A WALK ON HIGH STREET

I grew up in a factory town family.  My grandmother took care of me during the workweek as my mom went to her job in the local glass factory.  She did something in the manufacturing of medical pipettes – a mystery to me until I learned in science that they were glass tubes used for measuring stuff.  But just what she did do to/with them was never clear?   She did this for over ten years – but like many who toiled in the recesses of our factories, she rarely chatted about it.  It was just her week of “work”.  

But the weekends were much different.  Her work was forgotten when we made our Saturday walk on High Street.

We would go “up town” usually by bus, as my mother never learned to drive.  And we would do high street, our pre-mall avenue of friendly shops.  We would walk the whole 8 blocks on both sides of the street.  Some buying, some bill paying and lots of window shopping.

We would start with Milville’s Bank by the Clock as the ads trumpeted.  The big, staid National bank on the corner of High & Main.  It’s marble floors gleamed as we entered it church-like, silent interior.  The centerpiece of the bank was the vault with its monumental mechanical door.  The large area had a very high ceiling.  Near the rear wall was an imposing granite counter of glass windows framing a dozen clerks.  Some wearing green eye-shades – all dressed in fine business attire.  They spoke in hushed and reverent tones - with a natural respect for their regal repository of the city’s wealth.  And each clerk knew my mom by first name and she by theirs. 

This kind of personal business - could be today in the world of drive-thru banking and talking to a machine that eats hard earned deposits.

My mother was there to make a deposit to her $2 dollar a week, 40 week Christmas Savings Account.  An “instrument” of motivated savings that earned a small amount of interest but was actually a big device to insure that the saver would immediately spend the saved funds in the adjoining shops the minute the was available right before another bountiful holiday.

Next off to Freeman’s Shoes – to put another buck in her “Shoe Club” - this tool too helped her in “saving and affording” our most expensive personal item - our fashionable footwear.  I particularly liked this store.  Mr. Freeman would check my feet in the “X-Ray” machine. J stick a foot in this big box  and you could peer at the bones right through your shoe – a handy sales tool that insured a customer the purchase would be a “perfect” fit; with a mighty dose of radiation that would surely be banned today.  We know a lot more about the effects of wayward rays on our kids fragile cells.

This store had a lot of life size pictures of Buster Brown; “who lived in a shoe with his dog Tige – who lived there too!”  Many Saturdays Mr. Freeman would give me a Buster Brown coloring book or sometimes a new quarter – even if I didn't buy a pair of shoes – but I knew, he knew we would be buying as soon as my mom’s club was done and it was in the 16th week of its 26 week run.

And so it continued.

Next stop a look at Jules Men and Boy’s boys clothes – just a look as I had my school clothes for the year.  This year a new pant was introduced – Chinos?  The TV ads spieled out that they were a “cool and wearable” fabric – to me they just looked like shinny work pants.

The  Princess Shop was next on our itinerary  - This was not my favorite store - but mom always checked it out.  This was a dress-up dress store – no cotton “house-dresses” here.   My mother loved fine clothes and when she was young she had many beautiful “going out” frocks.  In later life, for some strange reason, she stopped buying clothes and wore the same outfits for her last twenty years of her life - never venturing into a dress shop and only buying her necessities from the Sears catalog.

Now a must on every walk - Bob Garton’s Sport Center – it was really a toy store with some fishing rods, duck decoys and shotgun shells.  I spent at least half hour imagining play with almost everything in the place.  I especially liked the plastic model building kits – and one in particular - the Battleship New Jersey.  It had to be at least a foot long. (I got it for my birthday later that year and it took a month to apply about 1000 decals and glue it together.).  Mom never rushed me here as she knew I was constructing my never ending Christmas list  - it would come in handy (for both of us) later in the year.

Next was the 5 & 10's.

We had two in our town.  The old Newberry’s and the new Woolworth’s – each with similar inventories, only Newberry’s floors loudly creaked as we walked the aisles and it still had a lunch counter.  (Fun Fact: One could actually buy something for 5 or 10 cents in these stores.)  Both were the purveyors of the necessities of life for the working class – from shoe strings to safety pins.  And for me a much more affordable toy department.  Today I would invest in a balsa wood guilder for 25 cents that would last exactly two flights before it disintegrated after a mighty nose dive.

Last stop – the very new Atlantic & Pacific Supermarket which was the dangerous competitor that soon would kill our corner markets.  The selection of brands wasn't overwhelming and nothing like the mega stores of today.  But it did have a fairly new section, frozen foods and this week “TV Dinners” were on sale  – but my mom wasn't interested  – “not enough to eat”, she declared.  We filled our basket, checked out and called a Yellow taxi cab with a nickel on the black payphone - taking a bus with several bags of groceries was not an option. 

And thus ended that week's Saturday walk on High Street, to be repeated weekly, for at least 8 more years  – and then they suddenly stopped.

The walk's demise?  It had to do with me attaining a girlfriend and access to my grandfather’s old car.  And that indeed is another story to come.