Tote-Sum

When I was a kid in the sixties, there were 2 convenience store chains in the United States. The first one was called 7-Eleven. Actually, the parent company had been operating convenience stores since the late twenties, but they didn’t start with the 7-Eleven chain until after WWII. The second convenience store chain in the U.S. was a local chain. It was the Tote-Sum.

Now, for those not hip to southern lingo, “tote” means to carry something. (It can also mean the thing to carry something in, but forget that one for now.) The word “Sum”, while a more correct spelling of the way we actually pronounce “some” was probably the owner’s crafty way of saving a little extra money on the signs by dropping a letter.

As a child, the Tote-Sum was my favorite place to go. At this writing, I can really only remember where about 4 or 5 of them were located, but there were at least 20 in the Jackson area. I know there was at least one in Vicksburg, but I don’t think there were any on the gulf coast. There were, however, 7-Eleven stores on the coast – something we didn’t have in Jackson. There may have been some in Hattiesburg or some to the north even.

If you ever run across someone who makes a reference to any convenience store as a “Tote-Sum”, you can pretty much nail them down as having lived in or around Jackson, Mississippi in the sixties, seventies or part of the eighties. To this day I still ask people “have y’all got a Tote-Sum around here?” Usually you get 2 different responses. One is “A what????” The other is invariably “I haven’t heard of a Tote-Sum in years!”

There were 2 within a 2 mile radius of my house. One of these was also very close to my school - an easy lunchtime trek through the woods surrounding a park to go fill up on candies and other goodies. I remember these both being open affairs – the storefront was really 3 rollup garage doors. It was like a big newspaper stand.

These did not have the trappings of a modern convenience store. There were no cappuccino machines or fountain drinks. The cooler was comparatively small, there were no aisles of products like motor oil and gloves and gas cans. There may have been light bulbs, but those were probably priced very high compared to the A&P across the street. I remember we also used to steal bottles stacked in crates behind the stores and bring them in for deposits – my first attempts at larceny. My store was on Northside Drive, across the stree from Highland Village and the Olde Time Deli. It stood next to the entrance to Maywood Mart. I once ripped out the oil pan of my ’72 Cutlass (the Brown Turd) in the side parking spaces.

To tell you the truth, I can’t really remember much about the inside of these stores. As much time as I spent there and as much crap as I bought, what once was such a large part of my life is not even a fading memory. All I can remember is a partial front-outside view of a paradise beckoning with open arms. And the sign.

The Tote-Sum sign was a thing to behold. Of course you would probably laugh at my recollection if you were to ever see one, but you have to remember that this was Jackson, Mississippi and it was the sixties and I was a child. In a metropolitan area of 250,000 souls and a 19 story building being our tallest, the sign was, to me, a thing of beauty. It was the closest thing I had to the streets of downtown Tokyo circa “You Only Live Twice”. Well, it and the Mayflower Café sign…

The sign stood probably 30 feet or so. It was a white pole, about 5 inches in diameter. Starting at the top were 8 olive green square metal boxes, each probably close to 2-3 feet per side, descending down the pole. On the left, right and front sides of each box was a reddish-orange-ish neon letter. T O T E – S U M. The neon was sequenced to start at the top, light a letter and pause about a second, light the next letter, pause, so on and so on until all 8 letters (well, 7 letters and the dash) were lit. Then they would all shut off for about half a second and then all come on for about a second. It would do that twice. Then it would start at the top of the sequence.

T…O…T…E…-…S…U…M…TOTE-SUM…TOTE-SUM

T…O…T…E…-…S…U…M…TOTE-SUM…TOTE-SUM

I remember some evenings, returning home with one or both parents, we would stop off for something at the Tote-Sum. Whereas most kids would always want to go inside and look around or spend their hard-earned cash, I would almost always elect to remain in the car staring, transfixed, at this wondrous device. It beckoned me. It spoke to me.

And not just to me!

In the nineties, I was working in the IT department for a grocery chain. The Tote-sum stores had long been closed, and most of the buildings were gone as well – victims of progress. My favorite store at least still remained – disguised as a Subway sandwich shop. I was working on a graphics-intensive executable and decided to have a unique “Exit” button. I made this button green and put big red-orange letters spelling “Exit” (of course) flashing in the same sequence as my beloved Tote-sum sign. E…X…I…T…EXIT…EXIT…E…X…I…T…EXIT…EXIT. I did it mostly because I was playing around and had way too much time on my hands.

While it was being beta-tested, I had at least 6 different people come to me and ask if I had modeled this on the old Tote-Sum sign. One even told me he used to sit in the car and watch the sign when he was a kid. Too bad I thought (and still think) this guy is an asshole. We could easily have been kindred spirits.

But he was a mainframe geek and never made coffee.

I can forgive the former, but the latter is a red-hot brad-awl shoved through my soul - no matter if you were a Tote-sum sign dreamer.