MILLIANS: When Western Auto was our Walmart

Published 8:00 am Saturday, July 6, 2024

Your child wants a Western Flyer brand bicycle for Christmas. What are you going to do?

In the ‘50s and ‘60s, the answer was easy. You’re going to Western Auto, in downtown Milledgeville at the corner of Wayne and Greene streets.

There were not that many choices in town for buying a bike. You had Western Auto, Belk, Chandler Brothers and a few other stores. That meant a lot of business for Western Auto.

Western Auto would hire young people during the holiday break to put together the 700-to-800 bikes they’d sell each Christmas.

“It took weeks and weeks and weeks to put together all those bikes,” said Jeff Owens, who worked at Western Auto during Christmas breaks in his younger days. “But it was fun. It was like a social gathering. Back then, everybody worked somewhere during the Christmas holidays.”

Western Auto owner Frank Evans would finance the bicycles. You could put a bike on layaway and then come back and pick it up on Christmas Eve.

“We handled all the layaways, too,” Owens said.

Lots of Milledgeville teens had their first jobs at Western Auto. 

“You know, your dad was running more than a store,” one of the store’s fulltime employees told Frank’s son, Bob Evans. “He also was running a school.”

Back then, Western Auto was the closest thing in town to a Walmart.

I remember going to Western Auto, shopping for a baseball glove.

No matter what you wanted, they probably had it.

Chris Chandler, in her book “Stay Sweet: Tales of Quirky Southern Love,” remembers visiting her maternal grandparents May and Billy Donnelly, during summer vacations. 

She and May would visit Western Auto, where Billy worked.

“It smells of bitter rubber – the tires of mowers and bicycles and autos. It holds tools and riding mowers and grills, automobile batteries, bolts and screws,” Chandler wrote. 

“I love to go visit Billy there while he’s working and sit on the mowers, pretending to drive them. I run my fingers through the tassels that hang from the kid’s bicycle handles where the bikes sit lined up, waiting to be bought.”

She also loved when Billy let her pretend to write up orders in the small receipt book with a slip of carbon between the pages that he always kept in his shirt pocket. 

Western Auto started in 1909 in Kansas City, Missouri, as an auto parts mail order store. It grew to thousands of stores with its own name brands.

It was sold to Sears in 1988, then purchase by Advance Auto Parts 10 years later. By 2003, the Western Auto brand was almost dead.

During Western Auto’s heyday, Frank Evans, also a local attorney, was appointed by President Eisenhower as the U.S. Attorney in the Middle District of Georgia. 

Bob said his dad used to joke that he got that job because he was a Republican, and there were very few in a county heavily populated by Democrats in the ‘50s.

“Dad used to say, ‘Me and Mike Landy (who ran radio station WMVG) are the only two Republicans in Baldwin County,’ ” Bob said, laughing.

Frank Evans held that position for eight years, before devoting more time to his local law practice and his Western Auto store.

Most of the time, Bob said, his dad considered himself a small-town merchant.

A merchant who did a lot of business before Walmart came along.

And a merchant dedicated to providing a service for his customers.

Like the time the store burned down one Friday night in August in the late ‘60s, I believe. 

Western Auto moved its operation to the old Baldwin Hotel, on the corner across Wayne Street.

They reordered enough inventory to carry them through Christmas.

They didn’t want to hear about tears being shed when a Western Flyer bicycle was not under the tree on Christmas morning.

Rick Millians, a 1970 Baldwin High graduate, retired after working at newspapers in Georgia, Ohio and South Carolina. Reach him at rdmillians@aol.com