I grew up in Sebastopol, CA, in the 1950s, the last remaining town in Northern California with a working railroad train going down Main Street.
With a lack of shopping establishments, we had to drive 7 miles to Santa Rosa to shop.
It's interesting how our perception of distance has evolved. What used to be a half-hour drive over bumpy country roads at 30 miles an hour in a stick shift Buick is now accomplished in 7 minutes on a blazing freeway in our air-conditioned hybrid Lexus.
We only went to town to shop for school clothes, Christmas presents, or Easter dresses and shoes. Finding a dress for Grandma often took most of the afternoon, going from shop to shop, trying on numerous dresses, and checking prices.
My favorite thing about shopping day was Penny’s Department Store. Penny’s had a modern pneumatic tube system used for payment.
The saleslady would ring up our merchandise at a cash register, but she had no cash drawer. She would write a receipt and place our money into a container, then put it into a pneumatic tube system. With a “shoosh,” the container would be sucked through the clear plastic tube system, and I could watch it move across the ceiling to a cashier with a cash drawer sitting behind a glass office on the second floor. She had a separate tube for each cash register below. She would take the money from the container, place our change and a copy of our receipt back into the tube, and send it whooshing back through the tube system. It would make its way back across the ceiling and “plunk” into the tray behind our saleslady. She would open the tube and return our change and receipt. This process took about 5 minutes to reach the cash office, to be processed, and returned to the customer.
No one had thought up a shopping mall yet, so the stores we wished to patronize were often a block or two apart. At noon, after walking from store to store, carrying our packages, we stopped at the Kress’s fountain for “a bite to eat,’ which usually meant hot turkey sandwiches. Finally, mid-afternoon, exhausted, each of us hauling big shopping bags filled with our day's purchases, we would hike back to the car.
Daddy would come in from a hard day’s work of building houses all day. His red-checked shirt, tan coveralls, and boots were usually covered with sawdust. I know how much he must have hated Mama’s inevitable words that followed. “We stopped at Kress’s today for a ‘bite to eat’, so we’re just going to have a light supper tonight!”
Daddy was a meat-and-potatoes man, but on shopping days, when we stopped for a ‘bite to eat’ at Kress’s, it meant Mama wouldn’t be fixing a big dinner. Daddy had to contend with soup and a sandwich. I don’t suppose he ever went to bed hungry, but he didn’t always get his meat and potatoes, especially on shopping days with Grandma.
In recent years, fixing a “light supper” because I stopped for a “bite to eat” at the mall is a memory I share with family. They have come to know the phrase from my all-day shopping adventures with Grandma and Mama; memories of long ago that I will never forget.
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