The Useful Dandy was greater than only a neighborhood nook retailer
by Tim Gilmore
By means of these entrance nook doorways at Herschel and James streets in Riverside, within the outdated nook grocery, the Useful Dandy, deep Jax histories cross, tales of hippie musicians not but well-known, of the outdated Lebanese household that’s given the town two mayors, of a canine named Stonewall who nearly died however as an alternative was liked into a protracted life.
In 1925, the wood-frame constructing was house to a Whiddon’s Money Retailer and Hiram Jones Meats. For a nickel, you can buy a Whiddon’s coupon the scale of a greenback invoice that was value 1 / 4. For a lot of the twentieth century, two of the Jacksonville’s most outstanding Center Japanese households owned or operated this nook grocery, the Nasrallahs and the Hazouris, years earlier than Tommy Hazouri was elected mayor in 1987 or his cousin Donna Deegan grew to become the town’s first feminine mayor in 2023.
Rumors nonetheless float round Riverside that musicians from this band or that performed upstairs, however metropolis directories record the residence as “vacant” within the late Nineteen Sixties. Donna Goddard doesn’t bear in mind it occurring; she frolicked everywhere in the neighborhood and her first husband Gary performed the Willowbranch Park “be-ins” in 1968 along with his band, Wapaho Aspirin Firm. Richard “Hombre” Value, the classically skilled musician who performed bass in Sarasota after which Jax with the band The Load, doesn’t recollect it.
Then Linda Miller tells me, “That’s the place I first took LSD.” She’d met a bassist named Berry Oakley and stayed with him as soon as on the Pickwick Residences downtown. Then he got here to her place above the Useful Dandy and stayed. “We’d all go hear the Second Coming play at The Scene,” Miller says. “Then we’d all come again to the residence, Berry and John [Meeks, a drummer] would play their acoustic guitars, and we’d all sit round, making the room all smoky and listening to music.”
The Second Coming would partially morph into the Allman Brothers Band. The Scene was a psychedelic music membership on the Westside. Oakley and guitarist Dickey Betts, each Allman Brothers Band founding members, Dickey’s spouse Dale, who sang and performed organ, and Larry “Rhino” Reinhardt, who later performed guitar with Iron Butterfly all performed in Second Coming and all got here again to the residence over the Useful Dandy late at evening.
Miller, who later married Oakley, remembers a lot from the few months, February to June, 1968, that she and Oakley lived upstairs, earlier than they moved into the notorious Inexperienced Home on Riverside Avenue. They made calls from the payphone downstairs within the grocery and when folks known as, Dorothy Hazouri would holler for them to come back down. “Berry and I might get up late within the morning and he’d go down, or we’d go down, and we’d purchase bologna and white bread and recent tomatoes and cottage cheese and cookies and sodas.”
John Meeks and Miller each liked to attract and Miller’s first acid journeys coincided with their very own Magic Marker murals of Lewis Carroll illustrations. She says the primary evening she tripped may need been the evening all of them listened to Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow and albums by Cream, Donovan, Nation Joe and Bob Dylan. One other evening Linda Miller the White Rabbit and Meeks drew the Queen of Hearts and her playing cards.
She remembers laying again and watching their illustrations like a film. “The playing cards had been flipping by means of the air, the caterpillar was smoking his hookah, the White Rabbit was checking his pocketwatch. Every thing was transferring.” A pal who later rented the residence instructed her the homeowners had painted over the wall drawings, however they nonetheless confirmed eerily from beneath the whitewash.
Nearly 30 years later, in 1995, Richard Ceriello, a speech pathologist from Lengthy Island, purchased the constructing for a track. Eight months later, his longtime accomplice, Tony O’Connor, died from AIDS. Thirty-year-old images present Tony and the couple’s canine Stonewall standing out entrance. “Stonewall confirmed up in our driveway nearly useless,” Ceriello recollects. “He had been hit by a automotive, had a dislocated rear leg, was ravenous, and as we came upon once we took him to the vet, had a bullet in his chest.” Stonewall was about 9 months outdated. He lived for the subsequent 16 years.
Ceriello restored an authentic entrance wall of home windows lengthy enclosed with newer smaller home windows beneath a steel awning. The entrance door was plywood, coated with locks. The entire home had sunk the place the freezer had rotted out the ground and sills beneath it. It was laborious to open the entrance door, as a result of the ground, “linoleum on prime of linoleum on prime of patched plywood,” tilted dramatically.
He stored among the authentic shelving. An authentic Coca-Cola advert and butcher block inhabit the massive entrance room. Ceriello says a narrative of the freezer getting used “to sit back our bodies” in the course of the look forward to funerals got here from Edna Starling, an aged neighbor who died in 2012. He describes her as “considerably troublesome to speak to, however I believe she was appropriate.”
This outdated constructing has been numerous issues to numerous folks over time. A long time earlier than Ceriello moved in, misplaced his accomplice and located Stonewall, Dorothy Hazouri offered shampoo and frozen steaks, whereas her husband stealthily offered beer on the Lord’s Day. In the meantime, Linda Miller recollects, “We had that entire huge residence upstairs and hardly any furnishings, it was like being within the physique of an enormous ship, and we’d fill it up at evening with buddies and smoke and music.”