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If there was one thing I enjoyed about working in my parents’ store back in the 1950s it was ordering little tricks.
Some people called them “practical jokes,” but I thought their function was to be wildly impractical. You’d buy and use one to throw your good buddy into complete confusion.
The best of them all, as far as I was concerned, was the cigarette load – a tiny explosive charge that you’d tamp into a smoke for your unsuspecting pal. I made sure we always had a card of the little dime tins right near the cash register, the better to encourage fun and good fellowship throughout the Heights section of Wilkes-Barre.
East Market Street in those days was lined with stores, stores and more stores from Public Square to the top of “Brewery Hill,” so called because of the Stegmaier beer plant down by the railroad.
My parents, perhaps unadvisedly or maybe because I worked cheap ($5 a week), let me keep a set of order books for our various suppliers and decide what we bought for our customers, good working people who lived within walking distance. Shopping centers, malls and discount stores had not yet arrived in our area.
There were pleasures a small store like that offered. I got a thrill at being told that we had the coldest sodas on the planet. Maybe we did. I would chill the Nehis and Pepsis and whatever in an ice water-filled chest in back and then, when they seemed about to burst, cart them out to the modern air cooler in the store proper. You could have gotten a confession out of a prisoner by pouring drinks that temperature on him.
Need some inexpensive school supplies? I made sure we had a lot of ten-cent composition books, two-cent pencils and allied stuff like penny erasers and little plastic sharpeners.
Who doesn’t want to look right? I ordered endless packets of bobby pins, combs, razor blades and lip balm. We were like a health spa with our headache powders, cold cream and mysterious unguents that were sworn to remove wrinkles and all signs of age. My guiding principle was that if you look like you sell a lot of stuff, people will buy a lot of stuff.
I never understood the appeal of smoking, but I ordered every kind of cigarette, cigar and pipe tobacco I’d ever heard of and piled them high as I could. We even sold plugs of chewing tobacco and packets of little papers for people who liked to roll their own.
Candy bars! Does anyone today recall the Mars, the Love Nest or the Powerhouse? I had them all, along with the usual Hershey’s and peanut butter cups. For summers I’d shove little wooden sticks in them and freeze them for no extra charge.
Admittedly, though, my parents did the dog work of keeping the place open and the customers moving 12 hours a day, seven days a week, 360-some days a year. I was the artist of order and display. If a young sport took a swig of icy cold Squirt and then lit up one of our pinball machines as his pals cheered, I silently congratulated myself.
But the tricks — you can start searching downtown and make your way up to the arena, but you probably won’t find itching powder or a plastic ice cube with a real fly in it these days.
I guess that’s what they call the end of an era.