Thirty-Seven Cents Used to Buy a Whole Afternoon of Freedom |
Armed with sticky coins and absolute freedom, we stood before the glass cases of neighborhood corner stores to build carefully calculated portfolios of pure sugar. |
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News for the America we remember |
Thirty-seven cents felt heavy in the pocket of my corduroy pants. It was a Tuesday in the late summer of 1971, and I had earned this small fortune by returning empty glass soda bottles found in the weeds behind the Little League field. My destination was Miller's Corner Store, a dim, narrow building that smelled eternally of floor wax, ripe bananas, and old newsprint. I pushed open the screen door, hearing the familiar squeak of the spring and the dull thud of the wood frame shutting behind me. I bypassed the comic books and the coolers entirely. I was there for the glass case at the front register. |
Miller's was not a place of brightly lit aisles. It was cramped, dusty, and operated by Mr. Miller, a man who seemed ancient to me at the time, permanently clad in a gray apron over a white dress shirt. He stood behind the counter, leaning on his forearms, waiting for the neighborhood kids to make their agonizing decisions. The glass case beneath his elbows was a treasury of loose sugar, divided into small cardboard boxes and clear plastic bins. This was the penny candy counter, and approaching it was a solemn ritual of youth. |
The first step of the ritual was the mental math. I stood with my nose inches from the smudged glass, calculating combinations. Some items were purely a penny a piece. Others were two for a penny. Premium items might cost a nickel. I had to keep a running tally in my head, knowing that if I miscalculated and overspent by even one cent, I would face the ultimate humiliation of putting a single Swedish Fish back in its bin. |
I always started with the wax soda bottles. They were called Nik-L-Nips, though we just called them wax bottles. For a nickel, you got a small row of miniature, translucent wax jugs filled with fluorescent liquid that tasted vaguely like fruit and entirely like chemicals. The procedure was precise. You bit the top off the wax bottle, drank the three drops of syrup inside, and then chewed the leftover wax like a terrible, crumbling chewing gum until it lost all flavor |
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