By 1952 I had driven down to Fayetteville and found an old grocery store that Kroger was abandoning because it was falling apart. It was right on the square, only 18 feet wide and 150 feet deep. Our main competitor was a Woolworth’s on one side of the square, and a Scott Store on the other side of the square. So here we were challenging two popular stores with a little old 18-foot independent variety store. It wasn’t a Ben Franklin franchise; we just called it Walton’s Five and Dime like the store in Bentonville.
