Chapter Twenty-Two
The library was a small brick building that had been built at about the same time as the new Oak Street Bakery. It was on Locust Street, on the corner of 11th Street, and it looked very serene with its green lawn and pecan trees and American flag hanging in the stillness of the late June afternoon.
I remembered coming to the library during summer vacations as a teenager and sitting in its big chairs, enjoying the frigid air conditioning and reading detective novels while my grandmother was at work at the nursing home. I parked in its well-kept parking lot and entered through the glass doors, and the air conditioning was as cold as I remembered it. I walked in and looked around to get my bearings--nothing had changed. The checkout desk was still on the right as I walked in, the water fountain on the left, next to a wooden bench. The stacks were around the perimeter of the library proper, and chairs and desks were scattered in the middle of the big room. There were a few young people there that Friday afternoon, as well as a couple of retirees reading the paper, but it was not crowded and it was as quiet as a cemetery.
I approached the card catalogue and looked up the Oak Street Bakery, but I didn’t find anything, so I went up to the front desk and asked the librarian where I could find the section on local history.
She was probably about thirty five years old, which made her look rather old to me at the time. Her hair was up in a librarian’s bun and she wore glasses and no makeup that I could see. Her nametag identified her as “Miss Doe,” and I wondered if her first name was Jane, but I didn’t have the nerve to ask.
She pointed me in the right direction and soon I was looking at a small shelf of books about Carollo County history. I picked up two of them and went over to an empty table, sat down, and began to scan their pages. I passed quickly over the pages about the settlement of the county in the early and mid nineteenth century and moved onto the oil boom of the early twentieth. There was no index, presumably because it was a labor of love and the author didn’t think anyone would need one.
There were pictures, but I didn’t see any of the Oak Street Bakery or Lester Macaboo, its founder. I was luckier with the second book. It mentioned the bakery in a section on successful businesses, but it didn’t say anything of use. I decided to check the newspapers.
Another trip to see the librarian and I was in possession of two rolls of microfilm, covering the Ransom Daily Record from its inception in 1922 to 1950. I sat down at the microfilm machine and turned it on, threading the first roll and forwarding to an early issue. I learned that the paper was a weekly at that time and that it was short--about twelve pages on the average.
I enjoyed looking at those old papers for awhile, and sadly there was no index. That would have to be quite a project for some ambitious smalltown librarian to undertake one day. I scanned through that roll and put on the other one. I found that the paper was not published in the war years from 1942 to 1944, but that it came back to life in 1945. I reached the end of the roll without finding out anything about the bakery, but I admit I didn’t read every page.
I went up to the desk and exchanged those two rolls for the next two, which covered the years from 1950 to 1955. The paper became a daily in 1954, and the task became more tedious. Finally, I gave up and decided to ask the librarian if she knew about when the bakery was rebuilt. Surprisingly, she knew a lot about the subject.
“Why, sure I know about that,” she said. “It’s one of the most successful businesses in town. I wouldn’t be much of a librarian if I didn’t keep up on local history, now would I?” She smiled and her face lit up and she wasn’t so dowdy after all.
“There’s a file on local things over in the miscellaneous files. I’ll show you.” I followed her over to a large file cabinet, and she pulled out a folder chock full of old pamphlets and newspaper clippings. “Here, look through these. If you don’t find what you’re looking for we can look somewhere else.” I was getting to like Miss Doe.
In the folder I found an article from the Daily Record with a big color picture of Lester Macaboo Jr. standing proudly in front of the newly-dedicated Oak Street Bakery. The date was August 14, 1965. The article told me that the bakery had officially opened for business the day before and was expected to be more successful than ever.
Further down in the article it got into the bakery’s history and how it dovetailed with the Macaboo fortune.
Here’s what it said:
The Oak Street Bakery was founded by Mr. Macaboo’s father, the late Lester Macaboo Sr., in 1946. It began as a small bakery on Fourteenth Street and quickly rose to the top of its field. Patrons in those days included the late Mayor Tompkins and Mrs. Chapman, among others.
The bakery prospered in the 1950s and began selling pecan pies through the mail in 1958, making it one of the early success stories in the mail order business in the United States. Business grew so quickly in the last few years that when the late Mr. Macaboo died, his son began planning expansion into a new building. That building is now a reality.
That told me a little more about the bakery itself. Another article, clearly from the society pages, told me about the Macaboo family itself. This article was from June 19, 1962, and reported a party held for the tenth wedding anniversary of Lester Macaboo Jr. and his wife, Marilee. The party was held at the Ransom Hotel ballroom and seems to have been quite a show. The Macaboos were feted by Lester Sr., who must have died soon after, and it was clear that they were the toast of town society. I also suspected that the status was rather new, comparing the tone of this article to the description of the bakery when it had first opened in 1946.
Yet I didn’t learn anything that jumped right out at me, nothing that would help me with the mystery I was trying to solve. I sat there for awhile, flipping through the articles, but I got impatient and put them back. There was something nagging at my brain, something I had forgotten that was important, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I thanked Miss Doe and left the library.
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