Allen's Furniture Store, the Silver Moon Cafe, the Shoe Shop and the Metropolitan Life Insurance office

This is the approximate site of Mrs. Allen's Furniture Store, which sold all manner of furniture, including caskets. Sometime, maybe years, before the fire, Mrs. Allen hired Jerry to pull weeds from her garden and plant pansies for her. This was the first time Jerry had ever planted pansies and Mrs. Allen very kindly gave him detailed instructions on how to go about it without disturbing the delicate roots.

Next to the furniture store was a vacant lot, approximately 200 feet wide, to the right in the photo. The next building was the Silver Moon Cafe, a two-story building that did not burn because it was in the opposite direction from the fire's path. This building was a frame building with porches, upstairs and down, across the front, and had an upstairs and downstairs, with an external stairway in the middle that led upstairs.

On the ground floor of this building was the Silver Moon Cafe (on the east side) and on the west side was a shoe shop that manufactured, repaired and sold shoes. Out front there was a bench for sitting in order to pass the time of day, visit with friends and neighbors, and play checkers.

The shoe shop was run by a nice man and his young son. This boy knew that Jerry could play checkers, and he wanted to learn how to play too, so Jerry taught him how to play on the bench outside the shoe shop. One thing Jerry couldn't help but notice was that the boy's thumb on his right hand was much, much larger than his other thumb, and it was large, hard, calloused and tough. Jerry thinks this was due to the hard and repetitive work the boy was involved in while sewing shoes in his father's shoe shop.

As always, Jerry was drawn to and fascinated by the machinery in the shoe shop. There were machines for buffing the shoes, grinding the soles of the shoes, polishing the shoes, sewing and stitching the shoes. And that wonderful smell of leather and polish permeated the store.

The small office, appoximately 8'x10' in size, of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was located upstairs in a part of this building that housed the Silver Moon Cafe and the shoe shop below. The business of the Metropolitan Life Insurance office was "debit insurance." The insurance agent was Mr. Lowery, who was a little man with a dried-up look, who always wore a black suit, carried a black book with his customer list in it, and who drove a black Ford one-seater sedan, not a convertible but a coupe. Mr. Lowery was a frequent customer at the Silver Moon Cafe where Jerry worked.

Jerry worked at the Silver Moon Cafe after the fire, and after he had the job of gathering, cleaning and stacking burned bricks from the fire. He worked at the Silver Moon from the summer of 1927 till June of 1929, when he moved to Montgomery with his oldest brother Aubrey (Audie) Alexander Clements.