M.E. Moses Five and Dime Store - Vernon, Texas

Not the actual M.E. Moses in Vernon, Texas (for reference)

 

One of my favorite stores from the past was the M.E. Moses Five and Dime Store on Main Street in Vernon, Texas. For those of you to young to remember what a ‘Five and Dime’ store was, it was an old-fashioned discount store. As you may have guessed the name literally meant that everything was around five and ten cents in price. Of course, you would have had to travel way back in time to get those kinds of bargains. Way further back than my memories of the mid 1970s anyway.

I believe the only thing you could have bought for a dime was a piece of hard candy.  A comic book was thirty cents and a gallon of gas was sixty cents a gallon back then. To put that into perspective, a comic book is four dollars today and depending on what part of the country you are in gasoline could be anywhere between two and four bucks.

The M.E. Moses store was your typical mid-western department store of that era. It carried everything from clothes, fabric, fake flowers, household goods to toys. In preparation for this piece I discovered a blog post (the only real information online about the store) where reader after reader shared their memories about shopping for toys at Moses.

I am no different from any of the others who commented about their memories of shopping with their families at the popular Texas chain. I spent my time in the toy department. As I recall the toy section was dead center in the store and there were plenty of shelf space dedicated to both top of the line toys and their cheaper counterparts.

One of my purchases back then was the ‘Godzilla battles the Tricephalon playset’ produced by a company that made cheaper knock-offs of Marx playsets. It wasn’t a get toy, but it did come with a plastic Godzilla figure, though the plastic army men that came with it were almost half as tall as the monsters plus a battleship that was only a little over twice the size as the jeep that came with it.

Who cares about scale … it’s for kids!

I can also say that I bought my first LP record at Moses, the 1975 release of ‘Kiss Alive’, a double album recording of the ‘hottest band in the world’ rocking the Los Angeles Forum.

Ah, those were the days when both your favorite monsters and rock bands were loud, fire breathing and larger than life.

I’ve gotten a bit off track. The one really awesome memory I have of the old Moses department store was the fact that it had a lunch counter and soda fountain in the back. A place where shoppers could take a break end enjoy a sandwich, burger or a hot plate and wash it down with a chocolate malt. Even in the 70s this was retro feature that had its heyday in the 1950s.

In trying to research the history of the M.E. Moses chain I found very little online. I can tell you that the regional chain started in Paducah, Texas in 1946 and had locations around The Lone Star State as well as Oklahoma. By the mid-1990s M.E. Moses was no more than a memory.

I wish I could tell you more but sadly that’s it.

I’m sure that many of you will be able to add to the story by sharing information and memories about this once great Texas department store chain in the comments below!

Read about more Texas memories at:

Gibson's Discount Center - Vernon, Texas

A Texas Size Mystery: The Big Bird Of 1976