LizzieMaine
Bartender
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- Where The Tourists Meet The Sea
I've often thought my interest in all things Golden Era had a lot to do with the town where I grew up -- a little community on the Maine Coast of about 2000 people where, during my childhood at least, the clock seemed to have stopped around 1950.
I grew up in the sixties and seventies, but many of my memories of childhood revolve around things which had disappeared from the scene most everywhere else. Our town had a big brick building in the center of town which was split between a greasy-spoon lunch room called "Mary's" where you could get a ham and egg breakfast any time of day, and a thirties-era drugstore complete with soda fountain and a crusty old Mr Gower-type pharmacist who'd yell at us kids to "Put them funnybooks back, this ain't a @#%! library!" as we sipped our ten-cent glasses of Coke after school.
We also had a hole-in-the-wall grocery store that featured penny candy, root-beer popsicles, and dented cans of Stokely's Green Beans and Snow's Clam Chowder at 10 cents off. The proprietor was a tall, gaunt friend of my grandfather's named Sid, who liked to terrify kids by showing them the spare glass eye he carried in his apron pocket.
My grammar school dated back to the early twenties, and there was no room for any kind of a cafeteria, so we ate our lunches in the basement, in a converted coal bin with soot on the walls. Generations of kids had written their names in the soot, and ours continued the tradition. Our desks were bolted to the floor, and had holes for inkwells, but that tradition, at least, was long gone by the time I started school. We used the inkwell holes instead to store our milk money.
We had seven gas stations in town, which seemed a bit much even at the time, and the price wars were colossal -- I can't remember my mother ever having to buy more than a dollar's worth of gas at a time. We also had a drive-in restaurant downtown, where you could get pizza, burgers, chicken-in-a-basket, and soft-serve ice cream, and when "Jordan's" opened for the season you knew summer had arrived.
If we wanted to see a movie, we had to go over to the next town where we could choose between a downtown twenties-era indoor theatre or a drive-in. I could get in free, since my uncle was the projectionist for both theatres, and there were always kids' events on the weekends. Next door to the downtown theatre there was a cafe with an art-deco aluminum front and a big neon sign that was always a great spot for a snack after the movie, and up the street a bit you could kill some time in a Woolworth's, with a creaky wooden board floor that always smelled like linseed oil -- just as anything you bought there always would.
We didn't have any malls, fast-food franchises, big-box outlets, trendy upscale boutiques, or suburban sprawl.
So with all that, is it any wonder I grew up feeling displaced from my own era?
What was *your* hometown like? Were there "retro" corners you enjoyed?
I grew up in the sixties and seventies, but many of my memories of childhood revolve around things which had disappeared from the scene most everywhere else. Our town had a big brick building in the center of town which was split between a greasy-spoon lunch room called "Mary's" where you could get a ham and egg breakfast any time of day, and a thirties-era drugstore complete with soda fountain and a crusty old Mr Gower-type pharmacist who'd yell at us kids to "Put them funnybooks back, this ain't a @#%! library!" as we sipped our ten-cent glasses of Coke after school.
We also had a hole-in-the-wall grocery store that featured penny candy, root-beer popsicles, and dented cans of Stokely's Green Beans and Snow's Clam Chowder at 10 cents off. The proprietor was a tall, gaunt friend of my grandfather's named Sid, who liked to terrify kids by showing them the spare glass eye he carried in his apron pocket.
My grammar school dated back to the early twenties, and there was no room for any kind of a cafeteria, so we ate our lunches in the basement, in a converted coal bin with soot on the walls. Generations of kids had written their names in the soot, and ours continued the tradition. Our desks were bolted to the floor, and had holes for inkwells, but that tradition, at least, was long gone by the time I started school. We used the inkwell holes instead to store our milk money.
We had seven gas stations in town, which seemed a bit much even at the time, and the price wars were colossal -- I can't remember my mother ever having to buy more than a dollar's worth of gas at a time. We also had a drive-in restaurant downtown, where you could get pizza, burgers, chicken-in-a-basket, and soft-serve ice cream, and when "Jordan's" opened for the season you knew summer had arrived.
If we wanted to see a movie, we had to go over to the next town where we could choose between a downtown twenties-era indoor theatre or a drive-in. I could get in free, since my uncle was the projectionist for both theatres, and there were always kids' events on the weekends. Next door to the downtown theatre there was a cafe with an art-deco aluminum front and a big neon sign that was always a great spot for a snack after the movie, and up the street a bit you could kill some time in a Woolworth's, with a creaky wooden board floor that always smelled like linseed oil -- just as anything you bought there always would.
We didn't have any malls, fast-food franchises, big-box outlets, trendy upscale boutiques, or suburban sprawl.
So with all that, is it any wonder I grew up feeling displaced from my own era?
What was *your* hometown like? Were there "retro" corners you enjoyed?
