THE FIVE AND TEN CENT STORE

When I was a kid my Mom gave me a small allowance. The kicker was that I couldn’t spend it all and had to give her back a certain amount of it at the end of the week or she’d deduct that from my next allowance, and I’d still have to save the same amount for the following week.  It made a fairly wise spender out of me, I can tell you that!  I can also tell you that, unknown to me, she banked those savings.  One day she handed me a small, brown savings passbook (I can still remember the color) with a tidy amount in it.  I’m not sure why I got the passbook when I did; the occasion has been superseded in my memory by the fact that I had undreamed-of savings in my hands. I do remember wanting to have some of it to take to the five and ten.

The Spalding Pinky

I loved the five and ten cent store.  I wasn’t given any treats there like the slice of bologna from the butcher or the cookie from the baker, but the treat was in all the different stuff to be seen there – everything from candy to cake pans, with great things in between.  Pinky balls, roller skates (and skate keys – I lost mine several times!), hankies, underwear, crepe paper, kitchen utensils, school supplies, or cosmetics – today we have specialty stores for most of this stuff, but then you could get it all at the five and ten – F.W. Woolworth’s to be sure. 

There was no one smell in the store – nothing like going into the bakery or drug store – but many smells: toiletries and soaps, rubber toys, pop corn, and the aromas wafting from the lunch counter.  We never had anything to eat at the lunch counter, though I wanted to.  I’d have liked to sit on one of those swivel stools and go round and round.  But in those times Mom was really watching the budget so we ate at home.

We moved a few times during my childhood, and I recall the ‘early’ five and tens, but the last was the most fun.  As with most stores of that day, the floor was wood.  It had buckled down one aisle, and it was fun to try to walk the whole way on the hump, or walk with one foot on each side of it – sort of like walking along a street with one foot on a curb and one in the gutter.

Many things we got at the five and ten are scarce today, and going to a dollar store (I call a lot of that stuff junk) or Walmart is just not the same. I will say that the closest match to the five and ten experience is going to the Vermont Country Store up in Weston, Vermont.  They bill themselves as being "purveyors of practical and hard-to-find products." They’ve got all sorts of things I haven’t seen in years: Glass Wax, Tangee lipstick (the first lipstick I was allowed to use), hair nets, Garibaldi biscuits, and lots of penny candy. They’ve even got the bumpy wood floors.

Today the Vermont Country Store
 stocks many of the same items that
were available at this Woolworth's

Before we moved to SCCL we lived only about an hour away from Weston, so a trip up there was one of our usual jaunts.  If you’re ever up that way you should make it a point to visit the Vermont Country Store and some of the other nice shops in the town.  And you can have a great lunch there too.  The Ortons, owners of the Vermont Country Store, have made the house next door into the Bryant House Restaurant.  Try the ham and cheddar melt or my favorite, the Monte Cristo, and an apricot sour.  The lunch counter at Woolworth’s was never like this – some things get better, I’m delighted to say.