W.T. Grant’s – Lee Duigon

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When my mother shopped at Newberry’s in the 1950s, she often treated me to one of those wonderful wax dinosaurs by the Miller Company. A lot of towns had J.J. Newberry department stores.

I haven’t seen one in donkey’s years; and it’s not only Newberry’s that I don’t see around anymore. Several classic department stores have vanished from the landscape.

E.J. Korvette’s–great sporting goods department, I got my Wally Moon baseball glove there. Two Guys from Harrison: their pet department seemed to have trouble keeping the birds in their cages, which always fascinated me. Woolworth’s. Surely you had a Woolworth’s somewhere nearby. And W.T. Grant’s. As a child, these stores looked big to me; but I guess you’d have to call them medium-sized department stores. Or even small department stores.

Where have they gone? Replaced, I suppose, by Target and Wal-Mart. Replaced by the malls: who needs a not-that-big department store, when a mall offers you a whole bunch of specialty stores all under one roof?

Is Bamberger’s still in existence somewhere?

I enjoyed them all. Newberry’s had the best toys, and great Halloween stuff–what you’d expect from a chain that started out as a bunch of five-and-ten-cent stores– Two Guys the best pet department, and Woolworth’s the best candy. They weren’t so big as to be intimidating. You can practically hitch-hike from one department to another at Wal-Mart. Sometimes big is too big. Some of the big stores today seem like they could double as hangars at an airport. I never got that feeling at Newberry’s. But the last Newberry’s store, Wikipedia tells me, closed its doors in 2001.

And oh, for some Howard Johnson’s ice cream!

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Today in New Jersey it’s almost impossible to own a gun legally. That, of course, doesn’t stop criminals and psychos who don’t obey the gun laws from committing crimes with guns. But just try telling that to a liberal.

When I was a boy, if you wanted a gun, you just walked into a store and bought one. You could even mail-order one from Sears Roebuck. I remember the gun displays in the sporting goods sections of several big department stores–E.J. Korvett’s, W.T. Grant, 2 Guys From Harrison. My Uncle Ferdie bought his .22 rifle at Korvett’s. Set up a target range in his basement and sometimes let us, his nephews, have a go at it.

You just bought the gun if you wanted one, and nobody felt threatened, nobody expected you to shoot anyone. There was literally no such thing as a “school shooting.” People would have had no idea what you were talking about.

Then along came the 1960s, when the Left took control of our society and corrupted it. Today that corruption is in full bloom. And one of the things we have to show for it is mindless violence. Like school shootings. But Democrats see this as their ideal opportunity to accomplish something they’ve long desired–the total disarmament of law-abiding American citizens. So they swear to us that if we just let them take away the guns, everything will be peaches ‘n’ cream.

It’s the moral corruption, the unfocused rage, and the sheer Godlessness of it all that really does the killing. But don’t ask liberals to get rid of those things, because they’re the ones that have put them there.