INDIANAPOLIS — Afew days ago, Lenny Zwerner did something every human being has longed to do at least once. He slipped through the mist and went back in time.
The date: Jan. 20, 1945. The place: the Citizens Market at 1244 Lafayette Ave., in 12 Points. Lenny’s Uncle Ernest would be behind the counter, Uncle Fritz might be stocking the produce bins and Lenny’s dad, Leonard — or “Skinny” — would be weighing a pork roast for a customer who’d come in to tweak her regular grocery delivery order.
“I tell you, if you’d ever been in the store, well, it just takes your breath away,” said Lenny, after his time travel. “All those canned goods on the shelves, the counter. There was a lady in there, looking at her ration book.”
The Citizens Market, which closed as a food emporium at the end of the Eisenhower Era, has been re-created in careful, loving detail in Indianapolis at the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center at the Indiana Historical Society. Complete with actor “interpreters” who portray the Zwerners and several customers, the exhibit is the first in an ambitious series of living history lessons titled “You Are There.”
The mist Lenny Zwerner walked through?
It’s as real as the boxes of Octagon bar soap are on the resurrected store’s shelves. A 21st-century technological miracle, the “fog screen,” allows rear-projection of a photo of the real Citizens Market onto a thin wall of water mist. It serves as the gateway to 1945 for visitors from 2008.
The photo is one of a treasure trove in the society’s collection of Martin Studio images that were shot by the legendary Terre Haute photography family and staff. The picture caught the eye of Hoosier historian Tom Roznowski awhile back as he leafed through Michael McCormick’s splendid “Terre Haute: Queen City of the Wabash.”
Ever curious and a familiar face around the Indiana Historical Society, Roznowski began to educate himself about the Zwerner brothers.
“He told me that photo just mesmerized him,” said Paul Zwerner, a Terre Haute dentist who is a grandson of Ernest and nephew of Lenny.
By the time the society’s staff had chosen the market photo from hundreds of images to serve as the subject of its first “You Are There” presentation, Roznowski was a Citizens aficionado.
“Lo and behold, he knew so much already about the store,” said Faith Revell, director of IHS exhibitions.
Revell visited 12 Points and the old market building, which has been empty for a few years but currently is under renovation as a beauty supply store. Designers, collectors and crafts people for the society spent months studying old photographs and haunting antique stores and Internet sites to authentically replicate as many aspects of the market as possible.
While they couldn’t re-create Citizens Market lock, stock and barrel — no one took wall-by-wall photos of businesses back then — they have pulled together a composite of Citizen-like stores that served Indiana neighborhoods in the 1940s and 1950s.
“The Zwerners weren’t the only ones who got kind of teary-eyed when they walked into the store,” said interpreter Mike Redmond. “I grew up in LaGrange, and I can remember a lot of stores like this. You get teary-eyed thinking about them, and about that time.”
Redmond is a former columnist for the Indianapolis Star and “one of the Ernests” who will inhabit Ernest “E.L.” Zwerner. Like Carol Shaefer, who portrays a scarf-wearing customer named “Mrs. Watson,” Redmond and the other interpreters are required to stay in character while they are in costume and inside the exhibit store. All have studied their roles intently and embellish their character’s lives with piquant details of specific 12 Points history and geography.
Mrs. Watson, for example, says she lives a few blocks away on Linden Street and that she is worried about her 20-year-old son who is in military service in the Pacific. Her two daughters are still home, attending Garfield High School, she says, while she, herself, works as “a copy reader” for the Terre Haute Tribune.
And Mr. Watson?
As Frank Sinatra’s voice wafts over the sound system, singing “This is a Lovely Way to Spend an Evening,” Mrs. Watson drops her eyes. Quietly, she confides that she had to kick her husband out of the house a few years ago; his drinking had become intolerable.
“But we’re still married,” she says. “Catholic, you know. We attend Sacred Heart of Jesus, just up the street.”
So convincing is Shaefer/Mrs. Watson, a visitor is moved to pat her shoulder and say, “I hope your boy will be safe. I think this war is going to end before the year is over.”
Bill Zwerner, a retired Clinton schoolteacher, drove over to Indy with his Uncle Lenny earlier this month for a sneak preview of the exhibit. He and his wife, Diana, a teacher at Dixie Bee Elementary School, also were on hand for the gala opening of “You Are There,” this past Friday evening.
They were able to contribute a genuine coffee bean scoop from Citizens for use in the recreated market.
“I remember the spiders in the bananas in the store room,” Bill said, laughing about childhood recollections.
He also remembers the scent of fresh produce, meat in the butcher case and delicious homemade sauerkraut that the German Zwerner clan cooked up at home for sale in the store.
Bill Zwerner is too young to remember the World War II ration books and strict rules set out by the U.S. Office of Price Administration. Both are evident in this first “You Are There” exhibit. But Bill and his brother, Paul, clearly remember hearing about those times.
And Paul still can see his grandmother, Flo, writing out phone orders then piercing them on a big spike. He recalls walking the length of the old farmers market with his grandfather, watching the older man “thump watermelons” or buy the perfect bushel of beans.
Speaking of his Great-Uncle Skinny’s partially missing finger, Bill Zwerner said the family used to joke that it was Skinny’s way of showing he wasn’t one of those butchers who’d slyly ease a finger onto the scale to increase the weight of a chicken or some chops.
The Citizens Market served residents in many areas of Terre Haute, not only 12 Points. This was due, in part, to the fact that Ernest and his brothers had motorized wheels for delivery. In the store’s heyday, a vehicle was an exception, not a rule, and nearly all customers dropped off or phoned in their orders to Flo. As in most stores then, there were no shopping carts.
“I don’t think there was much walk-in business,” Paul recalled.
When he was old enough (or could “reach the pedals”), Lenny Zwerner spent his Saturdays driving one of the delivery vans, a wood-paneled Jeep, he said.
“We delivered each order in a half-peck wooden potato or apple basket. The last thing to go in there would be the meat from Dad and the order slip,” he said.
Lenny’s other Saturday duty was washing the market’s front windows, then painting the week’s specials on them with a 1-inch brush dipped in flour and water.
The prices of those items also are part of the history exhibition in Indianapolis. Inside the re-created market, T-bone and strip steak are 49 cents per pound, a wooden-handled broom is 45 cents and a box of Wheaties will set you back a dime. Without a book of war ration coupons, however, your money is of no use. That’s the law, and the Zwerner brothers are sticklers for obeying it.
Lenny was a freshman at Indiana State University when his parents, who’d taken over from E.L. and Flo in the early 1950s, finally surrendered to the forces of post-war capitalism and closed the doors of Citizens Market around 1960.
“It was a good business until A&P; came into 12 Points, then the other big stores. We just couldn’t keep up,” Lenny said.
But the memories remain. Sitting in his own northside living room, Lenny can “walk” a person up and down Lafayette Avenue and name every shop, store, pharmacy, hotel, pool hall and movie theater that existed alongside his family’s market.
“It was the place to be,” he said, and he would know because, just recently, he’s been there.
Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com
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