Days Gone By: Manager remembers newsstand as popular gathering spot in Texarkana By JOHN FOOKS/Gazette Staff In the hey-days of downtown Texarkana, one of the most popular gathering spots was at 103 Main St., Texarkana, Texas, where Hale's Newsstand offered every major newspaper and every major magazine published in the United States. The Greyhound bus station was located across the street, attached to the McCartney Hotel and Union Station and the mail terminal was less than a block south. Around the block was the Trailways bus station. The White House Cafe was on one side of the newsstand and the Parker Hotel was on the other. The newsstand was swamped with out-of-town as well as local traffic. They stopped by for coffee and early news in the mornings and local gossip in the afternoons. They traded stories and newspapers, talked shop and entertained themselves with jokes and banter. They knew the owner, Hale Parker, by his first name and knew the lady behind the counter by her first name. The parking meter lady even stopped by to let Vera Taylor know when she needed to slip out and slide another nickel in the parking meter. "Hale's was the place to be in those years (1950s and 1960s)," said Vera Hall Taylor, today a resident at Edgewood Manor in Texarkana, Texas. She was Hale's manager for 25 years, then continued as manager after Hale's moved over to the Hotel Grim in the mid-1970s to become Texarkana Books & News. Hale Parker owned one of the largest wholesale news and magazine distributorships in the area called Parker News Agency. In addition to owning Hale's Newsstand on Main Street, he also owned the Sportsman Sporting Goods Store at the apex of the triangle where State Line Avenue and Main and Pine streets intersected in the middle of downtown Texarkana. Parker News Agency was a regional distributorship for virtually every major newspaper and magazine in the county. Taylor's son, Danny, was 8 years old when she started working at Hale's in 1951. He grew up reading every comic book on the market. "Mother used to bring home sacks of new comic books for me to read," said Danny Taylor, who recently moved back to Texarkana to continue a consulting business he started about 10 years ago in Fort Worth, Texas, where he had been living since 1976. "When I was a senior in high school I started working for Parker. I'd get up very early every morning before school and go down to the distribution point on Pine Street and pick up one of their trucks loaded down with magazines and newspapers and deliver them to all the newsstands around town. About half went to Hale's, where mother was working." Danny Taylor wasn't the only one on the road. His father, Roy, worked at Kelly Varner Cleaners, today Garner Cleaners, at West Fifth and Main streets as route manager. The senior Taylor started working at Varner's in about 1948 and retired in 1968. He died in 1979. Vera Taylor was born and raised in Social Hill, Ark., a small community near Malvern, Ark. Her father, Alvin Hall, was a telephone man most of his life and helped build the telephone company in Donaldson, where the family lived for several years before moving to Texarkana in about 1941. "There was hardly anybody in Texarkana that mother didn't know," Danny Taylor said. "When she went over to Books & News all the old customers followed her ..." Vera Taylor said she misses the newsstand business and the customers who catered to it. She especially remembers Hale's with great fondness. "I loved the people who came into Hale's because they made every day fun and exiting," she said. "They were the best years of my life."