Retail

If I had a nickel for every time I'd gotten my ears boxed by Woody or Sam I would have had the biggest stash of comic books, penny candy and Pat's sodas that money could buy. Because that's what I would have spent those nickels on. If you wanted your nose tweaked or maybe your ears twisted, then Woody's was the place to go. That's the way they operated at Woody's. You didn't even have to step out of line to get teased, bopped, or get punked in some way. But we kept coming back for more. The place was in our blood.

Woodrow W. Wittman, along with his brother Sam, operated the store on the corner a few doors down from my house. Sam, whose real name was Harry, worked as the butcher. I remember Woody Wittman as a short stubby man with thinning hair usually working the counter. Sam, a bigger man, could be found behind the refrigerated meat case in the back of the store. Both wore white aprons all day long. In fact, I can only recall seeing either of them without the aprons but a handful of times, usually when closing up at night. They worked long days, and the neighborhood counted on them to be open those long hours. This was, of course, a time when supermarkets and the like were rare, and the people in my area did most of their grocery shopping at the corner store. In my assessment, of the seven or so corner groceries in town Wittman's was the premier stand-out, the apex of local small town groceries.

It was crowded as hell in there. The way Gertrude and Leo Stein filled their tiny two-room Paris apartment with Picassos, Cezannes, and Mattisses, that's the way canned goods huddled in masses along the aisles of his store. Many items just ended up stacked on the floor due to lack of shelf space.

Adult customers with legitimate adult needs waited in line at the counter to be checked out, but I would not be daunted when I deliberated over which particular penny candy would fit my mood that day. I was partial to the blocks of fudge. A man has to eat, I told myself. Such was my craving. I could see Woody getting impatient, and he wanted to get to his other customers, and in retribution for the delay he would pop me in the face with the butt end of a loaf of bread. As customers, us kids weren't always right, but we were tolerated.

I watch on ESPN some little Asian guy eating, what? some forty hot dogs. Diminutive women putting down more whatever than big, brawny hee-men. In our age of excess, we've supersized ourselves right out of our clothing, and the new frontier of excess seems to be food. The drink part was conquered a long time ago... by Jim Murtaugh.

The Pat's sodas were nestled in Woody's chest-like cooler in a pool of ice cold water. They hung suspended from a metal rack in there. It was the drink of choice, and at a nickel a bottle it was a third of the price of a Coke. Murtaugh probably urinated pure Pat's soda. They say that about ninety-five percent of our bodies are made up of water. In Murtaugh's case, about fifty percent of that was Pat's soda. I'm certain of it.

Woody initiated the contest, calling out to everyone who ever sat on the cooler, "Who could drink the most Pat's sodas?" Excitement ran high. Perched on top of the cooler, we'd discuss in hushed tones the merits of particular contestants, who were mostly high schoolers, elders to us. There were certain favorites, of course, guys who played football, strong athletic types, guys who had to keep their honor intact only by putting down a cooler full of soft drink. They were also the guys who had enough money to pull off the stunt. Us younger kids were always broke, for the most part, and had to sit on the sidelines. I can't recall just how many Pat's were imbibed by Murtaugh, but it was announced that, henceforth, Pat's would be renamed Murtaugh's.

It was said that one reason Woody had such a devoted customer base dated back to the Depression when he was one of the only stores in town to offer credit. This elevated him to a kind of sainthood around town. It gave him the edge over the other seven or so corner stores in town. It must have been that Depression mentality that caused Woody to deliberate over money in an almost compulsive, fixated way.

Today, in this age of fancy finance and derivatives followed by expletives, we say "Show me the money. No, really, Show me the money", because we don't know where it is.

This wouldn't have happened to Woody. He was the quintessential analog guy. He didn't just pinch pennies; he pinched dollar bills too when he was giving out change for your purchase. He punished a dollar bill. Dollars were tangible things, and in his card-dealer hands they were made to do magic. His method for giving out change: Take the bill between your thumb and forefinger-- you'll need a strong grip for this-- and squeeze till you wring every last bit of value out of it. Then snap it and repeat this in rapid succession. The snapping part is the key to separating sticky bills. You can try this at home when separating new bills or any paper products that are stuck together. He did this as a reflexive action like a dog shaking off a wet coat, and it kept him from ever giving out extra dollars to his customers.

He'd pull a nearly worn down number two pencil from behind his ear and go over your receipt with you, putting a check mark next to each line item, once, then twice over the top of first mark before going on to the next line item. And he'd do this with each item, matching it with the actual merchandise on the counter. He'd reach across the counter and do it in front of you, getting right up in your face to assure that you were paying attention, to get your verification that, yes, indeed this was a true accounting. Sometimes he'd put the tip of the pencil in his mouth before getting started. Like the bluesman's craft, it was all built upon repetition, call and response, and improvisation at just the right moment. Of course, this took a bit of time. It was not for the quick in-and-out convenience customer of today. We would not rush him. We understood Woody and his extreme theatrical ways. We knew he had to do this.

When it came time to leave, Woody would call out, "How many Murtaughs did you have?" or "How much brunch?" Brunch he called it, way before the swanky restaurants, and then the family restaurants, adopted the term. It sounded to us kids like such a hip term to use. We'd readily own up to the amount of Murtaughs and Tastycakes and then scramble for enough coins to pay for the lot.

Tips didn't need to scramble much though, at least for awhile, because his parents had a credit account at Woody's tallied in one of those small receipt pads stacked behind the counter with all the other customer credit accounts, and Tips would just tap into it. Woody rang up the purchases, no questions asked. That was until Tips's mom brought the hammer down on Tips and Woody and put a stop to the illegitimate transactions. From then on Tips had to lead a hard scrabble life like the rest of us. He was crestfallen like a dog when you've taken away his bone. (Dogs always had real bones back then, by the way, not these fabricated toy things.)

I'd been paying for my snack treats with cash earned from saving soda bottles for the deposits or collecting newspapers that could be turned in for cash. On Saturdays, we'd fill up the trunk of my dad's car with newsprint and drive it to the dump. And sporadically there was the allowance from my parents. But, if truth be told, I was also a silent partner from time to time in getting stuff on Tips's credit line.

There was always this slightly unsavory aspect to Woody's which we, as kids, liked. We liked it a lot. The code word for illegal firecrackers was simply, "Crackers". You'd go to the back of the store where Sam did the butchering and ask for "crackers", and that's all there was to it. You got your firecrackers, Sam and Woody got their payment and everybody went home happy. While it was a grocery store in the main, there was so much more to be gotten there.

Small hardware items could be found. Behind the counter, next to a gallery of wallet-sized photos of local high schoolers, on shelves way up high, there were little boxes of things coated with dust in packaging from another era, waiting for that one lucky customer to come in looking for just that one brand of pipe cleaner or something else. A kind word for the stuff would be classic. Woody and Sam just didn't work the shelves. I don't think they knew how. To them, there was money to be made up there on those forgotten shelves, and they'd be damned if they were going to miss out on it. If didn't sell, there was an innate faith that someday it would. It wasn't going to be replaced with the next big thing. The next big thing would just be crammed in alongside of the antiquated merchandise.

I bought my first James Bond paperbacks from a wire spinning rack by the door. James Bond was my graduation from the wholesome Hardy Boys, and the seeming adult nature of the Bond books spoke volumes to me.

But I'd read anything I could get my hands on. I'd sit on the floor in front of the comic book shelves, reading. Woody would call out, "Out of the libe!" ("Libe" being short for library.) I surmised that this was as close to a real library that Woody would ever get, seeing as how I'd hardly ever spot him outside of his store... ever. I vaguely remember some sort of signalling system the brothers had set up when Woody was too busy at the counter to police the comic book section. I'd be staunchly trying to finish reading another page or two when Sam like a ghost with his white butcher's apron would make a surgical strike, sneaking up behind me to clamp onto either or both of my ears and twist. Then, chastened, I'd get up off the floor, settle my account, and leave, only to return the next day to start the whole cycle over again.

Occasionally, I would indeed buy some of those comic books. It's where I got my first issues of Sargeant Fury and His Howling Commandos and many Classics Illustrated. I think I was Woody's only customer for the Classics Illustrated, which was the gold in the otherwise pulpish world of comics that attracted most kids. Classics Illustrated was my only acquaintance with certain oldtimey fiction like Call of the Wild and Two Years Before the Mast.

Kids just couldn't stay away from the place. Even on Sunday mornings. I had to go to church in those early years, but a lot of others didn't, I guess. So Woody's got to be their church. Woody called it Mass, and throughout the week took a poll to see who was coming to Mass. That was where the Pat's flowed like wine, and it was not lost on us kids how much a Tastycake could reasonably double for the wafer-like host that was handed out in church.

Woody and Sam had a following, no doubt about it. Just as customers were devoted to Woody and Sam, they returned the devotion, staying open long hours every day, never taking a day off, except for Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was said, that Woody, after selling the store, could still be seen working there for the new owners. Like us, he just couldn't keep away from the place. That was in the seventies, I think. Woody and Sam would live on for at least another twenty years. I had since moved out of town, so my encounters with the two and their corner store have had to exist only in memory.

Sam died December 11, 1997 at the age of 83. Seventeen days later Woody, at 85, was dead. Though I don't know if this is true, I could imagine the two brothers buried next to each other up on a hill overlooking a landscape dotted with K-Marts, Targets and supermarkets of all kinds. Their identical headstones would be engraved "RIP" (Retail In Peace).

Z-Brick

They called it Z-Brick. We called it a miracle. It could transform a house or any building of your choice from a simple structure to one with a fancy pseudo-brick facade that looked just wonderful. It was rough but elegant. It looked like a million white chocolate Zero bars stacked on top of one another.

The most popular color in our town was white with grey mortar lines, even though real brick wasn't even that color. It doesn't matter. Nobody ever questioned why artificial Christmas trees were silver. This was fantasy, not reality, anyway.

White was the color our neighbors, the Longenhagens, chose. We went to see it. It was kind of a house warming, but only on the outside... to view the new Z-Brick. We didn't go indoors; there was too much going on outside. The grown-ups stood on the front porch discussing the ins and outs of the material, How was it applied? How long did it take to accomplish? Was it guaranteed? Was it patented? Why Z-Brick? And the big question: how much did it cost? Just in general terms, of course, because it was considered rude and obnoxious to ask someone how much they exactly paid for something. They circled around that question, hungry for details.

Annie Gillespie, Tips's mom, treaded closest to asking the dreaded question of Z-Brick pricing. She said she would go to town and get some Z-Brick for her own house. She always prefaced her announcements with the phrase "go to town" or some variant thereof, as in, "I'm going to go to town and clean the house". I think she invented the phrase, just like she popularized the word "machine" when referring to her car. Actually, she might have been the only person to call an automobile "the machine". She was right on the money in her evaluation of the Z-Brick, I could tell, as she cast her fashion-conscious eye on the facade. And as it turned out, a couple of years later, when the Longenhagens moved out, she moved in, and the Z-Brick house became her own. She was no longer eaten up with envy.

The adults continued their searching inquiries about the pseudo-brick substance just put on the house. The house looked new, I had to admit, but nobody wanted to hear the assessment of a five year old. My dad, being in the building trade himself, moonlighting after work as a carpenter, took keen interest in the transformation. He cast his deft eye upon the structure and deemed it was good. The house, in actuality, might not be recognizable to the casual passerby, a definite drawback, as I saw it. Someone might wonder, wasn't that house made of cinder block? (Some called it Hollywood block, but I didn't see how it had anything to do with Hollywood. Z-Brick though really was Hollywood through and through, not that other junk that was underneath it.) It might confuse company when they dropped by. Company was always dropping by, especially on Sundays.

We'd seen Z-Brick before, in the city, I think. It's not like we just got off the boat, you know. (Just got off the boat. We said that frequently.) But Z-Brick was new, it was sassy, it said to the world "We're happening". There wasn't much of it in Catasauqua at that point in time, but my prediction that everybody was going to want this on their home really did come true in the coming years. In time, every other house, it seemed, had a Z-Brick facelift. It got to the point when even real brick was held suspect, and it was, despite its authenticity, looked upon unfavorably next to Z-Brick, its big time cousin. People said real brick paled in comparison. They pointed to its dinginess, that it somehow wasn't bright enough, that it just didn't stack up to the new space age material. Z-Brick, on the other hand, was everything real brick was not. It was brighter alright, and it was a lot thinner too. The Longenhagens had gotten in on the ground floor, at least in our town, and they were proud as Marines.

Mr. Longenhagen was irresponsible. He left his hammer and screwdrivers outside, and they got all rusty surviving many rainstorms. Tips and I were getting awfully bored listening to all the laudatory comments about the plaster-ish stuff with glitter embedded in it. What did they know about Z-Brick? We'd get to the bottom of it with some real hands-on experience. We went around to the back of the house, and that's where we found the hammer and screwdrivers next to a shed.

The guys who invented popcorn ceilings must have ripped out a couple of pages from the Z-Brick manual. It was just that amazing, like constellations of glitter. I thought that Elvis might have Z-Brick stuff in his stage outfits. We were going to investigate further to see what was inside the Z-Brick to make it so wondrous. We had to do a biopsy.

The essence of Z-Brick was locked in mystery like the Coke formula or MacDonald's sauce. I wondered about the twelve different ways Wonderbread would strengthen my bones. I was a pawn in the marketing game that was all around me. But here, right here, was a chance to get to the bottom of one of those great mysteries. Our experiment on the back side of Longenhagen's house was going to change things around here.

Hand me the hammer, Tips. And a screwdriver. We'll need to chip away some of this, very delicately now, so as not to disturb the surrounding area but still enough to give us a good core sample. It wasn't every day that you could get a unique opportunity to study a building material such as this, and I was furthering my construction skills at the same time. We would just remove a layer one brick wide, maybe two... or three. I worked feverishly with Tips at my side. There was no better sidekick than Tips, who was up for any kind of adventure, and he had just the right amount of curiosity to make this work. He joined in, chipping away.

It got to be fun, so we continued on into the night until we had a pretty wide swath chipped away, exposing the underlying blocks in an unseemly way. I hoped it would be worth all the trouble it took to examine this more closely as I'd already skinned my knuckles on it and almost hit my thumb with the hammer. I actually hit my brother's thumb with a hammer once accidentally, and boy, did he yowl, so I did not want that to happen to me. Especially not now in the middle of our research.

I am forced to admit that what we found might be considered dull and mundane to some. The glitter was just on the surface. So much for integrity, you might say. But it really was just a surface thing, this Z-Brick. You could pick at it all day long, how it was just a half-inch thick, how it was fake. But this was one of those rare cases when fake, for lack of a better word, was good. Besides, those thousands of households who had Z-Brick couldn't all be wrong. And there were thousands more who wished they had it. I rest my case.

Just as we were finishing up, me and Tips, the grown-ups came around the corner to the back of the house and began yelling at us. They didn't get the gravity of our quest. We wanted to understand Z-Brick in a way no other kids had done. We caught hell anyway. They tore the tools from our hands, they grounded us, called us names. I think Tips got hit also. We feared for our lives. We were made to vow that we would never do this again. Why would we? We'd gotten all we could out of this, and now it was time to move on to the next big thing.

The Z-Brick chipping was fun afterall, and it was certainly something for my mental scrapbook, which wasn't too full yet at this stage of my life. The Z-Brick caper, as I began to call it, had emboldened me to visit our other neighbor in the alley to check out the iron balls he had embedded into the concrete of his driveway to strengthen it. In the spirit of Z-Brick, whenever I got the chance, I would go out there and dislodge a few. The iron balls were the size of marbles, and in time I amassed quite a collection of them. I'd upgraded my tool set, adding a cold chisel to my arsenal. I'd work under the cover of darkness. I'd tell no one of my exploits. But in the end, this eventually got me into a peck of trouble too, just like my first love, chiseling Z-Brick.