Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501310070
SECTION: STREET BY STREET PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The late Joe Monsour had run the store at 902 Peach Road since at least the 1940s. Ernest Brown was his cashier and part-time manager. Mary Brown worked there, too.
Black entrepreneurs and people like Monsour, of Lebanese descent, fueled the life in Gainsboro. "It was like being at home," Mary Brown said. "They took pride in those places."
Monsour owned the Gainsboro building where The Roanoke Tribune was published and the Star City Auditorium at Wells Avenue and Henry Street where James Brown and Lionel Hampton played in the 1950s and 1960s.
"At one time, they had me believing that they were going to renovate, have a little mall over there," Ernest Brown said. "I should have seen through that."
Not long after they bought the business, Ernest Brown said, C. Frank Kefauver, an elderly white real-estate man, warned him, ```Mr. Brown, you're going to have to move.' He knew something I didn't know. I hadn't heard nothing about it."
The Browns, so close that they finish each other's sentences, told what happened then:
Ernest Brown: "They moved everybody out from around us. If we could have stayed down there another four or five years, we would've had it made."
Mary Brown: "See, we couldn't afford to stay down there. Too many people were moving out."
Ernest Brown: ``Some of the elderly people didn't have no way to get back down there. They just left us."
Mary Brown: "We tried to deliver" to homes to keep the business.
Ernest Brown: "But you've got to have the walk-in trade."
Mary Brown: "We had to get away."
The Browns closed the store in the late 1970s. Kefauver lent them $10,000 to buy land for a new store on Cove Road. Brown's Grocery had 11 employees, two cash registers and 10 compressors to keep the food cold. It was one of the biggest black-owned businesses in town.
But they were competing with chain supermarkets on nearby Hershberger Road. Then, too, the Browns blame their customers. They still have a box of bad checks in their basement.
The new store failed. They had opened it with a $212,000 Small Business Administration loan, so the government came in one day, took the keys and auctioned off the place.
Ernest Brown is retired now; Mary Brown is an aide at Fallon Park Elementary School.
by CNB