That Flocoe Floor

REMEMBRANCES OF MARY LEE SETTLE That Flocoe Floor Ron Day One day in the early 1990s, the phone rang at the Pineville Library where I was working. It was Mason Combs, our town's late pharmacist/artist and proprietor of The Flocoe. He informed me that "a famous author from Pineville" had arrived and was talking with The Oldtimer's Club, a group ofelderly citizens ofthe community who liked to meet there for coffee and conversation. When Mary Lee Settle had first entered the Flocoe, Mason had looked up from his coffee and said "I know you! You're the sister of. ...now what was the name...?" Miss Settle laughed and reminded Mason ofherprovenance inPineville. She told the fellows (who included—much of the time—Richard Golden, Dr. Edward Wilson, Charlie Smith, Bob Waiden, Charley Dean, and Ralph McCracken) that she knew she was home again when she saw the green and white mosaic floor of what had been The Flocoe Sweet Shoppe in earlier times. Its unusual name was a blend of Miss Florence Samuels and Miss Coe Schaeffer, early proprietors. Miss Settle told the assembly that she'd set one of her books, Charlie Bland (1989) in the Pineville she remembered, but she'd placed it in West Virginia. Among the characters of that novel was Bobby Low, the name of one of her best friends here in the early 1920s. Bobby Low became Judge Robert Low, and he and his wife Genevieve were the names she could best remember when quizzing the Old Timers about others of her past. Everyone laughed when she pointed out that the doyenne of local society in Charlie Bland had been named Kitty Puss Wilson and that she was an amalgam of many people she'd known here. Though Mason Combs has died, his wife and daughter still operate The Flocoe, now a café, and it's still a place where ghosts of the past mix with "the new set." 32 ...