Johnny's Store had everything back when Jack Speers was a lad.
"The store was lit by lantern," recalls the 87-year-old Namao resident, and was one of the few permanent structures in the hamlet. With the unpaved roads often impassable due to mud and cars few and far between, it simply wasn't practical for Namao residents to shop in Edmonton. They went to Johnny's instead, there to buy fruit, flour, chicken feed, bolts, screws, bullets, cigars and more.
"The thing I remember the most was the bananas," Speers says, which hung in a bundle in the middle of the store. "They always hung with the end of the bananas down," he chuckles, "and I thought that was the way they grew!"
Apart from its contents Johnny's has stayed almost exactly the same for the past 110 years – same shelves, siding, walls and floorboards. Rumour has it there's still a bullet hole in the ceiling caused by a careless gunman almost a century ago.
Johnny's Store has been the hub of Namao for more than a century, but for the last 22 years it's been known as Namao Store. That all changes this month as the store – and its operator – reverts back to its original name.
Days of yore
The store is now owned and operated by John McNeilly, a motorcycle enthusiast, police officer and now the second Johnny to run Johnny's Store.
The family has taken great pains to keep the store in its original condition, McNeilly says. They've replaced the shingles and the foundation, but haven't touched the floor or changed the colour of the paint. It's been white for as long as anyone can remember.
The store itself was built in 1902 by Jeremiam Frank Johnson, Speers says. "They called him Frank Johnson because nobody like that 'Jeremiam' part, including Frank."
Born in Bethany, Miss., around 1871, Johnson was married to Jean and had a daughter named Margaret, says Gordon Carson, a local historian who's writing a book on Johnny's Store.
"What brought him to Namao is beyond me," he says, but he was an active member of the local church, which he also helped construct. His store soon became the home of the community's post office – an institution that remained there until earlier this year.
John Stephen Samis bought the store in 1910 after Johnson died, Speers says. "He was my grandfather, and he had 12 kids." He later moved to Veteran, Alta., but kept ownership of the store until 1931.
The store originally had an oak counter that ran its entire length, says Ross McLay, curator of the Namao Museum. It sold everything from socks to cameras to tobacco, as well as gasoline, motor oil and 10-cent Jersey Milk bars. "The inventory [process] must have been phenomenal."
The store was the hub of the community, McLay continues. "Not many people had telephones, so that's where you got your information." The store was, and still is, the place to drop packages, meet people, pick up groceries and find out the latest news. "My family, we'd go to the store every day."
Many of its customers were coal miners. There were about 53 active coal mines in the region in those days, notes Keith Reed, who ran the store for the last 22 years, and the store was the nearest place miners could go for supplies.
The store shuffled between many different operators from 1910 to 1931, Carson says, including Walter Will Shultz, Earl Samis and, in 1924, Thomas Neal.
Speers says he doesn't recall much about Neal, but does remember that he broke his arm when the Model T Ford he was cranking backfired.
"He had a green parrot," Speers adds, and he clearly recalls how it would hang around the store saying, "Polly want a cracker."
The parrot had a bit of a swarthy reputation, Carson notes, and was known to say "Shut the damn door!" and other less printable remarks. It may have come from a travelling circus, his research suggests. The parrot eventually moved to Westlock County with Neal's wife, Isabella.
The McNeilly dynasty
Robert McNeilly took over the store in 1931, Carson notes, buying it outright in 1940 and naming it "Red's." It's unclear if the store had a name before then. The store has been in the McNeilly family ever since.
Folks knew Robert as "Red" due to his flaming red hair, says McNeilly, Robert's nephew. "He was a big, friendly guy," he says, and would often pay him five cents to harvest 50 pounds of potatoes. "You could get a chocolate bar and a bottle of pop for two bits back then."
Red's became Johnny's when Robert sold the place to McNeilly's father, who was also named John. A giant of a man at over six feet, McNeilly says John was known for his dark brown hair and penchant for jokes. "He was well known in the community for his laugh."
Running the place and post office alongside him was Ollie, McNeilly's mother. "She was a true postmistress," McNeilly says, and took her job very seriously. She was also a bit of a fashionista, and always wore the latest styles.
The store carried flour, sugar, rice and even small washing machines, McNeilly says. "We used to get big round wheels of cheese from the Bruderheim creamery," he recalls – 18 inches across and a foot thick – as well as six-foot-long coils of garlic sausage. Customers would ask for a wedge or a length and Ollie would use a giant knife to cut it for them.
The store still had manual gas pumps in this era, Reed says. Each pump had a large graduated glass dome on top that held about a gallon of fuel, he recalls, and you filled it by yanking a lever back and forth. "It was a big deal that day when I [was old enough to] pump that lever."
When it was full, McNeilly continues, you hit a switch to drain the dome into your tank and then did it again. They didn't have automatic shut-offs back then, he adds, so you had to listen to the tank to know when to stop.
Lights and cameras
No one's sure how Hollywood discovered Johnny's Store. "Somebody was looking for an old store," Reed says. "The rest is history."
It was the early 1990s, and a film crew approached Ollie wanting to use the store as the eponymous café in the film Bordertown Café. She agreed, so crews moved in, covered up the "Johnny's" sign and started rolling.
That paved the way for other programs such as Ray Bradbury Theatre (which painted the store blue for a night shot), Fargo (which brought maybe 150 people to the site), and, more recently, Blackstone.
The store kept operating between takes, Reed says, which sometimes led to ruined shots when oblivious customers wandered onto the set at a bad moment. Crews would always restore the store to its original condition when they were done.
Johnny's back
Reed, who took over running the store in 1990, stepped down as operator of Johnny's at the end of June, citing commercial pressures. "The Anthony Henday did affect me quite a bit."
Despite that, the store itself still sees a steady stream of customers every day, and is a popular hangout for local students.
"It's a real satisfying thing to see students start in their first year of high school and go on to graduate," Reed says. The green photo album that is the store's official history book is filled with shots of happy grads, many of whom come back to visit years later.
McNeilly and his wife, Brenda, say they don't plan to change much about the store — fix the floor, add a modern bathroom, maybe add a coffee shop. Their plan is to update the store while still keeping its historic charm.
People appreciate that history when they come in the door, Brenda says. "It's a sense of coming home."
