Music Memories with My Family

Friday Nights at K-Mart

Yes, you heard that right

I am not ashamed to say that my family and I were great and faithful patrons of K-Mart in those days before that mega-giant went bankrupt due to the Wal-Mart-ization of America. I suppose K-Mart’s idea of discount prices were a Double-A baseball team’s relationship to the majors. The old K-Mart here in Greenville became the dispensary for Covid-19 vaccines. A discount by any other name…

But back in the late 60’s K-Mart spelled magic for families like mine seeking to find cheaper-than-usual toiletries, household cleaning agents, and even tennis shoes that might hold up for a summer season if you didn’t play too hard. Of course, K-Mart had toys galore, even Hot Wheels sets and individual gem cars like that green Camaro and pale-lime Cougar I once bought for peanuts.

More than anything, though, K-Mart had one of those snack bars, almost like the one seen at the old movie hall in Seinfeld, the one Kramer tries to rehabilitate with the help of Lloyd Braun. It’s not the Bentley, but maybe the name will strike me dead or alive by this story’s end. Anyway, someone, maybe Lloyd or even Jerry, decides to get the lone hot dog rotating in the ultra-red heated bin, a dog the attendant says was surely the same one twirling back in the theater’s heyday, maybe about the same time my family and I shopped at the Big K all those years ago.

So, no one would dare actually get a K-Mart hot dog, at least no one in my family, though maybe we would order some fries, golden brown, but still sort of frozen in their innards. But what we always ordered, almost as if they didn’t exist anywhere else and certainly not at our house in this form, were Coca-Cola’s.

Fountain Cokes with that perfect blend of syrup and carbonation, just enough to make the tears start in your eyes, and have your throat demanding a quenching that it couldn’t find in any other gas station, much less department store fountain.

Not every Friday night, but enough to make it seem so, my folks, my brother, our neighbors the Manzellas and I would pile into one car — maybe the Manzella’s Plymouth Belvedere with its push button gear shift (surprising that such a small vehicle could hold seven people, but it was a four-door at least) — and drive the nine miles on the backroads through Lipscomb and Brownville until we took the left turn in Midfield and then we’d pile out in front of the majestic doors of K-Mart, as if this were Fair Park’s KiddieLand or Shelby County’s Cherokee Beach or something.

Mr. Manzella would head immediately to that lunch counter, flop down at a booth with his Coke and wait patiently for the rest of us to figure out what we had to buy or what we’d at least beg to have bought for us. His son, Frankie, could usually be found headed toward the restroom. Frankie had been branded at eight with the ability to suss out any retail restroom in our town or any other, so he was always good to have on board for such trips because emergencies happen even on Friday nights with your family at K-Mart.

I was thirteen, fourteen, during the height of these family ventures, and you might wonder why I wasn’t with my peers, or whether I even wanted to be. Well, I often wondered that, too, but even in these times of adolescent dreams and imagined rebellions (or real ones like those peers often got into, no names, no faces, badges or borders mentioned here except for the woods-sneaking, and early pot-smoking, but not by me), I found my family fun and safe and happy and I’ll say it again:

Fun.

Everyone laughed and whether I followed my parents through the aisles — Dad always found lawn equipment to buy, out of season, and Mom usually made out good with new sewing designs — or whether I headed immediately to the record department, these nights felt like someone wanted me to fulfill wishes of finding treasures, or at least other wishes of not worrying about why that seventh or eighth grade girl I liked wouldn’t pay me any attention and instead went for the biggest jerk among our group.

Maybe what I’m saying is that even then, especially then, I sensed that my peers, even when they were acting age appropriately, were trying to tempt me and each other with dangerous visions, and what would I get in return?

Cigarettes?

I didn’t want to smoke and didn’t want anyone to consider me “uncool” either.

So better to go to K-Mart on these Friday nights even when my friends were going or starting to go to high school football games and flirt and touch each other’s knees and whatever else they did that I missed and kind of wanted to see and be part of (don’t worry: ninth grade would come and I’d try a Marlboro and touch Margaret’s knee and I didn’t get hooked or slapped, but neither did I feel fulfilled). Because…

At K-Mart, I could count on using either my lawn mowing funds, or in fall/winter, the good offices of my parents to buy at least, and usually only, one 45 record. Cost: 77 cents.

The AM hits were what sent me then, and there were so many: week after week, new ones, and the oldies I never knew much about before.

Like I said:

Treasures.

After browsing for 30, maybe even 45, minutes, I’d make my selection and then take it back to the booth where Mr. Manzella, now likely joined by his wife and my folks, would be waiting.

“Go get a Coke, Buddy,” one of them would say.

And I would, and then I’d sit with them, blinded by all the fluorescence and believing that these nights were like someone’s idea of Family Night at church or at bowling alleys, or wherever else intact families with uncool kids liked to find themselves.

God, I bought so many records at K-Mart (never buying any at Wal-Mart because I refuse to shop there, because I DO have a sense of nostalgic and misplaced and bankrupted loyalty). And so, after buying my latest prize, we’d all head out for home, and sometimes the Manzella’s would come back to our house and we’d all play spades or pinochle or poker, and I’d put on my record, and someone would likely call it “noise” and maybe someone else would even listen and like it.

It all depended on our individual moods, I guess, because happiness can fade if your teenager decides to buy “Whole Lotta Love,” or it can be buoyed if he gets “Kentucky Rain.”

But what if he gets, as I did one time, this record:

Yeah, I might have been a strange kid, but am I any less strange now? Because if I could, if it still existed, I’d take my wife and daughters, if they were in town, to K-Mart on Friday night and let them buy whatever they wanted while I waited in the snack bar, Cokes at the ready.

And while I love Tom Jones and always have, I have to disagree with his title song here.

Because even though that phony K-Mart-mania has bitten the dust (not “phony” but the reference came to me anyway), and even though I refuse to patronize the Walton’s place, there’s still…

TARGET,

and while it’s not everything, it’s certainly something. It even has corporate coffee to go with its vinyl department (I bought Taylor’s Lover there recently), and, of course, those fountain cokes.

Now, whose car are we taking?

Thanks for reading, ever and always, and thanks especially to Christopher Robin and Samantha Drobac for making Songstories happen. Any K-MArt lovers out there? Steven Hale, David Acaster, Paul Combs, Chris Zappa, Jessica Lee McMillan, Kathryn Dillon, Jim Mowat, Nicole Brown, Pierce McIntyre, Penelope Mayfield, or Danielle Loewen?

Here’s another one in case you missed it:

And I had to look it up: it was The Alex.