I remember the excitement that I had coming down from Ripton with friends to pick up our orders in the old train station.

It was, you know, a fun time. We'd all jump in a car and we'd come down and load up the car with what we'd pre-ordered. And usually Judy Campbell was there organizing it.

But we all got together at the old railroad station and that's where we started pre-ordering, dividing up food. And then that evolved into, oh, well, maybe we don't all have to take home 30 pounds of raisins so let's get some each and then try and maybe sell a little off at the railroad station. You could not walk into a supermarket like you can now and get natural foods or bulk foods or even decent flour; you had to really go out of your way. And that was the whole point, was everyone coming together to say, this is what we want. You know, we want nutritious food.

Everything was very tight, very small, very compact. But there would be bins of the flour and bins of the oats and bins of the brown rice. And, you know, at the time, never would the Co-op sell anything that contained sugar.

Thank God for the bulk bins. That changed our lives. I remember the first bulk bins coming into the store because before that, it was like they were just in bins on the floor. It was very unsanitary.

There weren't even tops on the bins. They were like old barrels and stuff. Well, you've probably seen pictures from the railroad store. Back in the old days when we had a lot more volunteers, member workers, we definitely had people coming in with nursing babies, nursing a baby while trying to package cheese. There probably would be all kinds of questions about whether or not that was sanitary or whether or not that was safe in those environments.

You know, it's just these sort of warm memories that we have when we used to come in and be handed an apron or be told, oh, climb up onto that ladder or, you know, fill that bin or, yeah, at least seven feet in the air. Oh, yeah, yeah, just drag that bag up there and fill those bins up there, those, you know, the bulk bins. And, you know, it's really incredible to me that we'd be trusted with it.

You know, a five-gallon bucket of molasses or something like that that we had to then, you know, pour out into smaller quantities to put on the shelves and sell. And, of course, the dreaded raisins.

We used to hide the money, you know, instead of taking it to the bank. Then eventually we got to where we took it to the bank. But we didn't even have a drop box or anything there. So we would take the money, we'd, like, hide it in the back underneath the bags of rolled oats and, you know.

At the end of the day, we would say, man, we were busy today. We had, what, 25 customers or something. Today, when we say we are busy, you know, hundreds, thousands of customers, it's amazing.

The word that I think of when I think back to that era for me is they were heady times. I mean, I knew that we were onto something big, that we were going to grow. We were going to be wildly successful. People were going to keep eating, so we were going to keep growing. And there was an excitement inside of me, and I'm sure a lot of the other staff too: what we were providing for this community and what our vision was that we were going to grow beyond our wildest dreams. And more and more people were going to join the co-op and be a part of that bandwagon. And it happened.