Fragments 1962: Archie’s Convenience Store Junk Food Club, Georgetown Ontario
As far back as I remember, we children from Georgetown’s Swanick subdivision frequented Archie’s convenience store at the corner of Ewing Street and Highway 7.
The owner and manager, Archie Girard, cultivated an avid clientele of baby boom kidlets; he should have been on the payroll of all the local dentists.
With our allowances firmly in hand, we purchased a vast array of candy, chips, and chocolate bars, with copious quantities of sweet drinks to wash it all down.
When I was in Grade 6, in 1962, my best friend for the entire fall term was a boy named Jim Macpherson, better known as “Mouse” due to his diminutive stature.
Mouse and I formed an odd couple as I was a bulbous child known as “Fat” or “Lardpile.”
Mouse and I would drape our arms around each other’s shoulders as we walked to school…via Archie’s.
Childhood works in mysterious ways, and during those halcyon days of 1962, there coalesced an unofficial junk food purchasing club that gravitated to Archie’s, each and every day, on the way back to the educational salt mines after lunch.
I took to plundering the coin collection that my parents had earnestly assembled for me and that included Queen Elizabeth coronation silver dollars and numerous other relatively precious currency from both sides of the border, with King George VI and Abraham Lincoln well represented in the diminishing mass of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and silver dollars.
Canada, 1953 Coronation Dollar EF |
In my case, the bulk of this purloined loot was used to purchase hockey cards that came with sticks of foul bubble gum, the chewing of which resembled chomping on a rubber tire.
Shirriff “Lushus jelly & puddings” were also at the top of my list for they contained buried treasure: hockey coins submerged in powder, along with a “flavour bud.” The powder and the bud went quickly down the hatch, but the hockey coins were jealously guarded as precious currency.
Of course, all of us also devoured industrial quantities of lace licorice; cinnamon candy; a broad assortment of chocolate bars (including the iconic Cherry Blossom, my personal favorite); Hostess Twinkies; and much more besides.
Candy from the 60s | Retro Candy | Candy District
By Christmas, my coin collection was thoroughly depleted and my scandalized parents brokered the dissolution of Archie’s Convenience Store Junk Food Club.
But those months of fall 1962 remain etched in my memory as a time of sweetness…as well as of tooth decay.
Your friend,
Robert
Robert McBryde – robertmcbrydeauthor.com
