I can clearly remember going into the old Woolworth’s store on Gaetz Avenue downtown, across from Hayhoe’s Plumbing and Heating. I was knee-high to a nit at the time, but I remember that excellent department store for several important reasons.
For one thing, there were turtles and budgies in Woolworth’s! I don’t mean critters crawling and flapping around all over the floor and ceiling, I mean wonderful creatures for sale. I would go in there with my Mom and when she was doing whatever Mom’s do in Woolworth’s I would make a beeline for the budgies and trudge a trail to the turtles.
In fact, I came home with a turtle on a memorable trip. I named him ‘Smokey’ after my cousin, whose nickname was Smokey, and lived on a farm. He didn’t live long – the turtle I mean, but that’s another story. Cousin Smokey is just fine.
Another reason I loved going to this mecca of merchandise as a little kid was the fact that they had magical tubes. These tubes would hang vertically over each till, go straight up to the tall ceiling, traverse the entire length of the cavernous store, make their way down the back wall and disappear into a secret room. This was endlessly fascinating to an energetic kid with the imagination of Peter Pan and the curiosity that killed at least nine cats. Especially when a till lady would regularly open her till, bundle her cash into a brick-sized bag and push it into the tube. Whooosh! It would disappear straight up and you could hear the pipes sucking the moola the whole length of the store and shooting it back down to some secret James Bond vault. But I wondered if anybody ever stuck a chocolate bar or a shoe or a baseball in one of those tubes just to see what would happen. I sure would have.
But the real reason I’m remembering Woolworth’s today is because I bought my very first 45 rpm record at that store. It was Bits and Pieces by the Dave Clarke Five and I loved the Capitol Records swirling orange and yellow title circle around the big center hole of the record. And the reason I remember that is because CKUA announcer Tony King mentioned on the radio that it was the 50th anniversary of the invention of the 45 rpm vinyl record!
Now I know it’s always the 50th anniversary of something or other but for over 50 years, to tell the truth, I haven’t given 45 records much thought. But I learned that it was kind of a big deal when the RCA company brought out the seven inch vinyl to combat Columbia’s twelve inch LP (“Listening Pleasure”) albums which actually stood for “Long Play”. This was after the 78 rpm record format which were made out of some strange space-age substance called “shellac” and were dangerously capable of serious bodily harm if thrown frisbee-style across a crowded room at a party. Did you know “shellac” is actually made of a “natural resin secreted by the female lac bugs on trees in the forests of India and Thailand”? (See if you can slip that gem into your next conversation!)
But the real reason I’m on about all this is because not long ago I found a cool little yellow swirly shaped plastic circle in and old box of stuff and hadn’t seen one in years.
Thing is, I carried it around and later I asked a couple of family thirty-somethings if they knew what it was. They had no idea you needed an ‘adapter’ to play a ‘45 record’ on a ‘turntable’.
Harley Hay is a Red Deer author and filmmaker. Reach out to Harley with any thoughts or ideas at harleyhay99@gmail.com.
I suddenly felt 50 years older.
