Feb. 18, 2002 - 21:13 MST

THE WONDERING JEW

Cameo

I am remembering, and at the same time realizing that each of my memory entries are governed by a short space in time in relationship to my childhood. Things did not stay the same all through my pre-teen years. When I sit down to make an entry and am thinking of old times, each memory has a time to start and a time when I had moved on, in age as well as experience.

My first experience of our Pearl Street neighborhood I guess was Mom taking me down to the Novelty Shop, in my mind it still registers as a toy shop, but Mom would buy JP Coats thread and hand sewing needles there too. It was different there than the downtown department stores. It wasn't a department store with its jammed up shopping, hopping people, it was quiet in there, I wasn't pushed out of the way and was able to stand and admire something on display without interruption. The lady of the store treated me with as much respect as she did Mom. If I remember correctly my first flying model airplane was bought for me there. Wire frame with wheels and the motive power a loop of strong rubber band, attached to a rear anchor and the shaft of a propellor at the front. When the rubber band was wound up it would drive the propellor. The surfaces that supported its flight was almost film thin translucent fabric. It didn't fly very high or very far, but it flew and lasted for a long time (in boy years).There was a hardware store next door that I would go in and look at the tools and neat stuff. When I was a little older I would buy carbide there for my tin can cannons. They also sold ammunition there, they didn't have a vast stock or variety but the stuff in use at that time amongst the working people in our neighborhood. Those two places had my attention whether I could buy anything or not. A few doors down was the neighborhood theater that Mom and Dad would take me to occasionally. I rember once early in the depression Dad had the winning ticket and we won a whole bunch of groceries. Dad walked the heaviest basket home, and I think he came back and carried the next heaviest one and I the lightest one and all three of us walked home. Mom stretched out the good stuff as far as she could.

Further north on Pearl Street was the paper station from where I carried my paper route. That is where at 12 years old I incurred an injury to my back that caused me complications on into my old age.

At a creamery next door is where I got my first taste of Pepsi Cola and to this day I still like it better than Coke.

Across the street on the corner was a drug store, it had a soda fountain (I think most drug stores back then had soda fountains) as well as the same stuff sold at the drug store near our house, but I wasn't known there like I was at the drug store near home. I remember coaxing a girl in my class in school who had neat handwriting to write a note saying something on this order, "Please send two packs of Wings cigarettes home with my son, he has the money to pay for them and my permission to buy them," or some variation on the theme. That is when I was flush, the rest of the time I would buy Golden Grain sack tobacco which would come with a pack of rolling papers at a little grocery a block away They only had sack tobacco and the one kind of cigarettes. Didn't need a note there. That is also the place that we would buy Twenty Grand cigarettes. They came in a cardboard packet 5 cigarettes to the pack, 4 cigarettes long. For a short time the manufacturer only paid US Revenue for 5 cigarettes rather than for 20 of the conventional ones. We didn't break the pack along the perforations, we would walk down the street smoking a cigarette almost as long as we were tall.

That same store had a vast supply of penny and nickle candy because being across the street from a school they sold a bunch of it there. There is where they had those delicious pillow shaped suckers, red on the outside and white on the inside and after it had been sucked to the stick shich was a piece of licorice root, a huge bargain to my mind. That is where I learned to gamble a bit, a very little bit though. They sold Holloway Milk Duds for a penny each. They were individually wrapped and I would spend pennies trying to get extra candy. Once in a while I would be lucky and find one that had a white center - that would get me a free one. Man I loved caramel any way and coupled with trying for a bonus it was so attractive.

On Pearl street cater corner from the Novelty Shop was the church where I first became a Boy Scout, got my handbook and Tenderfoot pin.

A block and a half away from our house on Pearl Street there was a Texaco filling station, I had ambitions to work in a filling station when I became an adult. They had neat uniforms and did esoteric things with air hoses and bottles of oil. Five gallons for a dollar then, and the station was full service too.

Across the avenue was a moving and storage company and I would spend time watching furniture being carried back and forth from their big truck. The new stuff was padded with excelsior and paper, the storage stuff was padded with furniture quilts.

Time passed and the Great Depression took its toll. Corner filling stations began to be vacant, also the same for store buildings. Things turned grim about then. My Junior High was a quick trip, because it was on Pearl Street too. Towards the end of the seventh grade I guess it was that my world widened out considerably and Pearl Street was something that the Streetcar ran on where I could go downtown and act like I knew what I was doing

But for some years, my world existed on Pearl Street and a block or two either way from it. A little world all of its own. And my life there I acted in a very exciting and interesting Cameo . . . . . .

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