Warning: Nostalgic Rhapsodizing Ahead

Not too long ago Hannah needed a cardboard box for a Girl Scout project, and she said one of the Scout leaders had suggested they could probably get one at an appliance store. Of course, nowadays there’s hardly such a thing as an appliance store, though there’s still one here on the turnpike. The thought of going to the appliance store to scavenge cardboard boxes took me right back to Scotia, 11, 12, 13 years old, every now and then we’d ride our bikes up to the back of Swire’s Department Store and see if there were any boxes appliance boxes lying around so we could build a fort, a rocketship, a superheroes’ headquarters. Swire’s seemed almost like the center of Scotia life, then, along with the A&P grocery store and the post office. Amazingly, the grocery store is still there, under another name, and the post office remains in the center of the village, but Swire’s is long gone. It was one of those amazing stores that now seem to exist only in the most remote areas, a store that sold just about everything you could need in daily life in the ’60s and ’70s. Way more expansive than a five-and-dime, way more compact than the K-Mart that was about to emerge and drive the independent stores under. Swire’s had two big sections — up front, the boring part: appliances. Washers, dryers, refrigerators, televisions, stereos of the type that only parents would buy. When the CB craze hit, that’s where my Dad bought his CB (he was a trucker, it actually made sense for him.) But the real life of the store was in the back, down a little steep ramp and past the two cash registers, where they sold . . . everything. Everything stacked high and tight. Fabric, patterns, buttons. Toys, models, model rockets. Paint, wallpaper, every kind of hardware. Hand tools, nails. Coloring books, Golden Books, Big Little Books. Bicycle parts. Spray paint, but you had to have a note from your parents (store policy). Caps and cap guns and “joke” fireworks that provided us with a shell and a fuse, and we’d rely on sketchy ideas and a chemistry set to try to figure out how to make a real explosive (this never worked, by the way). There were a couple of old women at the registers, both of whom were wise to our tricks but one of whom would gruffly forget about the tax when we came up a few cents short for something. If you had a penny left over, you could get some terrible gum from the ancient gumball machines that teetered at the top of the ramp. We bought a lot of model cars and airplanes there, a lot of Pactra paint and airplane glue (and for a while, you had to have a note from your parents for airplane glue, too — we could have been dope fiends!), a lot of Estes rocket engines, a lot of jigsaw puzzles. Nearly every birthday present I gave anyone as a kid came from the Swire’s (back then, kids, most department store toy sections shrank dramatically outside the Christmas season.) I know what a codger I’m going to sound like when I say you could have a good time there with 50 cents.

But the best things from Swire’s were free — the appliance boxes. If they sold a fridge or dryer, the box would sit out back. (Swire’s was on Mohawk Avenue, the main drag of Scotia, with a great little alley along the side of the building leading back to a parking lot that opened on Glen Avenue. That alley loomed large in our navigation of the village by bicycle.) Now, if you’re about 12 years old, there are a couple of ways to get a giant appliance box from the back of the store to someone’s house a few blocks away. None of them involve a car. I suppose that a couple of kids could have walked up to the Swire’s and just carried the box back home, but I don’t think that ever happened. No, the approved method for moving an appliance box was by bike, two guys on their Sting-rays, flanking the box, reaching out to hold the flaps. If the box were smaller, it would be possible to hold it up in the air, but big boxes produced a significant amount of drag. No matter. The mechanics of two bicyclists navigating a gigantic cardboard box down streets and around corners are deserving of further study, especially when you consider that the other kids would be weaving around among them, not helping at all. Sometimes the box came loose and one or the other of the pullers, balance upset, would go sailing and have to re-collect and start up again. But we always got them home. We’d paint them, cut windows, knock them together (duct tape not generally available then, by the way), set up tunnels and forts and whatever. When our parents were sick of looking at the mess, we’d often enough burn it down, and then wait for the next time suitable boxes would appear in the back of the Swire’s.

I think the Swire’s went out of business before I was even out of high school. The store was taken over by a large and fairly successful independent appliance store. The alley is blocked off. I have no idea if kids in Scotia today can raid the back of the store for cardboard boxes. Very few of these kinds of stores still exist anywhere, and when they go out of business there’s a general lament, but it’s clear that we don’t want them. We want clean and shiny and huge, not small and cramped and worn. Will kids ever treasure their trips to the big box stores the way I treasure the memory of that ratty old Swire’s? I’m really not sure. I remember going to the big, shiny Two Guys, and to the Mohawk Mall when it was so new, and while there was something special about those places (there’s something special about every place when you’re in your teens, isn’t there?), they would never be as important a part of our lives as the Swire’s was.