When The Corner Was More Than a Corner

It was more than a bar, more than a magazine stand, and more than a place to buy a  Cherry Coke that did not come out of a can or a bottle but was made with cherry syrup and Coca-Cola mix. It was also a place that was more or less forbidden for me to go up there when I was young because of the drinking that was going on there


 The Corner was one of those places in the 1950's and 1960s that allowed beer only drinking because Idaho had a strange law back then that allowed a 20-year-old to drink beer, but you had to be 21 to drink the hard stuff. I use to chuckle when I envisioned a young person who at the stroke of midnight jumped in maturity from 20 years old to 21years old and could now be man or woman enough to handle straight shots.


As I got older the Wallace Corner became the place that would fuel my dreams of big cities were there was " real" life, as I thought of it back then. So, on Sunday afternoons I would trudge up the street and purchase a news paper from Los Angels, Cleveland, NY, San Francisco, or Seattle. I would take my future road map home and read every word from those major papers and dream of getting on a bus and heading for one of those cities. It was years later that I finally realized that life in Wallace and life in North Idaho WAS the real life that I wanted.


Yes, the Wallace Corner was a very large part of Growing up Wallace.