Port Tampa general store a remnant of simpler time

A faded Coca-Cola sign on an ancient brick building in this once-thriving port city marks the most interesting of the community's few remaining retail stores, V.T. Clark's General Merchandise.

A throwback to earlier days, the small "cash-only" 9-to-5 store offers meats, produce, canned goods, hard-to-find soft drinks - and a little history and nostalgia.

Lining the walls are large black-and-white photographs of Port Tampa during its heyday, including images of long-gone hotels and other commercial structures. A smaller photo depicts the exterior of the store in 1926, when it was Law's Cash Grocery, fresh meats and vegetables.

"Back then there weren't big grocery stores, so they handled everything," says Sue Scott, daughter of the late V.T. Clark. She remembers her dad's "general merchandise" offerings including not only groceries, but everything from kerosene and ammunition to hardware and chicken feed.

The old days meant virtually everyone shopped locally. "Everybody came to the stores that were here" serving Port Tampa at the time, she says.

Handbills advertising the store's sale prices were distributed door to door on Saturdays by neighborhood children Clark hired, Scott says. One undated flier she has on display offers an array of specials, including eggs for 59 cents a dozen.

Nostalgic items left over from the old store include a soda machine that once dispensed 5-cent bottles of Coca-Cola, and aluminum carriers for those bottles.

Unlike the Coke machine and an old coin-operated scale customers are asked not to touch, the store's half-century-old walk-in cooler remains in use.

A modern display cooler holds milk and other beverages, including an unusual array of soft drinks, such as Cheerwine. The highly carbonated cherry-flavored drink is not readily available in Florida. There's also Bubble Up, assorted Nehi flavors and others.

"We have a lot of drinks; no alcohol," Scott says. Nor does the store sell lottery tickets, another mainstay of many of today's convenience stores.

For a taste of nostalgia, the store offers the two ingredients to resurrect "the working man's lunch" popularized in the 1950s: "We have RC [Cola] in a glass bottle and, yes, we have MoonPies," Scott points out.

Scott and her husband, Loren, assumed operation of the family business long ago, but closed the store to the public for nine years to focus on supplying food to tugboats operating in Port Tampa.

"They ordered quite a bit of stuff, and we delivered" to the boats, she said. Some deliveries went as far as Boca Grande, if a tug line the Scotts served had a ship there.

As purveyors, the Scotts cut the beef, pork and other meats and delivered them to the tugboat's galley. Also, tug crews routinely ordered grouper, snapper and shrimp by the case.

With the fleets including ocean-going tugs with crews of nine or more, orders easily ran $600 to $3,500, the Scotts say. Petroleum company exploration vessels might load a $10,000 order before heading out to sea, she adds.

When the couple reopened the family store in 1983, they expanded the customer base by making deli sandwiches. "We've got a lot of devoted sandwich customers," Loren Scott says, but industry in the small port has been hard-hit.

In 2008, after nearly 50 years of turning quarried rock into wallboard, National Gypsum Co. closed its Port Tampa plant and dismissed its 70 plant workers. Loren says the economy also has adversely affected Standard Concrete Products, a larger manufacturer that has operated a Port Tampa facility since 1952.

"It used to be we could sell everything," Loren Scott says. "Now, almost all our customers are repeats. We do have new ones probably every week." The new ones get a glimpse of the history of the port built more than 120 years ago, a formerly independent city annexed by Tampa in 1961.

Sue Scott laughs as she relates the comment of one woman, very surprised once she eventually entered the store: "I've been driving by here for 12 years and I never stopped."