My mother was telling me a nostalgic story this morning about her childhood, when the neighborhood revolved around Stypa’s store. Back in her time, the corner store was the hub steering the entire neighborhood across generations and ethnic lines, and there was an abundance of all of those.
The children took pleasure in the penny candy, in the days when a penny got you a handful of selections and you wouldn’t think of having a bagful all to yourself. The men visited the store for tobacco and the basement pool table. The women picked up their sundries.
It was also the only place with a phone. Everybody gave out the phone number of the pay phone in Stypa’s store, and when a call came in for a resident, either the owner’s daughter or a neighborhood child would run to the recipient’s home to announce it (and the runner–if it wasn’t the daughter–would receive a nickel).
Neighborhoods were more unified in those days, in spite of a multitude of languages, probably because socioeconomic status was equal in those neighborhoods; everybody cherished the value in a penny when you could get five pieces of candy for one of them.
Our elders can still smile at the memories of penny candy, soft pretzel wagons and cones of yum yum. They remember keeping a bucket handy to retrieve the manure left on the street by the passing wagon horses (great for the rose bushes), and watching for the occasional bonus ice chips which fell off the ice wagon during deliveries (back when a block of ice kept your freezer cold), and which could cool off a summer day in the absence of money for yum yum.
The generation with those memories are nearing the end of their time on this earth, and we don’t always listen to their stories with much interest. That’s a shame. If we ever see an ice wagon or food of any kind for a penny, it will probably be under much different circumstances.
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