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He fondly remembers the personal touch involved in doing business back then. Customers would say, "Come in for a cup of tea before you deliver the rest of those groceries, and sometimes he did. He never knew when the day would end. Sometimes, in the short days of winter, he'd still be out after dark with no lamp on the wagon. "You wouldn't dare do that today," he chuckles. Many remember the cheery driver who travelled up and down local streets each day. Former mayor Wheldon "Steamer" Emmerson recalled that Bill was always whistling The Dardanella, a popular tune at the time, whenever he passed. On occasions when the horse ran off or the wagon was in for repairs at O'Neill's Wagon and Car Repair, Bill was philosophic. Farnell's store, which occupied the present site of Oxbow Books, was "a conglomeration," he says. Goods were piled pellmell in boxes and barrels, between bundles of brooms and sacks of sugar. Those clean, white Redpath sugar bags, by the way, were recycled into little dresses and shirts by thrifty mothers who never threw anything away. Around the walls were shelves and drawers, the high ones accessible by a ladder that ran on little pulleys. Many customers let the grocer find what they wanted, always in the exact quantity they requested and weighed on the scales. "Now, everything is all in packages that cost more than the goods themselves sometimes," Bill sighs. The Christie's Biscuit travelling salesman was a regular visitor. He would pull out the big, metal bin drawers, count the Maple Leaf cookies and lemon and orange biscuits, and make up a new order. Store hours were 8 to 6, with late hours to 11 pm on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Once Mr Brown the baker arranged to build a dance platform on Main Street to draw more evening customers. "I was still working in the store evenings and couldn't get to those dances," Bill says with regret. Saturday nights, people came to the picture shows, then dropped by Farnell's for groceries, so the store often didn't close until midnight, to Bill's distress. Sunday shopping? "Some of those devout church people would have run a person out of town on a rail if you even suggested it!" During the depression, many people here were on the dole. "They used to get vouchers for $5 in groceries every week at the municipal building," says Bill McDonald, who made deliveries for Farnell's store at the time. "If a man with a voucher wanted us to include cigarettes in his order, we had to ignore