Going uptown

Living in a city like Wichita, we had stores of different kinds scattered here and there all over town. We didn't have any shopping malls at all, not the big ones we have today with all the indoor corridors and all. Seems we had a few "strip malls"---a few stores built together under one roof that you had to access from the front sidewalk. Usually these were like a grocery store and a drugstore type of building. For serious shopping we went uptown!!

Oh, how I loved going uptown to shop. There were block after block of all different kinds of stores. All of these stores had gigantic storefront windows, almost as big as the front of their store. The real impressive ones were on a corner so had two windows of this size. They were exceptionally fun to look at during the Christmas season because of the elaborate holiday displays they all had. All the santa's and elves, reindeer and toys all moving, doing their own thing!! We would walk around and watch all of them--it was so awesome! We would be all bundled up for the cold, and our little cheeks and noses would be so red. We would take some time out from window shopping to do our actual Christmas gift shopping. Then of course we would have to stop someplace to warm up with a cup of hot chocolate.

We had Woolworth's dimestore (often called the five and dime). Im not sure why, because you couldn't buy much of anything in there for that price. We had drugstores with luncheon counters, shoe stores (Kinney's comes to mind, but we had more than that). Department stores were abundant. We had Sears, Penney's and Montgomery Wards (yes they have been around since the early fifties). Mom always call Montgomery Wards---Monkey Wards. Why I do not know, I don'tknow if that if something clever she came up with herself or if it is just what they called it back then. Kind of like calling Walmart---Wallyworld!! And no---we did not have Walmart, Kmart or Target. We had no dollar stores.

We had a least one movie theatre uptown. It was called "The Orpheum" and we could go to a movie, get popcorn or a candybar plus a soda all for less than fifty cents. There were a couple other theatres uptown too but I can't remember their names.