They cut the ribbon on Village Shopping Center on Groundhog Day, 1967. The Hope Star photo shows 13 middle-aged or older men in black suits and narrow black ties lined on the flatbed of a Porter Implements truck all holding a part of a white ribbon they’re extending to be cut by a ceremonial scissors that fit into Mayor John B. Gardner Jr’s right hand.
Among the 13, we’re told in the accompanying article, were also the managers of several of the stores, but also E.E. Latham, who was no less than the President of Morgan & Lindsey Stores. It was a cold day from the looks of it. You can see tree limbs bare of leaves behind the men as they stood on the truck that the article said was in the middle of the new shopping center’s parking lot. The developer, H.E. Enlow, bought the land for $100,000 from Foster Land and Realty before finding investments from the stores that built the complex, which featured an A & P Grocery Store in the East-West row as anchor.
As the north-south half of what had been Hope’s Village Shopping Center is being demolished this month, starting with the old Village Rexall, then the old West’s Department Store and this week the Sears outlet, leaving only the old Morgan-&-Lindseys-then-Bill’s-then-Family Dollar, I well realize it’s leading to a good thing.
In the next 18 months, we’ll watch the building of a brand-new and much needed fire department headquarters, just one part of the Hope for the Future projects funded by a one-cent sales tax passed by voters in 2024.
But I’ll always have my memories. The Morgan & Lindsey was a colorful dazzling of my post-toddlerhood senses when my mother would take me with her to shop there in the mid-70s. Nearly every candy I could think of was available there up front, facing the panel windows. Fruit Stripes gum, Super Bubble apple and grape flavor (the local barbers only gave kids the bubble gum flavor) and my favorite candy bar, Hershey’s Krackel. It was like your chocolate had eaten its Rice Krispies that morning. Could I resist? No.
No, we couldn’t afford for me to do what I fantasized about, just go through the aisle with a paper bag, filling it with what I wanted. But I got my one choice per trip. One of those I remember was the Lik-M-Aid Fun Dip. You got three paper pockets of grape, cherry and apple powder. You licked the white chalky stick and dipped it into the flavored, sugared powder. “Dip it. Taste it. Wow,” said the copy on the label. And generally, you made a big mess. All over your mouth, chin and shirt. Grown-ups looked for their Wet Ones. Other kids ran from you.
I recall the Morgan & Lindsey having a swing set on display toward the back, just behind the sizable section that offered dress fabric on rolls and drawers of pattens you mother could look through if she wanted to make a dress for herself or your kid sister (who in my case claims not to remember the store under this name, though I remember her there as a toddler.) Around 1975, not long after we moved from the rent-house on 603 Rosston Road to the house dad bought at 1401 Davis Avenue, he backed his blue Chevy truck to the big door behind Morgan & Lindsey to have a couple of their staffers lift a long, obviously heavy brown box into the bed, propping one of its ends up on the tailgate. We were taking home one of those swing sets.
I wanted to take part in putting the thing together in our backyard. But other than holding a couple of the poles still as nuts and bolts were tightened together, I was not consulted often. There were of course hours of swinging, sliding down, teetering and tottering. I remember on the day we discovered I sprouted rashes on my legs when I took penicillin I was swinging east to west on it later that afternoon as my mother explained this newly discovered allergy to my dad. He took it well. “It doesn’t do me that way,” he told mom. “Must be from your side.”
I’d go on to years of banana-flavored erythromycin instead for my periodic infections that cropped up once every couple years, but the swing set itself would not be intact during all these. As I aged, as the neighborhood kids took their own turns on it, as the rains left rust, the metal tubing bent and broke. My sister only remembers it as already quite run-down in her first memories of it. I recall a neighbor kid and I would use the teeter-totter and the one swing left to pretend we were the Bandit and Jerry Reed evading Jackie Gleason while singing “East Bound and Down” at our lungtops. There were a couple times mom leaned out a patio door to say, “Your sister is sleeping.” But the boys were thirsty in Atlanta and there was beer in Texarkana.
The Sears outlet I’ll always remember as the district office for Santa Claus when he came to Hope riding on a blaring fire truck. He’d take his seat in Sears and I’d tell him over the years I wanted the Fisher Price Action Garage, a pair of Walkie Talkies, a reflecting telescope, a Panasonic stereo jambox. (The reflecting telescope only disclosed darkness, not Jupiter’s moons.) Invariably, my sister Jennifer, when put on his lap, let out respectable howls as I’d watch, shaking my head, all the poor souls still in line force fingers into ears. But we got the photos to prove later she’d been there and made her requests, which she always got. A yellow plastic pretend stove with all the burners and dials was a favorite.
I recall a shoe store in the middle of that north-south row. The Hope Star lists a Kennedy’s Shoe Store with owner Gus Kennedy. In my years as a Village Shopping Center visitor, it was Martin’s. I liked to go in and check out the boys’ cowboy boots. In the 70s, there was very much a vogue to dress like you were Glen Campbell, whether you played the guitar or not.
West’s Department Store I remember mainly for the free blowup balloons they’d give out to every kid. I thought it strange that though they had a big bottle and a machine to noisily blow them up, the results didn’t float to the ceiling. They just filled them with air. My trips there with mom and Jennifer were mainly to buy shoes or clothes. I remember Jennifer having to try on several Easter dresses there. She said tonight when I asked her about our trips there that she only remembered wearing second-hand Easter apparel all her childhood. But I distinctly remember the boredom of being with the two of them as they decided on what to buy, wishing I had brought a Dr. Seuss book from my stack of Hempstead County Library checkouts waiting at home. Maybe something involving Oobleck that didn’t also feature that stiff Bartholomew Cubbins?
The Village Rexall I remember as the store that smelled like vitamins, not the Flintstones I wished I could have more than one of every morning with my Sugar Corn Pops but like the One-a-Days mom had to gulp down. We’d get our drugs sometimes from a friendly guy who’d hand them to us in a slim paper sack, as we’d wait in chairs or look around the aisles of band-aids (none of which were shaped like cartoon monsters yet), make-up and things you could put on the walls of your house. It would sprout a drive-through on the side sometime in the early 80s when suddenly everyplace grew a drive-through, even our schools.
I’ve taken my pictures of the process of demolition of all this, always disappointed that I can see none of my memories of picking up the swingset, hearing Jennifer howl at Santa, trying out new candies and getting my West’s machine-blown balloon in these images. Something in me wants to get out and get my own piece of this row of stores I knew so well. But in that piece of cinderblock there will be no taste of Lik-M-Aid, no sound of the West’s balloon machine making me another one, no Santa-scared howl. At least I still have my pieces of memories.
Above photo: What remains of the north-south row of the Village Shopping Center as Hope city workers are helping to demolish it to make way for a new fire department headquarters. This particular building housed the Morgan & Lindsey Department Store as well as two dollar stores after M & L closed. It was vacant at the time demolition began at the end of April.
