Store Information

In 1980, the GLAMIS STORE was advertised as GLAMIS BAR.  It had changed a great deal since the old railroad days in the 40’s, been dismantled, and furnished with pool tables and pinball games, and very recreational orientated.  The old GLAMIS STORE was located north of County Road, which later would become Ben Hulse Highway (S78).  The highway had been put through Glamis and black topped in 1960. However, a new GLAMIS STORE was built on the south side of 78 across the highway from the Glamis Cemetery.

Carol Hales Allen.

Carol Hales Allen found herself in Glamis in 1940 because the school was without a teacher.  She reported for the job, married the store keeper, helped run the general store, and was Postmaster during “Patton’s Army’ training days on the California-Arizona desert.  Here’s how she explained it. 
“I was born in Iowa and raised in Kansas.  I was tired of teaching school in Kansas and decided to come to California.  My sister and her husband were living in Alameda and I went into a business venture with them that didn’t work out.  So I got a California teaching credential and I learned that there was a vacancy at Glamis.  So I got on the railroad train and came to Glamis.  I had no idea where it was.  That was in 1940, and I was 39 years old.”

The following is from Carol Hales Allen:
I arrived in Glamis by train from Alameda, California with much that I owned in a small trunk.  It was Labor Day Weekend, 1940.  I had been in the produce business in a meat market with Bill and Marie Johnson, my sister and her husband, and it just did not work out.  I applied for a Teaching Credential at Sacramento and received one for one year.  I had my degree from Pittsburgh, Kansas. 
I had gotten a job at Glamis at the Teachers’ Agency in San Francisco.  Al, the school board member selected, met me.  He said I asked as I got off the train, “Which way out of here?”
I saw no hard-topped road, only sand hills from North to South as far as I could see.  I think I was momentarily stunned by the immensity of the desert, my home for the coming school year.  We two people by those lonely railroad tracks seemed very small as the locomotive whistled its way through the distance. 
There was a schoolhouse beside the desert road that led into town, a group of railroad employees’ houses along the tracks, a wide open desert and a store across the way.  I was here to teach a rural school of eight grades. 
My pupils proved to be children of the railroad workers.  There were about twenty of them.  My home was a box car made into living quarters. The workers lived in two-box car houses with a concrete slab between and a weather cover over it.
I learned that Glamis was named for a castle in 1600 Scotland, and was pronounced “Glahmus.”  The castle is mentioned in Shakespeare’s MacBeth. 

The Schoolhouse where Carol taught all eight grades in one room stood across the highway from the old GLAMIS STORE.  It was made from two box cars and was very sturdy, efficient, and comfortable. 

M.L. “Al” Allen

Al Allen, Carol’s husband, had built the GLAMIS STORE in 1937, and run it alone until their marriage in 1941.  After the Ogilby Store burned in 1939, the GLAMIS STORE was the only place to buy supplies in the dunes between Brawley and Yuma.  Mr. Allen died in 1958, leaving the Glamis property to Carol.  Al had been trained as a carpenter, had worked in an oil refinery, had tried mining gold and several other trades during his lifetime.  The GLAMIS STORE became a community gathering place for the railroad crew members, for the miners who came in from surrounding areas and for those who lived there for their health to pick up their mail.