With Christine McConnell, Wayne Hutchinson, Bob Adamson, Shirley Dudman, Debbie McIntyre, Ross Purdy and Wayne Pearn. This story is part of our partnership with Maryboro Lodge The Fenelon Falls Museum and was written by Glenn Walker.
KAWARTHA LAKES-In 1957, Fenelon Falls residents gathered on Colborne Street to celebrate the grand opening of the village’s supermarket. The IGA’s six workers (including John Sobko) were on hand, the men dressed in jackets, bow ties and dress pants and black leather shoes. The ladies wore white dresses and shoes—as one would then expect a grocer to dress. The previous year Harold Sider had built a beautiful new store, which would house his jewelry shop and the new grocery store (later both halves of the store would be consolidated into Stokes on Trent, now ABECK Accounting and the Lil Wee Quilt Shop). At the time, probably few people realized how profoundly this store would change Fenelon Falls’ retail scene.
Fenelon Falls’ IGA was one of the first franchises in the area. Lithuanian Jewish immigrants Max and Maurice Wolfe founded the Ontario Produce Company in 1914. Their son, Ray, served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War, but returned to find that his parents’ business was struggling to compete as grocery chains were starting to bypass wholesalers. He partnered with Chicago’s Independent Grocer’s Alliance, to introduce this franchise to Canada, founding Oshawa Wholesale Limited in 1957. That same year, he granted a franchise to John Sobko for Fenelon Falls. Other local stores included Dollo’s in Minden, Scott’s in Kinmount and Shea’s in Bobcaygeon. It was a company looking to serve even small communities: “Every town’s a hometown for IGA.”
Before the IGA came to Fenelon Falls, many families looked at shopkeeping as a respectable profession, and there were many stores in Fenelon Falls that sold groceries. Many specialized in certain goods, and a customer might have to go to several of them to get everything needed. For decades, the community had been home to many general stores, and several establishments that cut meat.
Today’s shoppers would find it a very different experience to walk into the original 1957 IGA. The entire vegetable section was much smaller than the potato chip section of today. It had nothing like the variety of goods that customers take for granted today—there was no bakery, much of the food that was for sale was canned, and the meat being cut at the counter was fresh, not deli meat. Good luck buying any fruits or vegetables that were not in season in Canada or the United States, unless they were ones that kept well. The entire store was comparable in size to the produce section of today—it far from the village’s largest store at the time.
As Fenelon Falls residents lined up to walk into a village supermarket for the first time, many might not have realized what was different about this store. For generations, much of the work of a merchant was finding suppliers for their produce, at a price where it could be resold at a profit. Many farmers brought in their butter and eggs to barter for salt, sugar and fabric. For generations, much of the produce in general stores had come from the community. The goods that were not produced in the community often came from wholesalers, like Lindsay’s La Manatia and Polito families. While the introduction of the IGA did not end these local connections, it introduced a franchise that could conveniently supply much of what the store sold. It saved the retailer a lot of time in trying to source merchandise, and made possible economies of scale that could never happen in the local context.
It would not take long for Fenelon Falls’ IGA to outgrow its original location. In 1966, John Sobko purchased the adjacent three stores, known as the McCallum Block (named for a long-standing business, McCallum’s Men’s Wear and Custom Tailoring). He demolished these stores to build a much larger IGA. In the early 1970s, Shirley Dudman started working there, often on cash. “When we went into the store, we had to go down a step, just like at the Red Apple today. We had to go around and write the price on everything in the store. When there was a sale, we had to go around and wipe the price off, then do it again when the sale was over. I helped Tom Jenkinson in the produce department for a week or two, it was a nice clean job. I did not like the meat department as much, it was really greasy, and you had to wash all those blades.”
“When someone came to the check out, I don’t think I ever missed saying ‘Hello’ and ‘Thank You,’” Shirley Dudman continues. “They would put the groceries on the belt, and there was a pedal that you would push to pull the groceries up to the cash. You would pick them up, type in the price. If it was produce, you hit the button to put it under produce, or meat under meat. If there was any tax, you had to figure that out yourself. When I got American money, I had to calculate the exchange.” Christine, who started in 1976 adds, “you had to be able to do the math to know how much change to give back. If you were out 20 cents on your till at the end of the day, it came out of your pay cheque.”
Wayne Pearn started work in 1975, “I was the clean-up kid in the meat department. I made hamburger and kept the room clean. When I started work there, the meat was being cut on wooden butcher blocks, that you would clean with a wire scraper, and then wipe it down. There were not as many rules for safe food handing. It was good enough to scrape it down and wipe it with hot water. The floor was covered in sawdust to soak up the blood. We swept it up on Saturday, and put down new sawdust to be ready for the week. As you were butchering the meat, you could see the people and they could see you working through the big glass window.”
All of the meat that was not saleable was collected in what “we called bone buckets,” Wayne Pearn narrates. “They rendered it down to make dog food and oils. A truck came around to collect it and you could smell that truck five minutes before it hit the store. It was the worst smell you could image, especially in July and August. It just lifted the stuff up and dumped it in. And the flies…”
“We would bring in quarters of beef,” Wayne Pearn remembers. “The pork comes in the same way today as it did back then. There is a greater variety of cuts now, so instead of buying the whole quarter of pigs, you can buy cases with just one piece of it. If you needed four pork shoulders, back then you would have to bring in four cases. Today, when someone asks for something, I can just walk into the back and take it out of a box and have it in their hands within three minutes. Back then, you would have to cut and trim it into a roast and it would take 10 or 15 minutes to get it for them. Now a box of blade roasts weighs less than half of what the whole front weighs. The job has become lighter and easier. You don’t have to spend half a day in the cooler breaking down beef to be ready for the weekend. Now all the blade roasts come together in a box. The chicken was all cut by hand, now it all comes in pre-packaged—all that you have to do is price them. Back then you would have to cut up a chicken. It is much more sanitized than it was when I started.”
For decades, Fenelon Falls’ IGA had nothing like the selection that today’s shoppers take for granted. “It was often just the basics—apples, bananas and oranges in winter.” Wayne Pearn explains. “There was not as much imported produce, not so much from countries like Argentina or Mexico. Most of the produce came from North America. There were no hot peppers, no long and skinny peppers. There were clementines at Christmas, and that was it. A lot of produce was not available year-round, just when it was in season.”
“The second IGA started off with one loading dock at the back—a second was later added. A lot of the fruit came in six-quart baskets, and much of it came from Ontario. From the time I started, we were buying from Oshawa Wholesale and Lamantias. Lamantias drove to Toronto twice a week to pick up at the Ontario Food Terminal. If I got shorted something from Oshawa Wholesale, we would get it from Lamantias—like bananas, grapes or tomatoes. If I called him first thing in the morning, he would be back with the order by one o’clock. It made a big difference when we were short, then we had product. You can’t sell off an empty shelf.”
“Smoking was allowed when I started,” Wayne Pearn explains. “You could not smoke while you were working, but while you were on break you could go to the lunch room and smoke. It was maybe 10 x 10. One of the cashiers would go in there and smoke non-stop for half an hour or an hour. Nobody enjoying going to lunch after her. Customers would smoke in the store, and you could buy single packs of cigarettes at each cash register. Cartons were on top of the freezer. Today they are under lock and key and it is gum and magazines at the cash instead of cigarettes.”
“I was working at the Fenelon Dairy and Dixie Lee when I was 12 or 13 years old, when his John’s son, Dave, asked me, ‘Why don’t you apply at the IGA?,” Christine recounts. “I started there in 1976, and at that time there was no bakery. I was a cashier, and back then everyone had to be dressed in white. I remember John would look down and say, ‘polish your shoes.’ He wanted my hair tied up in little pink ribbons. By the time I finished school, the meat wrapper got fired, so I could work in the meat department. Then we had a small deli slicer, but the store did not have a deli section.”
Wayne Pearn observes: “Most people paid with cash or cheque. Debit was unheard of.” Christine continues: “You got paid cash, in an envelope, every Saturday. The banks would be closed on the weekend, so it was more convenient to have cash. At Christmas we got two envelopes, and the second was your Christmas bonus. The first Christmas party I went to was at Eganridge and there were 12 of us or so. It was a Henry VIIIth dinner, so we had to eat everything with our fingers.”
In the early 1980s, John purchased the next block of stores to the north, which had been home to the Public Library and Murchison, Sangster & Folkes Insurance to make way for the next expansion, which opened in 1983. “It was pure hell during the construction—you had to hand bomb everything to unload the trucks, and it was tricky getting the beef quarters into the store,” Wayne Pearn remembers. “You had to lift everything twice to get it from the truck into place in the store. But we made it through and it was a big step for a small town. The addition gave every department more room. Then the meat department had its own freezer, and the grocery department had its own cooler. Everything was bigger.”
When Christine started working in the bakery, John promised her a raise if she could increase the sales—and the young bakery manager was up to the challenge. “Nothing beats homemade bread, and everything in the IGA was homemade, including the toppings. Everything was made from scratch. You would roll out the dough by hand and weigh each loaf. You chopped in cherries for the cherry bread and apples for apple cinnamon bread. I brought in some of my mom’s bread recipes, and went away for training. I invented garlic cheese sticks, and soon we were selling 400 per day. Back then, you could invent your own stuff.” The bakery had many popular products, like cookies, hot cross buns, butter tarts, and shortbread at Christmas, but the Italian Bread that was made in the pizza oven was a favourite. The pizzas that were made in the basement were also quite popular, packaged on cardboard circles, and covered in shrink wrap.
One far-reaching change was the introduction of Universal Product Codes. Instead of staff having to manually price and reprice each item, then key it in at the cash, computers could perform the same functions automatically. “It was really nice and made things so much easier,” Shirley Dudman observes. “You just brought the item up to cash, scanned it, then put the groceries down.” Before they were introduced, as Wayne Pearn recounts, “As a bag boy, it was pretty easy to keep up. Now there are seldom bag boys and it is more difficult to keep up.”
When his former employees remember John Sobko, for many, “fair” is one of the first words that comes to mind. “He was not a hands-on guy,” Wayne Pearn explains. “He spent a lot of time working in the office. He did a bit of the ordering for a section or two, and would help after work if we were short. He paid people to do their job, and he let them do it. He ran a good business, and that’s why people stayed. I liked his policy, in the summer, of giving kids from the cottages 40 hours a week so they would come back every summer. Now a lot of kids can only find a part time job. He would often say, “If you get a minute, could you…. (clean this or do that). Maybe, I remember that because I would get told that a lot.” John often helped to deliver groceries to his customers with the IGA van.
“John was a nice person and he always had a big smile,” Christine observes. “You liked going to work. He was really good to me. If you worked hard, he would be good to you. If you worked hard, you would get paid more, now they would call that discrimination. We would go to Christmas gatherings and summer parties at his cottage.”
“John always drove a nice car,” Wayne Pearn remembers. “In 1980, he had a brand-new Chrysler New Yorker. He wanted to let me drive it. I was a 23-year-old kid with a $500 car. It was the nicest car I ever rode in.” John had a way of making his employees know that he appreciated them. “There were shenanigans, like slapping the guy in front of you with the mop while cleaning the floor or having a grape fight, after hours, of course. John would probably not talk to you for a while, so you knew he was mad.”
Many customers saw how hard John worked to keep the business operating. “He was a man on a mission—he was always on task,” Bob notes. Wayne Hutchinson continues, “John had a bubbly personality. He was very personable, approachable and easy to talk to. He always had a story. He really looked after his customers and was good with the staff.”
Wayne Hutchinson was also in the Rotary Club with John Sobko: “He would do anything to help. He supported baseball, minor hockey and anything else that was going on. For years, he let the Rotary Club have a barbeque beside his store on Canada Day. He supplied the hot dogs, buns, ketchup, mustard, relish, etc. He served a term as club president. If anyone had a health issue or a fire, John was there to help. He and Russ Baptiste sponsored a men’s softball tournament on Labour Day weekend. I think he was also the president of the Chamber of Commerce for a year.”
John was a faithful member of the United Church. He liked to boat and spend time at the cottage with his family. The IGA often sponsored its franchisees to go on trips, and John would make the most of these free outings.
Forty-two years after John Sobko had brought the IGA to Fenelon Falls, he sold the business to Mark Pilat. There had been pressure on John to open on Sundays, but as long as he owned the store, they would take a day off. Soon after Mark purchased the business, it began to open seven days a week—as was then becoming commonplace in Ontario. After operating as a Garden Market for a year, in 2002, Mark and Lisa Knoester rebranded the store as a Sobeys, as it moved to the south side of the bridge, into a much larger building.
By the time store became Sobeys, “it had quadrupled,” from the time that Christine had started. The store was selling a much greater variety of products, and much larger volumes than it had a generation earlier. For many years it has been Fenelon Falls’ only grocery store. As it expanded, many of the processes changed. “Bread was not made from scratch any more, it came in frozen. When they took my mixer away, I cried. Several products that we once made are just brought in, but you still have to chop the cheese in or make the tart filling. We bake cookies and tarts daily. Now we are making so many more products. Now, by the time someone is trained to bake these products, they move on to another job. It was getting too complicated to bake everything from scratch.”
“Sobeys today is very different from the IGA when I started. It was smaller and cozier, now it is so big and people come and go too fast. Back then, people worked hard, and the store could order what you wanted or what was selling. Now the company sends you what is in the warehouse, you get new product automatically. The individual store does not have as much say. Everyone who works at Sobeys is still a family, we always have been a family. It’s just a very different feeling from when I started.”
John Sobko passed away on July 3, 2024 at the age of 96.
This story is a memory and nobody’s memory is perfect. Sometimes details get a little mixed up, things get forgotten or overlooked, and the perspective is inevitably subjective. If you notice something that not right, have something you would like to tell us, or a memory to share the museum would be happy to hear from you: [email protected]
