Many things have changed over the years, but the one thing
that seems to have been disappearing at an alarming rate is the little corner
store.
When I was young, growing up on Manchester’s West Side,
there were four corner stores in my neighborhood (and I’m probably going to
murder the spelling of their names here):
Stewart’s, Patsas’, Henschel’s and Fritzies.
The closest to my house was Stewart’s. It was on a corner in a back alley and was
so small, a full-grown man probably could have stood in the middle of the
store, stretched out his arms and touched both walls. But it had the staples everyone needed back then: bread, milk,
cigarettes, candy, Popsicles and Table Talk pies.
The guy who ran the store installed a metal edge along the
counter, which he used for breaking Popsicles in half. He’d line up the center of the Popsicle
along the metal strip and with one well-aimed whack of his hand, would
perfectly dissect it.
My favorite flavor was blue raspberry. That was the Popsicle
that turned everyone’s lips and tongues bright blue. I always thought that walking around with a blue tongue all day
was well worth the price of a nickel.
In fact, I’m pretty sure Stewart was able to retire on just the six
million Popsicles he sold to us kids over the years.
And then there were the Table Talk pies. The store carried both the large size and
the snack size. My favorite was lemon.
My mom’s favorite, however, was strawberry-rhubarb, not exactly most
kids’ first choice. So whenever she
sent me to Stewart’s to buy a big pie for dessert, I’d usually tell her he’d
run out of the strawberry rhubarb…and then I’d bring home a lemon one instead.
Henschel’s was the most ancient-looking of the stores in the
neighborhood. It had a flight of
rickety wooden stairs going into it, and the floors inside were so uneven, the
only way you could walk straight in there was if you had one leg shorter than
the other.
But the store had a really good assortment of penny candy,
and that was all that mattered to me.
Most of my childhood years were spent buying penny candy (and my dentist
can attest to that). In fact, you might
say I was a penny-candy connoisseur.
That’s why I spent so much time walking to Fritzies, which
was the farthest away from my house. The penny-candy selection there was so
vast, I used to hyperventilate just walking through the doorway.
A large glass case trimmed with wood seemed to stretch
endlessly across the store, and it was filled with every morsel a penny-candy
lover could ever hope for: Tootise Rolls, Tootsie Roll pops, Mary Janes,
fireballs, Squirrel Nut Chews, licorice, spearmint leaves, candy buttons on
strips of white paper, tiny wax
(Excuse me, I have to pause for a second here to wipe the
drool from the corners of my mouth).
Choosing which five candies to buy with my nickel sometimes
took me over 25 minutes. I’m pretty sure that the clerk, after hearing me say,
“Give me one of those,” followed by, “No, on second thought, make it one of
these,” 150 times, wanted to beat me with one of the licorice whips.
And even then, when I left the store I’d still be wondering
if maybe I should have bought the Bazooka bubble gum instead of the jawbreaker,
or the orange slice instead of the spearmint leaf.
Patsas’ was the largest of the convenience stores. It took up a whole corner. For some reason, my friends and I used to
buy our nickel candy bars there rather than at any of the other stores.
My favorite nickel bars were Sky Bars and Charleston
Chews. My friend Janet loved Hershey
Bars.
That is, until the fateful day we walked out of Patsas’ and
eagerly tore into our candy bars…and Janet’s was covered with worms.
She flung that candy bar so far, I think it broke the
world’s distance record for flying objects.
Her accompanying screams made people across the street turn and stare at
us as if we were being mugged.
But there were no
expiration dates on products back then, so that candy bar, for all we knew,
could have been sitting on the shelf since Patsas first opened his market back
in the Stone Age.
There also was a large supermarket in the neighborhood,
First National Store, which abbreviated its name across the front, “FINAST”.
I still remember getting the word “finest” wrong on my
spelling test at school because I’d thought “finast” was the store’s description
of its products (the “finast” around) rather than an acronym.
Moving out to the country, however, put a major crimp in my
ability to find a store on nearly every corner for my daily dose of candy.
That is, until one day…when a convenience store, complete
with a large candy-counter, seemed to magically pop up out of the woods in the
middle of nowhere, barely a three-minute walk from my house.
I still have a sneaking suspicion my dentist built it.
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