As a kid growing up in Onset, our choice of retail venues at which to spend the few dollars Ma had squirreled away was very easy. A mere stone’s throw from our front porch sat The College Shop, Katz’s Department Store, and the five-and-dime.
Each store had its signature line-up. The College Shop carried preppy articles of clothing stacked high against the walls of its narrow interior space. Corduroy or chino slacks, crew neck wool sweaters, oxford button-down shirts, turtle-necks, and real leather belts were some of the staple offerings. We primarily purchased socks from the two brothers who owned the shop. We weren’t preppy people. But the socks were good quality, and quality was very high on Ma’s list of virtues.
Down at the end of the street situated on the corner now home to a pizza parlor was Katz’s Department Store. I remember going there with my mother, one of a handful of memories from that era when she still left her home. I must have been a very small child because in the memory, the clothing hung above my head on circular stands.
Each season, Ma would buy one or two shirtwaist dresses that she would lovingly wash and iron to perfection before wearing for the first time. The patterns were wild floral concoctions that seemed like mobile gardens in my little kid imagination. How proudly Ma wore those dresses crisp from the liquid starch in which she would soak them overnight before hanging them out in the fresh sea air to dry. Ma thought the invention of spray starch was akin to instant coffee – a miracle.
A few doors up the street from Katz’s was the five-and-dime. This was heaven for a kid. Stocking everything from toothpaste to ladies’ undergarments, from greeting cards to small hand tools, and of course, slotted tray after slotted tray of the latest trinkets imported from Japan, a trip inside was akin to Disneyland.
As the summer months approached and the sea of seasonal humanity prepared to descend on the sidewalks of my youth, the man who owned the place stocked his shelves with sand pails and shovels, inflatable beach balls and rings, children’s swimsuits, comic books, batteries, and tanning lotion.
I don’t recall Ma ever going inside the five-and-dime, but at least once a week she’d send me off with a list of the Knit-Cro-Sheen thread she required for her latest crocheting project. While there, I’d slowly go through the aisles eyeballing the imports. I loved the richly embroidered change purses and the little glass figurines. I’d tally up in my head how much money I had back home in my cigar box under the bed and plan how to earn a few more coins so I could own these rare items. If upon returning home there was a bit of change leftover, Ma would let me keep it “against a rainy day.” My rainy days never saw that money – it all went to the five-and-dime.
If what Ma was trying to purchase wasn’t available in the quarter-mile radius around her cottage, there was always the catalog – that would be the Sears and Roebuck catalog, of course.
Hours of blissful companionship with Ma were spent letting our fingers do the walking, not through the Yellow Pages, but through the Sears catalog.
From these exercises, I learned the difference between cotton and acrylics, how to read a size chart, what imported meant, and how to calculate the shipping charges based on the weight of merchandize being ordered. Ma taught me how to neatly fill out an order form and the importance of double-checking my entries. I guess you could say I learned at an early age about international trade, economics, social studies, and the three “R’s” all from the Sears catalog as taught by Ma.
Sadly, as the years went by and new high speed roads diverted traffic from the center of our small town to the outskirts of Route 6 and 28, and as the owners of the shops that lined Onset Avenue grew old, our retail world faded away never to return. Now we, too, would have to drive out of town to secure socks and slacks or depend more heavily on mail-order purchases.
Ma eventually found the strength to leave home and shop. In the intervening years between when her children left home and when she got in a car again after nearly two decades, catalogs had been her primary method of shopping. Now, freed to roam the Christmas Tree Shop or Wal-Mart without the pressure of worrying whether or not a two-dollar purchase would take food out of her children’s mouth, Ma shopped like a woman possessed in spite of her elderly status.
We spent many hours together slowly going up and down the aisles gathering face cream, birthday cards, shortbread cookies, and capris. She delighted in once again seeing products in real time versus from the pages of a catalog – retail as recreation.
Later still, I would push her wheelchair around my favorite stores as I looked for a new business suit or shoes I couldn’t live without. How she would tut-tut at the cost of things while waiting for me to come out of the dressing room to show her how the Donna Karan creation looked on me. Ma was my harshest critic and my glowing flatterer. There was no gray in her world.
By the time the Internet gave shoppers virtual access to retailers around the globe, Ma’s shopping days were done. Of course she knew about computers, but the technology was beyond her comprehension.
“You don’t send them a check?” she asked when baffled about how items were paid for if money wasn’t exchanged. I suspect she’d find it rather boring.
By Marilou Newell