November 11, 2007
A trip down memory lane is strung with Christmas lights
By Gene Krider
Something caught my eye on Oct. 30: a Christmas TV commercial. It was in the middle of a string of commercials during which I was practicing the piano, but the Christmas music inserted its way into the music I was playing. I turned to the TV — it was definitely a Christmas ad with snow around the light-draped house.
I am used to seeing stores decorated for Christmas about a week before Thanksgiving, but Christmas ads before Halloween?
I can remember six or seven decades ago when my family piled into the Terraplane on the Sunday after Thanksgiving and drove through the downtowns of Troutman, Moores-ville, Huntersville, Cornelius and finally to Belk in Charlotte. The show windows were filled with animated Christmas scenes such as elves making toys, Santa going up and down the fireplace and, best of all, elaborate electric trains going through tunnels, over bridges and through an elaborate town set.
We called this “the train window,” and Belk added features to it every year. There was always an animated doll window and a window full of adult dummies at a Christmas party.
Finally, we went inside to see the interior decorations with a Christmas tree in every department. By now we were worn out, and the children slept until we got to downtown Statesville, where the lights were turned on for the first time. In those days, lights were draped over a block on North and South Center and East and West Broad streets.
They were strung over the street, so we felt like we were riding through a tunnel of multi-colored lights.
All the store windows were decorated for Christmas. Some had a fireplace and Christmas tree with wrapped presents under it; others had suggested Christmas presents with big red bows on them — almost all had snow around the sides of the windows made of soap flakes.
Two weeks before Thanks-giving 1950, I got my first job at Rhodes-Charles Record and Toy Shop assembling toys like tricycles, doll houses and filling stations.
I worked on weekdays after school and all day Saturday. When stores started staying open on Wednesdays and until 9 p.m. the week before Christmas, school was on Christmas vacation and I worked every day but Sunday.
There were no credit cards back then, but most stores let you lay away gifts to be paid for and picked up a few days before Christmas.
No interest or fees were charged for this service.
The banks also had Christ-mas funds you could pay into all year and withdraw before Christmas to pay for gifts. The banks paid no interest on these accounts, but that did not diminish their popularity.
I started to work in the midst of the “battle of speeds,” which complicated merchandising.
Most customers still had perfectly good 78 rpm record players, but the introduction by Columbia of Long Playing, or standard size 331/3 rpm records could accommodate an entire 78 album.
RCA countered with 45 rpm 7-inch records with a big hole in the center that contained a single 78 rpm.
LP single-play attachments and 45 record changers plus expensive three-speed phonographs allowed you to play your old 78s and try the new modes that were higher quality and unbreakable.
Soon 45s took over pop music and LPs; classical music and 78s were dropped.
Recordings stayed this way until the introduction of CD recordings in the 1980s, which took over all music and required another player.
Now, mp3 computer technology is taking over popular music, and here we go again.
