They had many names—Kresge, Kress, McClellan’s, Murphy’s, Woolworth’s—sometimes local, sometimes national or international franchises, all “five and dimes” or “dime stores,” all identical and as American as Fourth of July bunting or a high school band playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”  Every Midwestern Main Street sported two or three, interspersed with hardware stores, family clothing emporia, bakeries, taverns, specialty shops.

            They looked alike:  fronts of sheet glass display windows, sometimes of curved deco glass, framing displays overflowing as cornucopias with the items of the five-and-dime galaxy.  Cascades of shoelaces and buttons on cards and ankle sox and perfume bottles and heaps of variegated candies, rows of tinted glass tumblers and candy dishes and epergnes and seasonal delights—mittens in winter, straw hats in spring, shorts in summer, earflap caps in autumn.  Above the dazzling window world were sunshades or awnings and above them a stamped metal tabard enameled and emblazoned with gilt letters of the name:  5¢  KRESGE  10¢ or similar heraldic. 

            The stores were four-square and unflinching, as self-proclamatory as a character in Pilgrim’s Progress, part of Vanity Fair.  The allegorical message they embodied was “Come inside, become enchanted and buy, buy, buy—only a nickel or a dime.”  My pulse quickened, my eyes widened when I walked into a dime store—I knew it would be a splendid adventure, an exotic voyage just beyond the blue horizon.  I empathized immediately with the boy in James Joyce’s story “Araby,” who yearns to go to a bazaar, because it is romantic and evocative and beyond the reach of a child.  I empathized also with his ultimate disillusionment, when he found the bazaar mundane, false and shabby.

            But I was never disillusioned with the dime stores—I simply outgrew and forgot them until they disappeared from the American landscape.  They promised everything, and they delivered on the promise.  I wandered the aisles dazed and slightly surfeited with sounds, smells and tastes, overwhelmed with profusion and plentitude.  Something to see, sniff, handle or sample at every counter.  The store reeked of a rich, pungent and inseparable compound smell that only existed in dime stores, as distinctive as the horseshit-and-candy aroma of the circus.  It was stale roasted peanuts, cheap cologne, wax for the bare wooden floors, plus tangy overtones of new clothing, pet department odors, hot chocolate and lunch counter scents.  It made me hungry and vertiginous.

            The soundscape of the 10-cent store was as dense and variegated—a polyphony of familiar music.  Cash register clangings, a spirited piano clattering in the sheet music department, the sustained chatter of customers and saleswomen, animal voices chittering in the pet department—budgies, canaries, woofs and meows, the roulette rustle of a hamster in his Ixion wheel.  Jingle of cutlery and whining continuo of malt mixers from the lunch counter.  In some older stores the slide-whiz! of pneumatic money trolleys overhead.

            Mainly the dime store was a feast for the eyes—much to see, heaps of trinkets, tchotchkes, bibelots of every color, hue, texture, size and shape.  A case of blown-glass animals as fragile and pathetic as Laura’s in The Glass Menagerie.  A toy department overstuffed with toy soldiers, guns, cars, balls, dolls, jacks, a wire rack of Big Little Books with lurid covers.  A universe of very little things to fondle, to pocket (if you dared), to examine in private.

            A wide candy counter with fresh roast peanuts, popcorn, rows of glass bins with vivid candies—kandy korn, Boston baked beans, tooth-cracking candied peanuts, bizarre candies like banana-flavored but peanut-shaped soft things (what was that?) or Mary Janes or coconut confections striped like neopolitan ice cream, long licorice whips, pipes, guns, waxen monstrosities like super-sweet lips and teeth, making me queasy with hints of cannibalism.

            A myriad other counters filled with adult stuff and boring necessities like clothing.  Tools, nostrums, objects of no use known.  Also, people demonstrating and selling wares—kitchen gadgets, odd playthings like yoyos or bubble-blowing apparatus, women’s goods like make-up or hair treatments, strange appliances like arch supports or orthopedic stockings.  Some new cleaning solvent or cookware or hygienic all-season underwear.  Who knew what you might find at this endless emporium?

            Hamlet’s nemesis Polonius, in his catalog of dramatic modes, mentions “poem unlimited” as the apex of his list.  The dime store, as far as I was concerned at 10 years old, was a poem unlimited.  It was as complete as any encyclopedia, a concatenation of unnamed delights, a chrestomathy of unclassifiable miracles.  Later, when I saw Joseph Cornell’s delicate shadow boxes (assembled from dime-store materials), I was instantly transported back to dime store days, perhaps a single memorable day when I begged to be bought a huge, gleaming Texan cap pistol nearly as long as my arm and heavy as an anvil.  It was a replica of a .45 revolver, chased all over with gaudy “engraving” and sporting genuine plastic ivory handles.  To me it was the zenith, the ne plus ultra, of cap guns, and carrying it on my hip would make me the most feared gunslinger east of the Wabash.

            My vain and inordinate desire for lead soldiers, plastic cars, deadly cap guns was instilled by the Xanadu magnificence of the dime store, its endless possibility and change.  It was a Land of Heart’s Desire, the cynosure of my imagination.  Later I would shift to hobby shops, hardware stores, then book and record shops.  But none offered the sheer scope of variety and surprise every dime store promised—and delivered!

            I was never disheartened or disappointed by these palaces of tawdry, unlike James Joyce’s  anti-hero.  I knew the goods were cheesy and shoddy—those were the years of “Made in Occupied Japan” stamped on ephemera—but I wanted gaudy gewgaws.  Nothing much was still priced at five or ten cents as the old signs boasted, but nothing was very pricey.  An economic cosmos scaled to a child’s purse.

            The world of the 5-and-10s is long vanished—leviathan emporia like K-Mart or WalMart do not even echo the old stores.  They are too vast, too coldly fluorescent, too air-conditioned, too empty of actual salespeople, too sterile, odorless and culturally correct.  The scale of the dime store was child-sized, intimate, and nobody bothered children, hovered or harassed them.  I drifted like a moody, pint-sized ghost through aisles, peered over counters, stood awestruck before some novel object.

            In summer the doors were wide open, wood-paddled ceiling fans whooshed a breeze and all the smells were amplified by heat and humidity.  Easter chicks were gone—sold or grown—and vivid summer gear was scattered:  swimming floats of blow-up plastic, shaped like turtles or seahorses or rings, in fluorescent hues.  Beach balls.  Rubber flip-flops.  Sisal espadrilles.  Flit guns.  Sunglasses.  Pyramids of suntan lotion, calamine, poison ivy cures, mosquito repellent.

            Other seasons were not important, except for Halloween and Christmas, when festive displays overwhelmed the five-and-dime.  First jack o’lanterns and black cats, ghosts and ghouls, every imaginable mask and costume, bins of orange and black candies.  Then cardboard Santas, snowmen and reindeer, festoons of paper holly and ivy, tinsel, ornaments, strung lights.  Carols played in the background, along with that year’s pop novelty—“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” “All I Want for Christmas Are My Two Front Teeth,” “Silver Bells.”  Always a new number joining the perennial Christmas hit parade of “White Christmas,” “The Christmas Song,” “Home for the Holidays,” tear-jerkers of yesteryear.

            But the dime store existed separately from the secular or sacred calendar.  It was a sector, an epoch, unto itself—a zone of commerce also a dream market, a public forum for awe and amusement beyond transactions.  It showed the promise of our prosperous, self-sufficient and hermetic culture.  It was primitive capitalism in action, a primer version of the department stores and today’s super-sumptuous mega-malls that promise everything, every dream and potentiality of desire, delivered into our hands.  Only 5 or 10 cents, fractions of our wealth, a mite of our total worth, after all.

            Not happiness on the installment plan but happiness paid for, cash and carry, by coins from the bottom of the change purse, the miser’s dream come true.  It takes little to purchase a little dream, little effort to reach a goal within arm’s length, little imagination to paint the clouds with sunshine.  ###