Funny How Time Slips Away | Grand Union Tea Company
Alright @YouTheReader,
I picked this song Funny How Time Slips Away for Stumblin’ Along because I’m going to the Outlaw Music Festival tonight at PNC in Jersey with my family. Their lineup includes a ton of great performers such as The Avett Brothers. I almost did their “Murder In The City” for this Stumblin’ Along, but I figured it would’ve come across a bit dark. My next option was going to be Willie Nelson’s “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die”, which out of context also felt a bit morbid. Anyway, I figured I would do some research on Willie Nelson, and this song “Funny How Time Slips Away” was the only one he wrote on his debut album called “…And Then I Wrote” that references time, which fit Stumblin’ Along.
Willie Nelson was born in Abbott, Texas on April 29, 1933. He wrote his first song at the age of 7 years old and started his first band at 10. After graduating from high school in 1950, Nelson joined the US Air Force but was soon discharged from his duties because of back problems. (**EARMUFFS FOR ALL THE KIDS OUT THERE**) A man before his time, Willie Nelson started smoking the reefer in 1954 at the age of 21. He was at a roadside bar in Fort Worth, Texas, when a friend of his Fred Lockwood handed him a joint and told him to “Get high and be somebody.” (Source: Austin American-Statesman) I figured it was because of his back problems. (**OKAY TO UNEARMUFF KIDS**)
During the late 1950s, he had been a DJ at local radio stations but he started writing and singing his own stuff using his own style. In 1960, ‘Ol Willie moved to Nashville, Tennessee where he wanted to start a career in music but he had trouble signing on with a record label at first. Nelson remembers his initial Nashville experience, “I enjoyed fooling around with phrasing, but it made my sound noncommercial for all those Nashville ears who were listening for the same old stuff and misunderstood anything original.” (Source: American Songwriter) Country labels in Nashville all rejected Nelson’s music because it was considered offbeat and too out there for mainstream country at the time.
At 28 years old, Willie Nelson signed a deal with Liberty Records and wrote Funny How Time Slips Away originally for Patsy Cline, a country music star at the time who was coming off her first No. 1 hit called “I Fall To Pieces.” Patsy never got the chance to use this song because another country star, Billy Walker, ended up being the first to record this song that Willie Nelson wrote in 1961. It wasn’t until September of 1962 that Willie Nelson at 29 years old made his debut album called “…And Then I Wrote.”
When his debut album was originally released,Billboard in their Vol 74 wrote that his single for the album, “Touch Me”, was an “interesting country-styled tune with good lyrics.” With a good review and a well-done album, Nelson switched over to the record company RCA Victor and became a member of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.
From 1964 to the early 1970s, Nelson was only able to string together a few minor hits. Despite his original success after failing, Nelson became weary of the corporate Nashville scene and decided to move back to his home state of Texas. He blamed the record labels for trying to shoehorn him into the Nashville sound that everybody was already playing at the time and it wasn’t for him. (Source: All Music)
Willie Nelson’s “interesting style” would go on to change country music and left its mark on American music as well. The rest as they say is history that Week to Week Notes will cover plenty more of through Willie Nelson’s musical career in due time. For now, I’ll Note that Elvis Presley covered this song when he dropped Elvis County in 1970.
The rest of the verses of this tune are a bit vindictive so we’re skipping past those parts and just using these lyrics as a way to celebrate the 90-year-old country singer who is still singing.
On to some history I Stumbled Along…
Grand Union Tea Company
In 1872, Frank, Cyrus, and Charles Jones founded the Jones Brothers Tea Company. It started out with one store in Scranton, Pennsylvania where it sold coffee, tea, spices, and baking powder. Early on, Frank conceived the idea that they would go door to door to the customer instead of making the customer come to them. Each of the young men, with a heavily laden market basket on his arm, started to canvass Scranton for business. This new concept worked like a charm. They were able to establish a chain of stores that carried just their own products. Soon after taking over the coffee, tea, and spice game of Scranton, they expanded with new stores in eastern Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New York.
In 1877, the Jones brothers changed their company name to Grand Union Tea Company. “Grand Union” was supposed to inspire shoppers to think they were engaging in a “grand union of savings.” By 1893, they bought some property in Dumbo, Brooklyn, and the construction of a massive warehouse began in 1896. Before they knew it in 1904, the Grand Union Tea Company was headquarters were the “largest warehouse and factory in the United States for teas, coffees, spices, flavoring extracts, baking powders, and soaps.” (Source: Hatching Cat NYC)
The ever-expanding Grand Union Tea Company business was growing and so was the needed space in the warehouse. By 1912, Grand Union was a 200-chain store across 33 states and Washington, D.C. When their 68 Jay Street warehouse was completed it had 10 acres of floor space. Which was enough space to ship 120,000 cakes of soap and 20,000 pounds of baking soda each day. The company’s yearly output of coffee was 32 million pounds. In addition to their massive operation going on in Brooklyn, they also supported a small army of 5,000 door-to-door salesmen and delivered goods in horse-drawn wagons. The Jones brothers still believed in door-to-door service.
During the 1920s, Grand Union used its financial might to acquire other food businesses and by the 1930s grew to one of the country’s biggest food chains. This was around the time when the Jones family sold the business and the warehouse in Brooklyn as well. In 1931, Grand Union had 708 small stores and $35 million in sales ($702,553,618.42 today). These stores were still more like local markets, it wasn’t until the 1940s that Grand Union became one of the first food chains to embrace the “supermarket” concept.
This was thanks to Lansing P. Shield who pushed Grand Union into the supermarket industry’s leading edge. It almost didn’t happen because, in 1946, the Grand Union’s President at the time J. Spencer Weed (Class of Princeton 1941, damn he moved up the ranks fast) sought to merge the company with American Stores Company (parent of Acme Markets). A backdoor merger deal was made on October 8, 1946, behind Shield’s back. A furious Lansing P. Shield, who had been with the company for 22 years, rounded up enough stockholders and directors to call the deal off, which was announced to the New York Times on November 5th, 1946. Weed was then weeded out of the presidency and eventually the board of directors. If you’re ever at ShopRite or any supermarket, remember that it was Lansing P. Shield who was instrumental in creating the departmentalized “island” concept you see below. (Source: Pleasant Family Shopping Blog)
All of this Tea Company and Supermarket talk is so riveting stuff I needed to get a coffee myself in order to finish this. By the mid-1950s, Grand Union halved the number of stores they operated from the 1930s but they enlarged the size of the actual markets themselves and the stores turned out 7x the number of volumes in sales. Then they started experimenting with discount merchandise stores called Grand Way. The first Grand Way was in Keansburg, New Jersey, followed by one in Albany, New York. Grand Union reached $1 billion in sales in 1968 thanks to their supermarkets and discount dollar stores. In Paramus, they even at one point built an entire strip mall where a Grand Union Supermarket was anchored to a Grand Way - this would fail and be bought by Winn-Dixie and Kmart. (Source: Funding Universe)
In the 1970s, a British corporate raider named Sir James Goldsmith bought Grand Union through Cavenham Foods and then he sold it to this Gary D. Hirsch, an investment bank guy who filed bankruptcy on its behalf in 1995 before then handing it off to J. Wayne Harris who would eventually file Chapter 11 bankruptcy again. Even with all the bankruptcy, Grand Union Tea Company, formerly the Jones Brothers Tea Company, is still around a few spots today in Upstate NY and Vermont due to a ‘21 revival. (Source: C&S Wholesale Grocers)
Well, I sure as hell didn’t expect to learn a bit about the supermarket industry because I was having a pint of Guinness from a can at 68 Jay Street, but here we are… @YouTheReader do you think Willie Nelson has ever been to a Grand Union before?