COLLECTING, THE RESCUE OF THINGS, AND THE HUMAN

6 7 R C O L L E C T I N G , T H E R E S C U E O F T H I N G S , A N D T H E H U M A N N O Ë L V A L I S In my senior year of high school, the Woolworth’s in Toms River, New Jersey, closed. At least this is the year I think it closed. I recall it that way because it seemed that nearly all my friends were there, picking over the sale items, rummaging through the bins. I had never seen so many classmates in one place outside of school. Woolworth’s was on Main Street – because all the Woolworth’s were on Main Street. Once a year, usually just before the start of school, there was a special night when everything was discounted at 10, sometimes even 20 percent, in an era when discounts were few. People waited all year for this sale. So maybe this was just an annual sale. But there was a heightened feeling, a kind of drama, that remains with me, and whether it was that day or another day when Woolworth’s closed, it meant something. A spin-o√ from the general store, the first Woolworth’s opened in 1879. By the 1950s the Woolworth stores were an institution . Practically every town with a population over eight thousand had a Red Front. It was the original five-and-dime, ‘‘everybody ’s store,’’ where nearly everything was the same low price and the merchandise was no longer hidden away but available and on display for the customer. 6 8 V A L I S Y And it was heaven for children. If you were small, the thing you saw, and heard, first was the scrubbed wooden floors because they creaked. The only other place in Toms River in the 1950s that creaked was Berry’s Hardware, a relic of the previous century, whose back faced the river and where deliveries at one time were made by boat. Mr. Berry, who by the 1950s, was Mr. Berry’s son, displayed his nails, screws, and hinges in the traditional wooden bins you can still find every so often. But the Woolworth bins were a world unto themselves, each one filled with di√erent items: tiny plastic toys, candy cigarettes, marbles, tops, erasers, barrettes, rings, and red wax lips for Halloween. The glorious colors and the exquisite clink of cascading marbles, which mostly boys played with, induced a trancelike feeling in me, and the track of time disappeared. Even though I didn’t collect marbles, the Woolworth bins were a child’s dream, an embryonic collection in the making. In handling the cool, gleaming surface of these objects and hearing the gentle clink-clink, I had already imagined having them in a box or a drawer, tucked away nestlike. For in the moment that you see, hear, and touch something, the idea of collecting is already there; it preexists the collection itself. Woolworth’s was also like a series of scenes and seasons, with objects appropriate to each one. For Christmas, anxiously clutching two dollars, I bought Evening in Paris cologne for my mother (who loved Chanel No. 5, but exclaimed joyously when she saw the cobalt-blue bottle), Schra√t’s candies, Irish linen handkerchiefs, and a tie for my father that joined the woeful rack of other ties he never wore. Easter meant baskets, which my mother always prepared , but millions of people bought the Woolworth Easter baskets . These, I have since learned, were hand filled by Woolworth employees, who, as Karen Plunkett-Powell points out in Remembering Woolworth’s, also decorated the chocolate eggs and other edible novelties. For a dollar you could buy a friendship ring. This was a serious investment, because for a dollar you could also get twenty chocolate bars, or five pizzas and cokes, or play twenty games of pinball, or so my brother calculated in the third or fourth grade. You could buy parakeets, turtles, and at Easter baby chicks in the Pet Department . And every Woolworth’s had a luncheonette, where the counter girls were either eighteen...