I would like to add my condolences to CaliNative on the passing of your mother.
A photo from pinterest.com....
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A dapper young fellow and his '65 Ford Galaxie, apparently purchased at Jim Fisk Ford, which was at Manchester Blvd. and Florence Ave. in Inglewood.
I tried enlarging to read the street name, no luck it's just too blurry....our best clue is the Pronto Market sign....this was the chain's Downey location....
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I could not turn up a list of all Pronto locations, but in addition to Downey I found references to stores in Pacific Palisades, South Pasadena, Culver City, West Covina, and Garden Grove.
I'd never heard of the store, turns out they were started by Rexall Drugs as a competitor to 7-Eleven, and were the predecessor to Trader Joe's....excerpt from a history of Trader Joe's....
"Although Trader Joe's was not officially founded until 1967, its origins can be traced back to the Pronto Markets chain of food stores that were started in the late 1950s. Pronto Markets was initiated by the Rexall Drug Co. in 1958. The venture reflected the intent of Rexall, an operator of a chain of drugstores, to get in on the burgeoning convenience and corner food-stand market. Rexall appointed Joe Coulombe to head up the new division. Coulombe was only 26 years old at the time and had been with Rexall for only three years. Nevertheless, his managers were impressed with his performance and believed that he could handle the job. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Coulombe managed to build Pronto into a chain with a considerable presence in Los Angeles and Orange Counties.
Despite its expansion, Pronto was experiencing growing profit pressures by the mid-1960s as a result of increased competition. Southland Corp.'s successful 7-Eleven chain, in particular, was bearing down on smaller competitors like Pronto and was even planning an aggressive expansion in Pronto's region. Rexall elected in 1966 to jettison its Pronto Markets division and escape the convenience store industry. Coulombe, still at the helm, was faced with a choice--attempt a buyout of the chain that he had built and remain as chief executive, or bail out and look for a new niche in the retail industry. Coulombe took an extended Caribbean vacation before deciding to stick with Pronto. With the financial backing of Bank of America, he purchased Pronto from Rexall and went to work.
Coulombe knew when he bought Pronto that the strategy he had used to grow the business in the past would be ineffective in the face of growing competition. 7-Eleven was targeting his customers, and his organization lacked the resources to compete with the national chain. The ever-innovative Coulombe considered two prevalent social trends as he devised a new marketing scheme. First of all, consumers were becoming increasingly educated and sophisticated, and were expecting more from their shopping experiences. Secondly, the surge in global travel, made possible by plummeting jumbo-jet airfares, was exposing Americans to new foods. Coulombe decided to develop a food store at which well-educated, well-traveled, but not necessarily wealthy, people could buy foods that would impress themselves and their friends. "I wanted to appeal to the well-educated and people who were traveling more," he explained in the October 2, 1989 issue of Forbes, "like teachers, engineers and public administrators. Nobody was taking care of them." Coulombe opened the first Trader Joe's outlet in South Pasadena in 1967--the rest of the Pronto chain would soon become transformed into other Trader Joe's outlets."
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