Sears was Wal Mart

They say smells can trigger memories that are more powerful and vivid than the usual ones.

Walking down stairs today at work, I must have smelled something - no clue what - that took me back about 50 years - yep maybe 50.

Let's go back to the days of "I like Ike", those sentimental 50s.

Even a big city like Dallas didn't have shopping malls. We had some neighborhood shopping centers - populated by an A&P, a drugstore (where you could sit at the counter and order dinner, lunch - whatever), a shoe store (where I ended up working during college) and S.S. Kresge but nothing like the large complexes of today. And you had to park somewhere and walk outside to each store and then out again to the next. Imagine that!

Dallas had a big downtown area where the upper-class stores and hotels were kept. A Sanger store which later became Sanger-Harris. Neiman-Marcus. Funny but in more than 20 years of living in Dallas I never once went into Neiman-Marcus. I finally visited a few years ago but by then it was just another multi-level department store that seemed to have an abundance of make-up counters.

But a mile or so south of downtown in a more industrial part of the city, stood a mammoth reddish-brick building. It was called Sears & Roebuck. And for reasons incomprehensible today, it was only open late on Thursday nights. It may have been open on Monday evenings too but I'm not sure of that.

It seems like we went there often on Thursdays. Probably once a month at least. My memory of those visits was triggered today by some smell. My favorite part of those visits was the candy counter. One of those where you bought candy by the ounce. You could get almost anything you wanted but my favorite were peanut clusters. Those chunks of melted and then re-hardened chocolate wrapped around peanuts. I was usually allowed to buy 25 cents worth which in the pre-inflation 50s got me 2,3 or sometimes 4 pieces of candy! For a young man of less than 10 years this was wonderful! I didn't get much in the way of treats or candy. Not sure if it was for health reasons or simply we didn't have that much money. But I could almost always count on peanut clusters at Sears & Roebucks. It wasn't just Sears back then.

Can you imagine any kid of today waxing nostalgic for Wal Mart in 50 years?