — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:21:37 +0000

Hunderup’s was a great hangout for kids for the reasons you describe. The demise of Hunderup’s store began the day he decided to extend credit to the neighborhood kids. It was a poor business decision to say the least. We would arrive after school, pay maybe $0.50 cents towards our balance, and proceed to charge another $3.00 or so for frozen cokes, licorice, baseball cards, candy cigarettes, and smoothies.

By: wfm100

wfm100 — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 04:20:31 +0000

In the late 1940′s, I remember taking empyty quart soda water (Canada Dry Water) bottels back to Hume’s, for the five cents per bottle depost. If I had six bottles, I could get a 1/2 pint of vanila ice cream.

Also, remember well the barber shop at the end of the building. Always wondered why the barber had a seperate room for when he got tired (rest room).

By: aandh

aandh — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 15:09:09 +0000

This is a great piece. How differently we lived in our cities, only a few decades ago. Kids hanging out in the neighborhood, a butcher and produce a block away, no big parking lots. Amazing. How much we’ve lost in 40 short years, in my view. Thanks for this – our neighborhoods used to be about a lot more than just where we slept.