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December 1935. "Coffee house in Selma, Alabama." The Sadler Grocery Store, purveyor of Kon-Koffee-Kompany's Table Talk and Selma Pride ("Roasted Last Night") as well as Coca-Cola and Dr. Pepper. Nitrate negative by Walker Evans for the Resettlement Admin. View full size.
Thank you Paul Schmid for that beautiful circus poster.
The remnants of a Cole poster on the side of the grocery store.
Feel sorry for those poor animals such as lions and elephants that have no place to be kept in such conditions.
Three railroad trains, double length!
That first step at the bottom is a doozy.
It's interesting that the railing only begins about halfway up. I guess the stairs aren't dangerous before that point.
I roast my own coffee and had a laugh when I saw that the company used "Roasted Last Night" as a slogan. Roasted coffee needs to "air out" for 2-3 days before grinding and brewing. The roasted coffee beans release CO2 during the "airing out" time, and if brewed before that happens, the coffee tastes terrible. The first time I roasted coffee, I didn't know that, and wondered why it tasted so bad. Now, I can't drink most coffee made outside my house because it is hard to compare to the quality of home-roasted coffee made from fresh green coffee beans almost straight from a coffee plantation.
I tend to agree there is no hidden message in the sign. 1935 Selma wouldn't bother to be coy about the prevalent attitudes and would feel no reason to hide what was obvious in everyday life to a certain segment of the population.
Idiosyncratic spelling and alliteration were something of a fad in brand names of the 1920s and '30s, resulting in quite a few "Koffee Kompany" businesses in locales from Tacoma to Indianapolis to Selma, not to mention the Kona Koffee Kids -- a girls' baseball team. Is there trouble brewing in that Kon-Koffee-Ko name? Probably not.
If Sylvan Street is now MLK, then this is the corner with Water Avenue today. Kitty-corner is the old railroad depot, now a museum, making this a pretty good location in 1935.
Especially finding just the right angle to fit "Selma Pride Coffee" and "Table Talk Coffee" in between the windows.
Subliminal messaging?? We may never know if it was intended, but that name certainly conveys it.
Yet history had the last laugh: what was known as Sylvan Street (see marker painted on steps) is now Martin Luther King Street.
Let's see ... if I can have Dr. Pepper at 10, 2 and 4, that means that at 6 and 8 I can have coffee. At the next 6 and 8, I can have Coca-Cola.
Start out with lots of caffeine early on, then taper throughout the day.
Of course, I could mix either the Selma Pride or Table Talk with Coke for a really nice caffeine hit late in the day. Then I could stay up all night roasting coffee for the next day.
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