The Penny Candy Store
Remembering the simple memories of an “unscheduled” childhood
My paternal grandparents lived in a flat above a tavern on Hopkins Street in South Buffalo. Even in the ’60s, the street was down in the mouth, within pollution distance of Bethlehem Steel, where my grandfather, father, and brother worked. Visiting them required a climb up a steep set of stairs leading into a vestibule with a mirrored wardrobe with hooks for our hats and coats.
My grandmother owned the building and collected rent from the tavern owner, which may have explained why she believed it in her purview to bang a broom handle on the floor to express her anger at the noise. (I have since found out from my older brother that Grandma was quite the entrepreneur: In the 1930s(!), she owned a beauty salon, the tavern, and at one point, a small storefront. She sold the salon and turned part of the flat into a micro-beauty shop, complete with the requisite clear jar with blue water to sanitize combs, and a commercial hair dryer.)
Just past the wardrobe was the tiny kitchen with what is now considered wonderfully vintage but then was what working class folks could afford: a porcelain-top table with metal legs and Art Deco styling. To the right was the formal dining room, overwhelmed by a table and hutch. It’s there that Christmas Eve dinners took place. The year I aged out of the kids’ table in the kitchen was the year I figured out Santa was just a magical story adults concocted to keep kids in line. I felt simultaneously very mature and a bit disappointed, though I was never one to put much stock in myths, religious or otherwise.
Past the kitchen, a living room was full of furniture much too large for the space, including a massive round blonde wood coffee table with a glass top, and a sofa with the obligatory-for-grandparents plastic cover and doilies over the back. To the right was my grandparents’ bedroom, sans door, a rudimentary form of birth control for the working class.
Every summer, I spent a week with the grands. For my blue collar family, this was my summer camp. My sibs and I didn’t have organized activities, and certainly no helicopter parents. We were left to our imaginations, and in my case, the world of books, a refuge for a fat kid living in a neighborhood with few kids my age to be friends with.
On street level next to my grands’ building was Malik’s, a name my brother remembered but I had forgotten; I just think of it as the penny candy store. What I’ve never forgotten is the goods: comic books, popsicles, and penny candy. A smart kid’s dream. Remember Neccos and Mary Janes? The wax bottles with colored sugar water? The gum “cigarettes,” pack and all?* (*Which they still sell, renamed candy sticks. Uh huh.) All these and more were on the shelf right smack facing the entrance. Against the back wall was the freezer full of popsicles in enough flavors that I could choose a different one for each day of the week I spent there. Grape, orange, cherry, lemon lime — back in the day when you could actually taste the flavor without having to buy “premium” all-fruit versions. Or maybe that’s just how I remember it.
The wall to the left had a rack full of comic books. They were missing their covers. Either they were illegal resales, or hand-me-downs from the owner’s kids. I didn’t care. All I knew is that I could buy several at a time, which my parents couldn’t afford to do at a regular drugstore at full price; if sometimes I was able to cajole my Mom to buy them for me, I realize now that it meant she gave up something else in our budget.
Girls my age, if they read comics at all — they were mostly a boy thing in the ‘60s — went for Archie and his insipid Betty or Veronica drama. I made a beeline for superheroes: Superman, Batman, the Legion of Superheroes, Supergirl. As a fallback, I’d pick up a Green Lantern or Captain America, but those were definitely Plan B.
Goodies in hand, I’d lie on the floor in the living room, nestled between the TV and the brown recliner Gramps sat in to watch baseball in the summer and college football in the fall, next to that enormous coffee table.
Being able to pore through a stack of comics and lick a flavor-of-the-day popsicle was a day well spent, no “activities,” teams, or even parents needed.
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