Text from the above article:
Old-Time Store Still Going Strong
St. Tammany Farmer June 6, 1974
When you open the door to Champagne's Grocery, 427 Columbia Street, you're in a delightful world of yesteryear. The sights, the smells, the arrangements of stock are reminders of those days before supermarkets. Of days when everybody knew their grocer personally, trusted him, depended upon him, called him friend.
Champagne's may be the very last of the "Pa & Ma" grocery stores hereabouts---a pleasant reminder of what Lum & Abner's fictitious "Jot-Em-Down" emporium of that beloved radio serial might have been like.
Robert A. Champagne and his wife, Mrs. Mildred McLain Champagne, run the store together. They have no other help. And it may well be the only grocery in this area that still delivers. Champagne delivers once daily, the orders coming in by telephone. Many of those customers are elderly people or have no means of transportation.
The proprietor delivers himself, and frequently is called upon, like a good neighbor, to help with varied and assorted household chores, which he performs graciously. Not only that, but when a customer needs a non-grocery item, Champagne takes the time to go to another supplier to get it, merely as an accommodation.
It's all in the game--that wonderful game known as life---as played by a couple who know and love people. The little grocery was established in 1918,where Champagne's grandfather operated it briefly for five or six months before his death.
His father, Thomas J. Champagne Sr., at the time was in partnership with the late A. J. Plaunche in the 300 block of Columbia street, also in the grocery business.
When his father died, Thomas Champagne took over the present location after selling out to his partner. He operated the store until 1946. when his son became manager. Thomas Champagne Sr.. at 82, still lives in Covington and is in good health. As you enter Champagne's Grocery, you are impressed by the vast and varied stock, all of it neatly arranged. The store actually is spotless.
While they do not generally handle fresh meats, they do carry cold cuts, bacon, sausages, cheeses, hot dogs, etc. Brand names are everywhere and prices for the most part are in line with supermarkets. Champagne recalled the depression years of the 1930's, when he sold a 2-pound slab of salt meat for 25 cents; a pound of red beans for five cents; five pounds of rice for 19 cents---and on and on in those days when a dollar was worth a dollar, but everybody didn't have one.
Food stamps were a disappointment to him. He tried them and recently quit handling them. Some customers used cash to buy non-food stamp items from him, but took the stamps elsewhere.
Not all his clientele forgot the little store with the big heart. He has one family who has traded with Champagne's through three generations. Fifty-six years in the same spot and still going strong, in an era when many neighborhood groceries have gone out of business, is a monument to something more than running a store. It has to be attributed to the human side of the proprietors, who are not merely merchants, but friends.
An Advertisement from 1935
The grocery building today
The store opened in 1919, with Thomas Champagne as proprietor. It was being run by Robert Champagne when it closed in 1979, looking pretty much the same as it had for decades with its original counters still in place.
Champagne used two tree truck sections as chopping blocks for meat cutting, and he made sliced ham and po-boy sandwiches for his regular customers. Robert's daughter Patricia Champagne Massoth remembered that the store had sacks of dry beans that the kids would all come in and mix together. "Another attraction for the children was the candy counter. The kids just loved our penny candy," she said.
Champagne was delivering groceries to his homebound customers even in the last days of the grocery. It was a practice that had been offered since the early days. "My father's clients were some of the elderly ladies in town," she said. "and he would take their orders and have the groceries delivered to them."
Other store interiors
