the old haunts

We had two Murphy locations in Gadsden at one time. We had the one downtown on Broad Street and the one at Agricola Shopping Center on 12th Street. I remember going to the Agricola location because dad frequented that location more than the one downtown. It's probably because it was a location that was a little more wheelchair accessible (in a time when things weren't wheelchair accessible).

We didn't have Walmart, Kmart, or the mall back then. I remember going to Murphy's more than any other store. Dad would often take me down there, just the two of us and have a BLT or club sandwich at the grill. They had a nice grill back then - nice people too! The picture above isn't taken from the Gadsden location but looked very much like the image above. To get a taste of that moment in time, venture down to Gadsden Variety Store downtown Gadsden (Broad Street). They've got a pretty good deli there.

I do remember Mason's. That was the first big department store I'd ever been in. Dad, Mom, and I went to the Mason's in Anniston before the one opened up in Gadsden. Do any of you remember the huge HUGE slide in front of Mason's? Of course you do. It was such a mamoth ride that it seemed as though it would take five minutes to reach the bottom.

One of my favorite stores to go to was Grants downtown. They had a nice toy department downstairs. My old Junior High math teacher Tommy Parks told me once that he used to man the popcorn machine that was situated down the staircase. Wasn't there a Grants at Agricola for a while too? I think so.

Of course the real place to find toys was Sears & Roebuck at Christmas time. Sears was downtown before the mall opened and I remembered it having a great candy counter upstairs as well. My mother-inlaw, Mrs. Betty Hale, used to work at that counter.

Eventually the Gadsden Mall came around and seemed to suck the life from downtown Gadsden. People didn't want to see the open sky between store visits when the mall was built. Both Sears and J.C. Penney relocated there and a lot of shops faded into memory. Both Sears and Penneys never seemed the same after that move. I loved the old variety stores of that time. They seemed so big in their day but dwarf in size when compared to the supercenters of today. I remember those trips downtown with my older brother. We'd hit every five & dime, and every toy department on Broad.