South End better with Mae Hicks around

From her produce stand on Marion Road, Mae Hicks could see the Columbus police cruisers plain as day, guarding the city’s latest homicide scene.

She doesn’t recognize that kind of meanness as representative of the South End.

“The South End is a good place,” she said Friday. “This is my home, with these folks.”

For “38 or 35 or whatever” number of years, Hicks said, she’s worked at Mae’s Market at 440 Marion Road, keeping customers up to their ears in Ohio sweet corn, Indiana melons and Georgia peaches. There is buttermilk in the cooler and lard in the dinner rolls. She carries homemade candies before Christmas and a few artificial flower arrangements for cemeteries.

The customers hail mostly from the South End, but some drive farther, from the North Side, Obetz, even Pataskala.

“I’ve got people come from Cincinnati to buy my green beans,” she said.

Hicks herself came to Columbus from a three-room house in Kentucky’s hills.

“I was washing on a washboard when I was 8 years old,” she said. “I always wanted to be a nurse, but I never made it.”

She was the oldest of nine children. She is 62 now.

“There are five of us left,” she said.

They were poor, and their father drank too much. She loved her family and Kentucky, but as a young woman she wondered what awaited her there. More poverty, she figured, and quite possibly a husband who drank too much.

“Please, God,” she prayed, “let me get out of this holler.”

She came to central Ohio with an aunt and uncle, at age 18. Some of her family, including her mother, eventually followed, and it was her mother who was a customer of the produce stand at Parsons Avenue and Marion Road, run by a Vietnam vet named David Hicks.

“Give my daughter a job,” she told him, and he did.

“We ended up getting married, and I’m still here on the corner.”

He passed away 17 years ago, Hicks said.

Business since then has had its ups and downs, but her loyal customers have seen her through. She donates fruit to veterans in Chillicothe once a month, runs meals up to her brother at a North Side nursing home a few days a week and makes sure a homeless man on his bicycle has enough to eat. She sets aside a handful of mints for a customer before his dialysis treatments and for another customer before her chemotherapy.

And she always has a cup of coffee waiting for Earl Wall of Obetz. He takes it black.

“I used to love sugar,” Wall said. “I ate candy bars for breakfast, but no more.”

Wall was on the crew that installed the first artificial turf in Ohio Stadium in 1971. He met Woody Hayes on that job. Wall is 87 now.

“It’s hard to believe my boys are pulling social security,” he said.

Wall likes to stop by Mae’s and talk to the old-timers who drift in and out. They tell tales, some taller than others, and commiserate about how easy the kids these days have it.

He recalled that at one job he made $1 an hour for $40 a week. He lost $8 of that to taxes and brought home $32. Of that, $15 went to his mother. He footnoted the story by adding that $1 an hour was, at the time, “a good wage.”

These are the people who have kept Hicks on the corner, lugging full crates of half runner beans.

“They’re wonderful folks, I’ll tell you,” she said. “Good people.”

Yes, bad things sometimes happen in the neighborhood, as they did Thursday afternoon on East Barthman Avenue across the way. But her upbringing in Kentucky taught her to survive day to day and that “you ain’t gonna leave this world without hurt,” no matter where you call home.

She focuses on the good. You get through the day-to-day, maybe raise two kids, and soon enough you have two grandchildren. They’re grown now too, and wouldn’t you know it? Your granddaughter, whose portrait hangs on a market cooler, plans to be a nurse.

Hicks will say it more than once.

“South End is where I belong. Sure is.”