By some rough magic - give or take some changes in level [1] - today’s Te Puna Store stands almost exactly where it always was. The shed adjacent to it, I was told [2], is the last building remaining from the original structures whose life extended well into the 1960s.
The Magic Cash Store, Te Puna, 1937
Collection of Tauranga City Library, Pae
Korokī Ref. 01-260
The store and its shed were the brainchild of Madge Covell. As is evident from many an article in the Bay of Plenty Times, describing her performing talents in singing, recitations and plays [3] she developed throughout her adolescence the charm, confidence and courage needed to be a retailer on the main Tauranga-Waihi highway, with no very near neighbours [4] and only a telephone on a party line [5] for summoning aid.
Madge started the general store in Te Puna about 1924, “filling a long-felt want”. [6] It’s likely she had help from her carpenter brother, William Norman (Norm), to build the store, and her farmer father, William Henry Covell, to negotiate an arrangement for the use of the site from the Armstrongs. They settled on boundary land just along from the Te Puna Memorial Hall, built in 1922. Madge was to be a true friend to the Hall Committee [7] - the Te Puna Store held a key to the Hall, along with a register to sign its loan and return, right up until its demolition in 2016. Her public spirit did not end there. A voter herself in 1928, she held the electoral rolls for the Te Puna Riding at the store for the 1929 Triennial election of the Tauranga County Council. In 1931, she made a donation, “on behalf of the young people of Te Puna”, to the Unemployment Auxiliary Committee [8]. In due course the functions of the Post Office moved from the Lochhead home to what had speedily become the hub of the community.
Madge and (possibly) brother Norm and sister Irene, 1937
Detail from Pae Korokī Ref. 01-260
Madge’s charm and energy, as well as the great location, made for business success. She coped with a burglary in 1929 [9], she installed a petrol pump in 1931 [10], and she bought the land the store stood on in 1932 [11]. No wonder she called it the Magic Store.
By 1937 she had married Leonard Anderson, who moved from Apata [12] to a property in Te Puna [13]. She continued to enjoy a busy social life in Te Puna [14], and continued to run her own shop until she and Len left the district, among many expressions of affection and gratitude, in 1945.
Mr Peedle, Detail from Bay of Plenty Times photo, May 1963
Collection of Tauranga City Library, Gifford-Cross Series, Pae Korokī Ref. gcc-2740
I have been unable to ascertain when the Magic Store became part of the Four Square chain[15]. Madge sold her business to Mr E.C Peedle, who, to my personal knowledge, epitomised the jolly grocer known as “Mr 4 Square”. He wore the apron. He drove a magical black delivery van whose fatly rounded outside was, to young eyes, somewhat smaller than its delightful inside. After Mr Peedle came (briefly) the Bartholomew family, then the Gearys, and after that, for many years, Ben and Margaret Board. Nowadays the store is run by Pritesh and Dipti Bhikha, very much in the cheerful community tradition established by Madge Covell/Anderson. The magic lingers on.
Te Puna Store today (2024)
Photograph by Beth Bowden
[1] The store used to be elevated slightly above the roadway of State Highway 2, which ran about 15 metres from the slip-road immediately outside the entrance to the shop and, eventually the petrol bowsers.
[2] Personal reminiscence from Dorothy Butt, who, along with her first husband Bill Geary, operated the store 1960-70 (approx.).
[3] Including one beguilingly entitled “The Teasey Tea Patry”, but probably unconnected with the Tauranga haberdasher: https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/BOPT19201215.2.19
[4] The Armstrongs lived nearby, but their house was at least 500m away, on the eastern side of the present roundabout. At that stage there was no residence at the store.
[5] Operated from the Lochhead home in Te Puna Road.
[9] https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/BOPT19291017.2.14
[13] I have been unable – so far – to establish just where the Anderson home was.
[14] An instance among many: Madge threw a party for her 70-year-old mother, who had evidently moved in to live with the couple, in 1938. https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/BOPT19380511.2.15
[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Square_(supermarket)
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