Jones Market
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| Village Green Shopping Center |
The Village Green Shopping Center held its grand opening on April 20, 1966, with Jones Market as its anchor. Other tenants included a barbershop relocated from the Southwick Shopping Center and the Venetian Bakery, a new business in town. A branch of the Third National Bank of Hampden County opened about a month later. The new center's parking lot capacity was 200 cars. (Jones Market, founded by Charles H. Jones, was initially located nearby on College Highway. Due to increased business, the new store afforded more square footage than the original.)
1968 - Tragedy Strikes
John Graham, of Gargon Terrace, worked at Jones Market and was well-known throughout Southwick. Stricken with two successive brain hemorrhages on April 21, 1968, John went into a prolonged coma following brain surgery. An official announcement about the creation of "The Johnny Graham Fund" - a fundraising campaign to help John's family pay his staggering and continually mounting medical bills - was made on June 20. (Folks could donate at the Third National Bank of Hampden County and Jones Market.)
Sadly, John died on October 8, 1969.
1978 - a rough year for Jones.
On November 28, 1978, around 12:30 p.m., a 21-year-old Southwick man with a knife was arrested at the store for threatening owner Clyde Jones. The knife-wielding man pleaded not guilty at arraignment and was held on a $2,000 bond. (What triggered the event at the store and the trial's outcome are unclear.)
Two cars pulled into the parking lot in front of Jones Supermarket in Southwick on December 11, 1978. Out of two cars came what witnesses called a band of gypsies, about nine to twelve of them, each with a dark complexion, wearing bright clothing and jewelry; they danced into the store at about 10:50 a.m.
Using various tactics, the gypsies kept store employees occupied while helping themselves to the estimated $4,000 to $5,000 in cash in the store's office, the whole robbery taking less than five minutes.
The group attempted to rob the Big Y on South Broad Street in Westfield earlier that morning. The store manager there remembered seeing them the year prior, so when he saw them coming this time, he immediately called all personnel to the front of the store. As the gypsies entered the store, they saw the employees waiting for them and immediately exited.
Violent storms tore through Western Massachusetts and Connecticut on October 3, 1979, when Mother Nature unleashed her fury with a series of strong thunderstorms producing lots of rainfall and high winds resulting in uprooted trees, traffic jams, flooding, and death.
In Southwick, the storms knocked down ten utility poles and numerous trees, the latter forcing the closure of Route 57 from North Longyard Road to the Agawam town line. Lightning struck one of the three transformers at Jones Market, knocking out power to the store's freezers. (The storm caused more than $1 million in damages in Western Massachusetts and Connecticut. A lightning strike also silenced WWLP-TV 22 for several hours.)
Jones Market joined Yankee Supermarkets, an advertising, merchandising, and purchasing association formed by twenty-five independent supermarkets in Western Massachusetts and Connecticut on February 13, 1983. (Initial planning started in the spring of 1982.)
Association members pooled their resources to compete against large grocery chains; collectively, the individual stores could offer quality merchandise at lower prices than they could on their own while maintaining enhanced customer services, something unmatched by rival chains. (The association had joint assets totaling more than $20 million by 1984. By 1986, they were down to thirteen member stores.)
Jones's participation in the association paid off with increased customer demand pushing the need for another expansion; that and Massachusetts' newly passed Beverage Container Recovery Law. (The Massachusetts Bottle Bill, which requires containers of carbonated beverages to be returnable for a minimum of five cents, was passed in 1982 and took effect in January 1983.)
Southwick's Planning Board and Zoning Board of Appeals held back-to-back public meetings on February 15, 1983, concerning a proposal to expand Jones Market by 8,000 feet—the reason for the expansion: additional selling space and room to store bottles returned for deposit. (The zoning board was involved because Jones requested to relocate the store's electrical transforms within 10 feet of the shopping center's rear property line.)
The State of Connecticut investigated Yankee Supermarkets over eighteen months in an antitrust probe surrounding price-fixing allegations. (The state's assistant attorney general in charge of antitrust and consumer protection announced in October 1984 that the association was clear of misconduct.)
When a man from Hartford, Connecticut, attempted to cash some checks at Jones Market on September 30, 1983, suspicious store employees triggered the silent alarm. Two Southwick police officers (Sgt. LeBarron and Cataldo) arrived at the store and arrested the 28-year-old for trying to cash stolen payroll checks. (About a week earlier, the man cashed a stolen check at the Ames department store in Southwick.)
Clyde and Carol Jones sold their store to Edward A. Corbeil on December 6, 1986. Corbeil rebranded it Big E's Supermarket after his well-known store by the same name in downtown Easthampton which he opened in 1977, having purchased Ed's Foodland from Ed Stawarz after leaving his position of 28 years working for Big Y. (Corbeil was vice president and general sales manager when he departed Big Y. He originally named his Easthampton store Big E's Foodland - dropping Foodland from the name following the store's expansion in October 1985.)
Big E's Southwick store closed permanently in May of 1996, with a public auction held on May 30 to expedite the liquidation of Big E's equipment and fixtures. (Big E's in Easthampton remained open.)
About a month later, Southwick Village Realty Trust sold the shopping center to Georgio Karathanasopoulos, owner of Village Pizza, who immediately planned to subdivide the former space occupied by Big E's and complete exterior renovations to the entire plaza.
Edited Out/Author's Additional Research Notes
The barbershop opened about a week before Jones.
The store closed for a day in 1967 in memory of the recently deceased Annie Jones.
Earlier that year (1978), police in Connecticut stopped him (the knife man) for operating a vehicle without an operator's license. Appearing in court, he was found guilty and fined $55.
Conflicting information - in October 1985, the association reportedly had 140 stores; by 1987, that number dwindled to about seven.
Jones' founder Charles Howard Jones, born September 12, 1902, died on July 30, 1972.
Clyde L. Jones died on March 5, 2023.