Paul Richardson wrote:
> Looking through some of my 'memoirs' from the attic, I found a sticker from
> 'Pedros'. It was a remarkable store in a place called Dillon, South
> Carolina. If we drove straight down to Daytona without a stayover or not,
> we always stopped at Pedros. For miles before Dillon, Pedros was announced
> on billboards that got larger and larger every 20 miles or so until you got
> to Dillon.
The place is still there. It is actually (and always was)
called South of the Border. It has that name because
it is within a couple hundred feet of the North
Carolina/South Carolina state border. The place is
the quentessential tourist trap. The sell just about
everything. If you ever wanted one of those pink
plastic Flamingos, well they sell them there.
Back then (as now) the place was on route 301
which was the primary North-South route where
Interstate-95 was still not completed. I-95 passes
right by and crosses over 301 immediately next
to the place.
The thing about S.O.T.B. was that it was, back
in the 60s, one of the few ALL-night places. Back
in the late 60s I made many stops there for coffee
at the wee hours of the night while enroute between
Norfolk, VA and Charleston, SC. One of those
times I was making a run in my TR-3A when we were
just north of SOTB and the Generator light came
on. We rolled into the place at about 4am. We
just had some coffee, maybe a donut and waited for
sunrise before continuing on at daybreak when we
didn't need the lights anymore. The problem was just
a set of brushes which I replaced the next day.
> In this store you could buy any form of firearm from a Thomson machine gun
> to a water pistol. We used to buy M80 'cherry bombs.' They were global in
> shape and about an inch in diameter with an inch long 20 second fuse. When
> they exploded they went off like a cannon.
Well, there are cherry bombs (look like a cherry with
a fuse) and there are M80s which (as you note) are
considerably larger.
Cheers,
Bill Sohl
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