N E W   D E A L   N E T W O R K

Conservation in Context
The Evander Childs High School Murals Project

Return to The Bridge Index

The Store (Prize Essay)

Florence Match
April 1939

From earliest childhood I remember the store as being the most important topic of conversation and thought among us. It has always interfered with us. It is like a small child in the family that never grew up and so must always have the most attention. It is part of us. We can't escape from it.

I was born in a three-room apartment in back of a store we owned at that time. There wasn't very much of anything there. The ventilation was very poor. One either froze or practically suffocated because there were only three windows in the whole apartment. In order to get into it one first had to go through the store. On winter days the continual opening and closing of the door of the store created through the whole horse a draft which was most uncomfortable. In the kitchen we had a coal stove which was rather moody and gave out heat only if it felt like it.

My mother, realizing that I needed sunshine and fresh air, bundled me into my carriage every morning. She dressed me up in two or three suits, covered me with a pillow made of down; and then in order to be absolutely certain that I wouldn't freeze, she piled a few wool blankets on top of that and placed the carriage outside the store where she could easily see me. Here I would lie alone for hours at a time, either sleeping or enjoying the air. At this very tender age I hadn't yet realized that there was a store in our family that interfered with my growing up nearer my mother. Often, I imagine, the store too felt annoyed at the small amount of attention I did receive and complained in the only way she could. That is, the amount in the register wasn't so much as it should have been. This complaint would immediately turn the attention of the family to her; and then she would cease complaining, gloating in the power she held over us.

When I was five, we moved to another store and another neighborhood. Here things were a little better. We had a very nice sunny apartment a block away from the store. This was like paradise compared to what we had been living in before. The apartment had all the new improvements, including steam heat and a lot of windows.

At six I started school. Here I immediately felt a difference between the other children and myself. They all knew that my father owned a candy store. I had the strange feeling that I was looked down upon by the other children because most of their fathers worked down-town in large offices or didn't work at all. This made me retire more into myself, and I began to find it difficult to enter into games which the others played.

When I was about eight years old, I began to be broken in to working in the store. My first assignment was selling penny candy. I had to wait on all the little children who took a half hour to pick out a penny's worth of candy. Next I learned how to sell newspapers and magazines. Then I was raised to the position of standing behind the counter and selling cigars and cigarettes. Finally I began to be able to sell toys and greeting cards. So I arose from being a very useless person in the store to being able to take care of it when ever it was necessary.

As I grew older, I found it interfering in my life more and more. After school I often had to break dates to go roller skating or bicycling because I was needed in the store that afternoon. I began to take piano lessons: but I have broken them off too, this past year, because I never could devote all the time I wished to my practicing.

But I am not the only one who is in bondage to it. It has affected my father by making him a nervous and irritable man. He has a very hard day, getting up at five in the morning and standing on his feet till eight at night. At one time in Europe he dreamt of becoming a doctor. But his family was too poor, and he was forced to choose the trade of carpentry. He came to America and met and married my mother here. Thinking that there was no future for him and his new family in the carpentry trade, he began to look around for a small business. I shall never be able to understand why, but he picked the candy store business. I can't conceive of anything in which there is less future. So he became a candy store owner and a slave to what he had chosen. When he smiles, he smiles only superficially because there is very little laughter left in him. He has grown small and limited in his ideas from seeing so much smallness in the little people around him. In some ways he is rather petty because his business is a business of pennies which must be closely watched if they are to grow into dollars. The only topic of conversation he can discuss fluently with my mother or with anybody else is business. If gotten on to another topic, he will talk for above five minutes; then his mind will begin to wander and eventually return to business. He has become a mere automaton, existing with no true aim in sight.

The store has made my mother prematurely grey and old. She manages both a home and the store. The continued drudgery of her life, in which she has never had a minute to spare, has cut her off from most of her relatives and friends. Consequently, she has turned to us, her children. For us she has worked so hard all her life. In us she places all her hopes and dreams of the future when she will no longer have a store to take up her every minute but will live in quiet comfort with all her little grandchildren around her. She lives in our schooling, in our outside activities, and in what we shall make ourselves in the future. Her motives are purely unselfish. Her desire to see us comfortable without our having to slave the way she has, has so strengthened our determination to succeed that my sister now holds a very good government position, my brother is attending a dental school, and I am on my way college.

It has made my brother and sister live for the future when the most they will do in a candy store will be to buy newspapers and candy there.

And I, too, live for the future when I shall be able to look back at the days when I worked in my father's candy store and reflect upon how things have changed.

Home | Newell mural | student mural | history projects | archive | credits | links