NORTH CARROLLTON - There's more than a little nostalgia factored into the Lil' Red Shed.
Tacked onto the south end of Korner Kuttery, a hairdressing salon on George Street, the Lil' Red Shed is settling into its fall and winter menu. This, after bursting onto the scene around the Fourth of July as a fireworks stand and switching quickly over to snow cones.
Quite a few snow cones later, hot tamales arrived, or was it the peanuts?
"Things kept popping up," explained Heather Jones, who works at the beauty shop Lil' Red Shed owner Sheila Brower.
Boiled and parched peanuts came, and barbecue; then came the "fifties foot longs, just like those they used to sell at the Cotton Boll in Greenwood," said Brower.
Brower's husband, who is a retired public health employee, is only one of many friends and relatives who pitch in to help take care of the stand while his wife works.
The peanuts come from Florence Boone of Vaiden.
"All our stuff is homemade," Brower said, "so I make the chili for the Rotel chili pie and the chili footlong. I really have experimented - thrown a lot of things out."
Everything's popular, from the snow cones to the nachos, but perhaps the current stars are the frilly funnel cakes dusted with powdered sugar.
The hot tamales, which are "the real thing, with a meat texture, sauce, flavor very different from canned or 'store-bought' varieties," according to the fan club gathering of a recent afternoon at closing time, come in real corn shucks. Tom Sherwood of Cleveland makes them.
The snow cones got started, she said, after people who saw the metal shed going up expressed their disappointment upon learning it was for selling fireworks, not for selling snow cones.
Decades ago, a generation of snow-cone lovers satisfied their hunger at Clarence Bennett's ice house, which was across George Street and a bit to the south of the Lil' Red Shed. Bennett's wife, Mary Sue, served many paper cones filled with crushed ice, doused with flavored liquids. The Browers have many more exotic but equally delicious flavors than did the Bennetts, and they use Styrofoam cups and shaved ice.
"I don't know how many people have come and referred to me as 'Mary Sue,'" chuckled Danny Brower.
The snow cones will be phased out according to the whim of the weather.
Catchy signs have accompanied the new items on the stand's menu, which the Browers say is complete. "Heather is our 'Jones Sign Company,'" Sheila Brower said. Some of the time, the Browers' daughter, Brooks, who is in college, helps with that.
The hot tamales come out of the Delta, but Brower cooks the roast beef and makes the barbecue.
"No, we don't intend on adding hamburgers. We're not having a deep fryer or a hamburger grill," Brower said. "We may have 'specials' for lunch. We have cotton candy and pickles, chips and nabs and soft drinks in addition to the other stuff."
It's unlikely they'll be offering fireworks again, "because of the food," Brower said.
