When you walked into Ma’s Junk Shop on west Eighty-Ninth in Manhattan, you saw a small soda fountain with three stools to your left, and then a long glass display case filled with the hundred different kinds of penny candy they made before the War. Ma, four foot ten and grouchy, stood on raised flooring that gave her the height to operate the malted milk mixers, push the handles that squirted syrup into soda glasses and to glare down at you as if you were about to smash her display case with your book-bag, grab one of her two-a-penny root beer barrels and run.
The Junk Shop was a few storefronts east of Amsterdam, on the opposite side of Eighty-Ninth from the Claremont Riding Academy. When I was six and seven I used to stop there on my way home from P.S. 166, which was up the block toward Columbus, to buy the Play Ball Cards and Horrors Of War Cards that came in packages of GUM, Inc. bubble gum.
I resented Ma’s suspicious glares. I figured she might have grounds with other kids, but I was a Junior-G-Man and a Lone Ranger Leader. Not only did I try to be honest myself, but tried to make sure the four kids in my Lone Ranger Club were honest too. When Arthur, son of the superintendent of a building up the block showed me a toy soldier he’d stolen from Woolworth’s, I walked him up to Ninety-First and Broadway and made him put it back into its bin on the toy counter. My father told me I’d been foolish; Woolworth’s might have accused me of stealing.
In spite of any feelings about Ma, on the way home from school the kids spent all their pennies in her Junk Shop, buying penny packs of Jujubes, jawbreakers, Mary Janes and Jujy Fruits, Chiclets, Chunkys, Charm Pops and Wax Lips. None of those interested me. Neither did the Goobers, Gobstoppers, licorice wheels, Mr. Goodbars, Necco Wafers, Boston Baked Beans, Tootsie Rolls, Tootsie Pops, candy buttons, Mallo Cups or Raisinets ranked in rows behind, below, above and beside them in Ma’s display case. The only thing I bought were the penny packs of PLAY BALL and HORRORS OF WAR trading cards and, until a kid two grades ahead of me warned me against them, the Picks.
Picks were chocolate-covered coconut bonbons about an inch in diameter. They came in a nine-by-nine inch box three layers high. You pointed to the particular Pick you wanted Ma to pick up and take out of the square box with her grubby fingers and hand to you. Then you bit into it to see whether you’d picked one of the rare red ones. If you picked a red one, you gave the half you had left to Ma and she had to give you five cents worth of anything in the Junk shop. The one time I got a red Pick, it made me feel lucky and made me forget all the times I’d ended up with white Picks. The only thing you could do with a white Pick was eat it and they weren’t that good. I used the red Pick to buy five packs of Play Ball cards. In the end I was sorry I ever got it. Getting that one red Pick kept me buying more thinking of the five packs of cards I could buy if I got another, not thinking of all the single packs I missed by wasting my pennies on Picks.
Later I learned that was what keeps numbers players keep on buying numbers. I didn’t know about numbers games back then, but now, looking back, I suspect it was one of Ma’s sidelines. I must have bought twenty more white Picks without another red before the kid two grades above me followed me out of Ma’s one day and whispered that Ma pricked the bottoms with a needle to see the color and took most of the red ones out. I didn’t like Ma, but couldn’t believe anybody would do that. I asked how he knew and he said his mother turned one of the Picks upside down and showed him a little pin-hole in the bottom.
I knew his mother by sight. My mother looked down on her because his mother wore a leopard skin coat, and lots of makeup including a beauty mark on her left cheek. One day my mother went into the Junk Shop with me and his mother was sitting on a stool at the fountain drinking a strawberry malted milk. When we got outside, my mother warned me not to drink out of the glasses in Ma’s, that I could catch infantile paralysis from them. That my mother didn’t like his mother made me think his mother was right about Ma punching pinholes in them and I never bought another after that.
I bought lots of packs of Play Ball cards and quite a few Horrors of War cards too although at the time I was more interested in baseball than war. Today people sell Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio cards and The Retreat From Nanking card for thousands of dollars, but I didn’t keep any of them.
Up until a few months after Pearl Harbor, you got two two-and-a-half inch wide, three-and-an eighth inch high Play Ball Cards and a pink sheet of bubble gum for a penny. When the War came, they claimed they needed the bubble gum rubber and the cardstock for the War effort and penny candy disappeared. Instead of spending our pennies at Ma’s we saved them up and bought ten and twenty-five cent War Stamps that you pasted in little books. At some point Ma’s Junk Shop disappeared, but I don’t remember when. I had transferred to P.S. 6 on Madison by then and didn’t pass Eighty-Ninth and Amsterdam any more.
We all felt part of the War effort back then. We knew how many stamps we had to buy for different calibers of bullets, how many for a hand grenade and for different sizes of bombs. If all the kids at our school bought one ten cent stamp a week we knew how long it would take to buy a tank or a fighter plane. We collected newspapers and scrap metal and had rationing and meatless Tuesdays and Fridays. If boys a got into trouble they took him out of carpentry and put him into the knitting class and he had to learn to knit six inch woolen squares for blankets.
It gave you a good feeling to think you were helping fight the War. They should have done that during Korea and Viet Nam. During Iraq too. It would have made people feel more a part of things than telling them to forget about the war and go shopping.
To be continued
Herb L.
oldtimewriter. com