I was watching the great DUCK SOUP tonight, and I was struck by one of Groucho's funnier lines; the spy Chicolini (played by Chico Marx) is on trial for treason. Groucho recommends that he get "ten years in Leavenworth or eleven years in Twelveworth. Or five and ten in Woolworth's."That sort of wordplay was commonplace in a Marx Brothers movie, but I have to explain almost all the references to my children; in the case of that one, because Woolworth's went out of business, or at least declined in the 80s, then changed itself into a sporting goods company renamed Venator.
The whole notion of a five and dime seems like a 19th century concept to my children, but of course I remember them--and we had not only a Woolworths in my town, but a Ben Franklin. Remember Ben Franklins?
I wonder what phenomena my sons will have to explain to their own children?
18 comments:
I used to shop in Woolworth's in Rochester, New York not so long ago and on my way back to visit family in Pennsylvania I used to pass by a Ben Franklin in Towanda, PA which is still there for all I now. I forget what the five and ten was near my parents' house when I was a kid though. We never called it anything but the five and ten store.
We also had a store called Goldblatt's. Was that a national chain? It was around for the longest time, and then suddenly it was gone.
"I wonder what phenomena my sons will have to explain to their own children?"
The internet?
You might be pleased to hear Woolworths is alive and well, as the dominant supermarket chain in Australia.
And I guess it's still big in Britain, as well. It's only the U.S. chain that petered out.
Gary, are you telling us the internet will be gone in 20 years? Where will it go?
In it's current form, I expect the internet will be gone. It'll be either strictly controlled by governments, so you need a unique ID like an e-passport to connect, or else it will be so integrated into all devices you don't notice it's there.
If we were having this conversation 30 years ago, someone might say, "You mean we won't all be walking around with a personal CB radio?"
Wow! I am internet naive; I imagined it would go on forever, just broadening into other universes.
You're a good man to know for these glimpses of the future.
Julia, in trusting my predictive powers, you probably need to know that when seeing MySpace for the first time, I said, "Who in their right mind would want to use that?"
I still say that. :)
We still have a Ben Franklin here in our town.
Explaining to children. Just yesterday I was explaining the origin of "cc" in email to my daughter. She had trouble grasping just what carbon paper was & how we typed carbon copies. She's used a typewriter so it wasn't like she was totally lost, but the concept was difficult for her to understand.
Yeah--some of the stuff we once did seems ancient even to me--but to them it must seem incomprehensible and without context.
Nice to know there are still Ben Franklins around--what part of the US are you in?
I am reminded of Andrew Sarris' observation apropos of the Marx Brothers' far lesser status as movie artists than Chaplin or Keaton (and, I think, even Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon). They were of lesser stature, Sarris said, because they did not direct their own movies and thus control their own parts in the scripts: They didn't get the girl, which may seem minor but accounts for their falling short of major importance as film artists.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
And yet they make me laugh harder than Keaton or Chaplin do. Chaplin generally makes me sad with his existential pieces.
The Marx Brothers gave the world countless classic routines and great lines but no great movies. Keaton, on the other hand, did, and Chaplin, too.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Their movies would be much better with tighter plots and less singing and dancing.
That's right. They would have been better has the Marx Brothers had the power and the talent to create their own movies rather than be deployed as just one more concession to popular taste.
I have just mentioned this post to my boss, an expert on department stores who gave me a short history of Goldblatt's.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Julia,
In re Goldblatt's: Goldblatt Bros. was a Chicago-based chain that started as a neighborhood department store on Chicago Avenue but eventually bought a State Street location that had been A.M. Rothschild (not Maurice Rothschild, which was a different company) before the previous Great Depression. Goldblatt's had stores all over the city and throughout Chicagoland -- I know as far east as South Bend and Benton Harbor, I am pretty sure up to Racine or Kenosha; how far west I don't know.
They appealed to a blue-collar clientele. In Indiana there were downtown Goldblatt's in Hammond (the former Kaufmann & Wolf Lion Store) and Gary. But starting in the 1950s they were one of the first department store chains to move to shopping centers.
In the late 1960s, I believe, Goldblatt's bought H.P. Wasson & Co., a store in Indianapolis with branches in nearby cities. Wasson's had not been as downmarket a store, and Goldblatt's either didn't know how to run it as that or didn't want to, making it a lower-end store that didn't have much appeal in central Indiana. But the last Goldblatt's in Chicago limped on until 2000.
Federal's in Detroit, Alexander's in New York, and Jefferson in Miami were the same sort of operations, if any of this blog's readers remember them. But none of them was national, including Goldblatt's.
David Sullivan
Peter Rozovsky's colleague
Thank you, David! This was most edifying. Did Alexander's, Federal's, and Jefferson share the same fate as did Goldblatt's?
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