I miss a lot of things growing up. But one of my fondest memories is the local five and dime store.

In our little city it was Newberry’s and it was located in the center of town, on High Street.

The nice thing about Newberry’s was that you could buy just about anything and the idea was that most things wouldn’t cost more than a nickel or a dime.

A magazine rack stood in the front of the store and I always saved my money for the latest issues. I was mesmerized by the glamorous stars and their scandals.

Why had Elizabeth Taylor stolen Debbie Reynold’s husband? What was the motive behind Lana Turner’s daughter murdering her stepfather? Why couldn’t I look like Sandra Dee, blonde and leggy? Would I ever get to meet Robert Horton? He was on his third wife and, if he could just wait another ten years, I was ready to be his fourth.

My favorite part of the store, by far though, was the pet department. Puppies, kittens, birds, rabbits and turtles were all waiting in cages to be taken home. And my family did just that.

We bought a tiny black and white puppy. Sitting up, she was smaller than an eight ounce cola bottle. We named her Patches and she lived to the ripe old age of ten. Patches might have been a mutt, but she was a very smart dog.  When my mother was whizzing down the highway in her convertible, Patches, sitting in the front seat beside her, jumped right out of the moving car. She landed on the side of the road. My mother abruptly stopped to search for the dog, but Patches had disappeared.

A car pulled over and the driver accused my mother of throwing Patches out of the car. My mother was beside herself with anger and worry.     

When she finally got home, Patches was waiting for her on our front porch.    

The rest of our Newberry’s pets did not fare as well.

Our parakeet, Lucky, wasn’t that. He died after a week. We bought a lot of baby turtles, but, in a short while, their shells would turn soft and they would die. (My friend Eddie’s turtle, however, grew to a gigantic size, had to be kept in the bathtub and fed a head of lettuce every day. He eventually gave the turtle to the zoo.) Our little rabbit had a heart attack when Patches was chasing him.

Perhaps the pets sold at the five and dime were not too healthy.    

Or maybe we were just bad pet owners.

I also loved the food offered at the busy store, like the machine that made fresh popcorn. And then there was the lunch counter, where neighbors would meet for a mid morning cup of coffee for a nickel, where children could enjoy a sundae for twenty cents or a milk shake for a dime. And whatever happened to ham and pickle sandwiches or cream cheese served on nut bread?

The five and dime sold school supplies but sometimes the pen dried up after a few uses, and the notebook paper was only lined on the first ten sheets. The rest were blank.

Still there was always something to buy – bobby pins, plants and dirt, garden supplies, candles, and silverware, fabric and patterns, pretty colored ribbons, threads and needles, cheap clothing, and even cheaper perfume. And for a dime you could purchase a pound of penny candies.

Our favorite time of the year was Halloween. The stores were jammed with costumes for the one night of pretending. You could be an airline stewardess, a creepy clown, an evil witch, a zombie, or a superhero, like Superman or a character from a fairy tale. And, of course, all the girls wanted to be Lucy. 

The store allowed us to decorate their windows with ghosts and spirits and haunted houses. We used poster paints and no talent was necessary. We all participated, looking forward to the evening when our plastic pumpkins would be full of Neco Wafers, taffy, fireballs, Hot Tamales, Black Crows, Butterfingers, and, of course, Hershey Chocolates.

I miss the five and dime stores, where neighbors could sit at the counter and chat over coffee and banana crème pie, where children could buy toys and everyone could browse through the 75,000 items that they were rumored to sell.

The closest things we have now are the chain drugstores, but I have yet to find one that sells parakeets (or for that matter even parakeet seeds) and there is no lunch counter, just sandwiches packed in plastic with a due date stamped on the bottom.

Of course, there is Amazon, where you can buy literally anything (except parakeets) but more often than not, your purchase is coming from someplace, far, far away.

Which is where the five and dime stores have gone…

Image credit: User Bobak on en.wikipedia [CC BY-SA 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)