New Seniors

There were several neighbor stores with in a block or so of my house in the northeast section of Philadelphia.  A mom and pop grocer was located on nearly every corner.  There was also a drug store, which was more for sundries, magazines, OTC medicines, penny candy, and ice cream plus a soda fountain with stools in front of the granite counter.  Around the corner was a butcher shop and across the street was a real pharmacy.  So no one had to travel far to buy the necessities of life.

Almost daily I was sent to one of these stores to pick up something for my mother.  The store I visited most often was the grocery store.  It carried a limited supply of staples, some fresh and some packaged, along with a limited variety of fresh produce and refrigerated items – things that a homemaker needed to make dinner that night.  Frozen food had yet to arrive, since home refrigerators were equipped with a compartment for making ice cubes and little room to keep anything else frozen.

I was always given money to pay for the groceries, but I noticed many customers told the owner to, “Put it on the book.”  I learned this meant charge it, which was often the case with families where the man of the house was away in the war.  Later the grocer charge account was mostly for people who were strapped financially.  These people, it turns out, were the prime customers for the little stores as supermarkets began to sprout up throughout the city after the end of WWII.

One of these giant supermarkets, small by today’s standards, opened right after the war and was about a mile from my house.  Since we only had one car, my mom took me along to wheel the half-dozen or so bags back in my wagon.  I tried to avoid this bi-weekly assignment at first, but soon learned to love it.  This particular supermarket had a bunch of neat things to occupy the mind of a pre-teen age boy.

Besides the vast and colorful array of fresh produce, endless aisles of canned foods and a great selection of cereal – I always needed lots of cereal box tops to get the latest premium offered by The Lone Ranger, Superman and others, there were things I had never seen before. Imagine, assembled under one roof, this store featured an automated orange juice squeezer; live lobsters and crabs waking around in a big salt water tank; and a donut making machine, complete with a conveyor belt that transported the product from the fryer to the display case.

 Modern conveniences such as these made this supermarket a state-of-the-art working science experiment for this youngster, and probably many of the adults, too.  This was especially true, since we had had gone for several years during the war without even the basic foods such as meat, eggs, milk and butter to name a few.  I never much liked going back to the crowded, dingy neighbor grocer after getting hooked on the supermarket experience.  I guess that was the case for most other people as well, because slowly but surely these neighborhood fixtures began to disappear.  But they sure served a purpose to city dwellers for many, many years.  I kind of miss them, don’t you?

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