LET'S GO SHOPPING!

Back in the olden days, there weren't shopping centers and malls like Gateway or Fashion Place.  There weren't big box stores like Target, Home Depot and Walmart.  If you needed clothes, shoes or underwear, you went to a department store.  The hardware store was where you bought lumber, nails, bolts, screws, saws and hammers.  Pharmaceutical items were purchased at the corner drug store.  There were variety stores for everything else.

If my mother, sisters and I went shopping, it was usually on Saturday afternoon after ALL the morning chores were done and lunch was over.  It was also a time when we changed from our play clothes and put on dresses or skirts.  We never went to a department store in play clothes.  My mother was raised in an era when the women put on dresses, dress shoes and wore dress gloves to go shopping.  It was an event.  We never had to wear dress gloves.  But it was a very long time before my mother decided that it might be acceptable to go shopping on Saturday in pants or slacks.  However, those pants/slacks had to be clean and neat. We had to wash our hands and faces and comb our hair.  Mother always put on her makeup before we left.

Back in my day, there were several department stores.  The moderately priced ones were Hetchs and Kahns.  If you didn't mind spending a little bit more money, you went to Woodward and Lothrop.  The people with a ton of money shopped at Garfinckles.  My mother usually frequented Hetchs and Kahns.  I don't think that I ever set foot inside Garfinckles. These department stores were free standing with perhaps some smaller local stores in the same area. 

I loved to go to Kahns. In the kid's shoe department at Kahns, there was a large glass enclosed cage set in a wall and in that cage were... small monkeys.  Probably just about every kid who knew that their Mom was going to Kahns wanted to go along just to see the monkeys.  It didn't even matter if you were getting shoes or anything.  While mothers shopped, the kids hung out in the shoe department watching the monkeys. 

Our local hardware store was Snyders in the neighborhood commercial district called East Falls Church.  I went to Snyders quite a bit with my father on Saturdays.  Due to the basement remodeling, he was always in need of nails. lumber or other building materials.  Snyders was a wonderful place that always smelled of fresh cut lumber. At kid's eye level, there were many bins filled with various size nails, screws, nuts and bolts. Those bins were fascinating. I'd walk alongside my father as he filled small bags with what he needed.  At the cash register, the bags were weighed.  The total weight determined how much he paid. There were also large open bins of various seed that was sold in bulk.  Whenever I went to Snyders with my father, he always bought a bag of sunflower seeds as a treat that he shared with me.

Across the street from Snyders was the corner drug store that had a soda fountain.  I remember that special treats would be a sundae or milkshake at the soda fountain counter.  The dentist that we went to had his office above the drug store.

A few doors down from the drug store was Robertson's Five and Dime.  That was a wondrous place for a child.  A Five and Dime store was a variety store where you could get small household items, pencils, notebooks, small toys, trinkets, and candy.  Most things were very cheap and a lot of things were a dime, nickle or less. If you could get your mother to give you a bit of her change from a purchase, you could always find something special at Robertson's.  The best thing was the open bins of wrapped, hard candy.  You've heard the term "Like a kid in a candy store"?  Oh, the wonder of all that candy.  It was so hard to choose.

One day on a visit to Robertson's with my mother, I decided that I wanted a Three Musketeers bar.  My mother must have said "No" because when she wasn't looking I took one and hid it from her.  When we got home, she saw me eating the candy bar and asked where I got it.  I told her I took it from Robertson's.  She immediately took the candy bar from me and drove me back to Robertson's.  There I had to confess to Mr. Robertson that I had stolen the candy bar and paid him for it with money that my mother gave me.  I never did that again.

While I was in junior high, Seven Corners Shopping center opened.  It was the brand new concept of a center where department stores anchored each end of the center and smaller, speciality stores lined enclosed walkways between the department stores.  Seven Corners had a Woodward and Lothrop at one end and probably a JC Pennys at the other end. 

These kinds of shopping centers are all over the place today.  I find it interesting that new centers being built today are trying to capture the feeling of the old neighborhood shopping areas of the 50s and 60s.  But try as they may,  the feeling of neighborhood and familiarity can't really be duplicated.