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ORAL HISTORY

Ginger and Harvey Gauthier

The motto at Joyce’s Supermarket – “Where Prices Are Born Not Raised” – is as unorthodox as its sausage selection, and it points to the good humor and ingenuity of its proprietor, Lowell Gauthier. Lowell still has a hand in every aspect of the business that he and his estranged wife, Joyce, founded in 1969.

Some of their five children also work at the store. Ginger Gauthier happily spent her childhood at Joyce’s, napping on fifty-pound sacks of rice in a back room when she tired. By the time she turned twelve or thirteen years old, she was at the check-out counter, calculating sales tax in her head. Today, she can’t imagine working anyplace else. Ginger’s younger brother, Harvey, recalls watching his father break down whole sides of beef with just a handsaw and a clever. They didn’t sell fresh sausage at Joyce’s back then, but with seven mouths to feed, his parents always had a pot on the stove. These days, Harvey sometimes cooks Joyce’s plate lunch specials—perhaps red or white beans, beef and gravy, chicken fricassee, or smothered potatoes. And once the temperatures dip to seventy degrees, the siblings say, their clientele starts asking for gumbo, which they make in sixty-quart batches.

For the most part you’ll find chicken and sausage gumbo at Joyce’s, though Harvey and Ginger’s personal gumbo repertoire is much broader: duck, hen, shrimp and okra, seafood with boiled eggs, and even squirrel.