Some of you aging hippies out there probably remember the old Skagit Valley Co-op when it used to sit down on the other end of town.\u00a0 Close to the jail so the sheriff could keep an eye on who came and went, all us young longhairs would come out of the jungle once a year to get provisioned up.\u00a0 Fill in what we couldn\u2019t grow \u2026. And catch up on the current events here in Mt. Vernon and Gomorrah.<\/p>\n
I tell you what, that was a historic place, that old Co-op.\u00a0 Sure didn\u2019t have room for a fancy Deli or a free range meat section or specialty cheeses from around the world.\u00a0 Don\u2019t remember much of a Beauty and Cosmetic section.\u00a0 Mighta been a magazine rack with Mother Earth News, but that\u2019s all we needed really.\u00a0 Fine Homebuilding Magazine, Naw\u2026. Our shacks were beyond Martha Stewarting\u2026..<\/p>\n
Over the past 25 years the Co-op\u2019s grown up along with us.\u00a0 Its belt kept expanding one notch at a time until finally they just bought the whole damn block.\u00a0 Sort of downtown Mt. Vernon\u2019s answer to Wal-Mart.<\/p>\n
You think back to those humble beginnings, the cramped bins of grain and the teeny-weeny check-out stand, the loyal customers and the always great staff, you can appreciate how far they\u2019ve come.\u00a0 And maybe us too.\u00a0 I know I\u2019ve baked about one million loaves of bread ground from their grains.\u00a0 And even tho my homebrewing has diminished a bit since they got the giant beer and wine section, a lot of fond memories were from those moonshining Co-op days — even if those memories are starting to slip.<\/p>\n
Mt. Vernon, I don\u2019t need to tell you, took a different route than its neighbor to the north.\u00a0 Kept its history.\u00a0 Kept its soul.\u00a0 For those of us who still make the hard trek in from the hinterlands, we want to say thanks.\u00a0 And if there\u2019s any sheriff deputies reading this, I was just kidding about that moonshining\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n
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Some of you aging hippies out there probably remember the old Skagit Valley Co-op when it used to sit down on the other end of town.\u00a0 Close to the jail so the sheriff could keep an eye on who came and went, all us young longhairs would come out of the jungle once a year […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-and-ravings"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1977"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1979,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1977\/revisions\/1979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}