The clipping that jarred a memory. |
It
didn’t take much to jar the memory.
Stored long ago and jammed tightly in the closet of a dusty recess of my
mind, it fell to the floor and rolled to my feet when shaken by a mild tremor. I picked it, popped the twine, and peeled
back the layers of yellowed newsprint that had wrapped it. There it was.
55 some odd years old and only somewhat dinged and nicked, a small part snapped
off here and there, but whole and hefty
in my hands.
What
shook it loose was of photo posted on a Facebook page for nostalgic old
denizens of Cheyenne, Wyoming, the place where I grew up. It was a .jpeg of a newspaper clipping with
the grainy image of a building and a story under the headline, DDA Aims to Purchase Z’s Furniture Building. The caption noted that the building once was
home to Fowler’s, Cheyenne’s leading department store back when they were
putting fins on Chevys. The article
explained that the building had been vacant and a home to pigeons for some
years and that the Downtown Development Association hoped to buy it and somehow
turn it into “a mixed residential and commercial use anchor” for what has
evidently become a moribund business district.
Little cared I for that, but Fowlers….
Fowlers
sat at the corner of 17th and Carey in the heart of what was at the cusp of the
’50’s and ‘60’s a bustling downtown shopping district. Like most of the downtown, the building had
been erected in the boom years of the 1880’s when the Union Pacific Railway
yards and the cattle business made the Wyoming Territorial Capital a bustling
and progressive place—the city Tom Edison picked to install his first street
lighting, forward thinking and modern shaking the mud and shame from its boots
for its wild days as Hell on Wheels.
In
that spirit the Fowlers, the family that owned the department store had itself
gone mid-century modern. They clad the
upper three stories of the building in gleaming white, windowless and smooth
masonry and wrapped the first floor in sweeping display windows worthy of
anything in New York or Chicago. The
name Fowler’s was emblazoned against those white walls in a bold but flowing
script at a jaunty rising angle. It
stood out proudly, different than anything that surrounded it.
Fowler’s,
you see, was our Macy’s, our Marshal Fields, our May Co. It was where
the better class of matrons—and those like my mother who desperately
wanted to join their ranks—of Cheyenne, half the state, and much of western
Nebraska came to find the latest fashions straight from New York and where
their husbands bought their double breasted suits and had them marked with
chalk and fitted by real tailors.
Capitol Avenue in Down Town Cheyenne in the late '50's. |
There
were, of course, other department stores down town. There was Montgomery Ward and J. C. Penney,
and a couple of smaller, less prestigious, local owned places. There were ladies dress shops, men’s wear
places, shoe stores, and of course Western Ranchman Outfitters where everyone
went to get their cowboy on. Mom shopped
at them all, dragging me and my twin brother Tim along with her on her weekly
Saturday expeditions. Most weeks we
looked, or she ended up just picking up notions at Woolworth’s. But a few times a year it was serious
shopping—back to school time in August, the Christmas rush, and the time to get
us all polished up for Easter.
For
our back to school jeans and plaid shirts, Ward’s and Penney’s would do. She would have to shop for my jeans in the
Husky boys department, a mild humiliation especially when she would chat loudly
with the sales women, most of whom she seemed to know from the PTA, Cub Scouts,
church, or various charity projects, about my failure to firm up into a
suitably athletic young man. We would
buy a pile of three or four jeans to last the year. Mom would count her bills out to the clerk
who would put them with a ticket into a brass and glass capsule and send them
shooting off through mysterious pneumatic tubes
to some distant office and after a few moments her change and receipt
would come zooming back.
To
get ready for Frontier Days or to shop for my father who’s job at the Wyoming
Travel Commission required him to be turned out in cowboy style, it was off to
Western Ranchman where Tim and I could get our annual pearl snap shirts, silk
kerchiefs, cowboy boots, and dress straw hats, none of which were to be worn
except for rodeo events and state occasions decreed by Mom.
But
for her own wardrobe and for our Sunday-go-to-meeting dress clothes, nothing
would do but Fowler’s. This particular
Saturday, it must have been in October or November because there was a sense of
urgency, the mission was to get me a winter coat. And not just any winter coat, a very
particular one.
Tim,
the all-American boy and apple of my mother’s eye, had already laid early claim
of teenage style. He was carefully
smoothing his dark hair with generous glops of Brylcreem every morning which
left it shining and immovable and insisted on being shod, at least until the
snow flew, not in boots or polished lace-up shoes, but in black and white high lace-up
PF Flyers. He had overwhelmed mom’s
early objections and picked out a letterman style jacket with leather sleeves
and wool body that he would wear in all but blizzard conditions.
I,
on the hand, was pursuing my single minded desire to dress like a 40 year old
so that I would be treated with respect.
The fact that the gray Rough Rider style hate with the pinned up side
brim that I was habitually wearing in those days belied that ambition evidently
escaped me. The hat embarrassed Mom no
end, but she could not get it off me until it was cold enough for my black
leather cap with the fold down earflaps and chin strap.
Other
than my hat, my mother approved my middle age style aspirations, although she
approved of very little else about her bookish son. In her mind that was classy, the most vaunted
ambition of a woman who had grown up dirt poor and who yearned for middle class
respectability. So the coat for which we
were searching was a good wool car coat, the kind that could fit over a sport
coat but was not quite a full overcoat. Most
importantly it must have a fur collar, and a least a suitable faux fur
one. This had turned out to be a
difficult quest because, surprise, surprise, most stores were not showing coats
like that for pre-teen boys. But if
anyone in town would have it, it had to be Fowlers.
Just
before we descended into the boy’s department in the basement Mom took my
brother and I to the side and shook us strongly by our shoulders so, along with
a certain terrifying steely tone to her voice, told us that she meant business,
and bent down low to whisper in our ears “I don’t want you to say a word about
Mr. Brown. Do you understand?” Brown was not the real name which is lost to
my memory or an alias created to spare embarrassment to any surviving family,
but a mere generic substitute.
One
morning over breakfast before school a week or so earlier, mom had gasped
loudly and laid down her coffee cup.
“Murf!” she said to my father, her head enveloped in the usual cloud of
cigarette smoke, “Did you see this? The
paper says that Ed Brown was arrested in the men’s room of the Wyo Theater the
other day on a morals charge! And I
always thought he was such a nice man.”
The
Wyo was one of three downtown movie houses.
The Lincoln was the top, the one that got most of the biggest films and
hosted the road shows for Biblical Epics like The Robe or Ben
Hur, the Paramount showed double bills with A picture tops. But the Wyo showed B movie triple bills,
horror and sci-fi, the cheaper oaters.
That’s where you went to see a flick in 3D—if you mother would let you,
which ours did not. But once in a while
we would sneak over there, ditching the Saturday marathon kiddie matinee at the
Lincoln where we had been deposited, to see something thrilling like Attack
of the Fifty Foot Woman. The
washrooms there were dirty and had sticky floors, but I had no idea of what
sort of crime could be committed in them.
I
was unclear on what a morals charge was or why anyone would get arrested in a
toilet. My more sophisticated brother
informed me that it meant that Brown was a queer, although he was hazy on what
exactly that meant except that it was dirty.
Later
that day after school Mom ever so casually asked us if Mr. Brown had ever
touched us, “down there” when we were at the store. The question confused me. She tried to explain and got red faced. Finally I semi-understood. “No,” I said, “not even when he measured me
for pants.”
Back
at Fowlers, Mom released us having given her most impressive fair warning. We descended the stairs to the brightly lit
Boy’s Department. Almost as soon as my
mother’s foot touched the floor, Mr. Brown rushed over to greet us with a broad
smile as if he were encountering long lost kin.
I guessed him to be about my Fathers age, but that meant he could have
been anywhere from 30 to 50. He had
close cropped rather curly hair with just a hint of gray. He wore those glasses with a tortoise shell
top frame and gold rims securing the lenses.
Was there a moustache? My memory is hazy, but let’s give him a close
clipped thin one. He wore a subdued
hunter’s plaid sport coat, crisp white shirt with a bow tie, sharply pleated
slacks and gleaming oxfords.
“Mrs.
Murfin!” he exclaimed, “How is Murf?”
They fell to chatting excitedly sharing family details. Mr. Brown was married and had children
evidently around our age who went to a different school. His wife was going to model for Fowlers at an
up-coming charity fashion luncheon at the Palomino Club out on the highway to
Denver. It went on like that for a while
my brother and I fidgeted.
Eventually
Mom broached the purpose of the expedition.
Mr. Brown turned and considered me.
I was wearing that damn Rough Rider hat and last year’s zippers fall
jacket, to tight now with frayed knit cuffs riding high above my wrists and a
rip in one of the slash pockets from shoving a balled up glove into it with too
much force. Clearly I was a boy in need
of counseling and clothing.
“Hmm,”
he said after consideration, “I have just the thing.” He rifled through some racks and pulled out a
light brown car coat of wool so soft, he said, it might as well be camel’s
hair. It had three large leather
buttons, commodious pockets and, yes, a fine faux fur brown collar. I put it on and stood in bay of three mirrors
to examine myself as Mom and Mr. Brown hovered behind. “It’s a little big,” I said noting that the sleeves
half covered my singers when I hung my arms to my sides. Mom nodded silently.
“But
look how tall Pat is getting!” I tried
to stretch myself taller, proud of my one advantage over my brother. “He’ll grow into this by Christmas, just you
see.”
Mom
nodded again. “We’ll take it.”
More than a year later, at Christmas 1961, I was still wearing the car coat, Note it was getting a little tighWith twin brother Tim on our front step on Cheshire Drive. |
I
took off the coat and handed it to Mr. Brown.
We all strolled together back to the register. On the way Brown casually snapped up a brown
fedora on the way past, whipped the Rough Rider hat of my head, and sat it on
me at a jaunty angle. “What a handsome
young man!” No one ever had called me handsome in my entire life and may not
have ever complimented me on my looks.
That was Tim’s personal department.
Mom
turned to carefully survey me. She
picked up the hat, weighed the possibility that I could be convinced to wear it
instead of my battered old hat. I more
than half wanted her to buy it, but dared not say so. She looked and the price tag and then,
somewhat sadly, returned it to the mannequin head from which Brown had
snatched.
By
the register Brown carefully folded my new coat and laid it in a large white
box lined with tissue paper which he carefully folded over it and smoothed down
with a practiced hand. He carefully
fitted the top on and then from a large cone of twine on a spindle tied the package
with speed and ease. Mom handed over a ten
dollar bill and got back little change. I may not have ever had such an expensive
garment.
All
the while Mom and Mr. Brown chatted, smiles beaming from both. After extended pleasantries Mr. Brown shook
my mother’s hand and turned and shook mine with a dry, firm grip as if I was
important and grown up. I carried the
large package for my Mom.
On
the walk back to the car she told us that we had spent so much money that we
would have to skip the usual stop for sodas at Rodell’s Drugs. She had a worried look. I knew with some guilt that she had wildly
over spent and was concerned about what to tell Dad.
We
climbed into Mom’s ’51 Chevy, Tim as usual riding shotgun in the place of honor
in the front seat. I sat behind Mom with
the package stretched out beside me on the seat. Mom lit up an unfiltered Kool and he the car
was soon filled with a haze. On our
drive back to the house on Cheshire Drive, I worked up the courage to ask what
Mr. Brown could possibly have done to get arrested.
After
a pause Mom said, “Some people just don’t know to keep out other people’s
private business. You’d think the Police
Department would have better things to do than hiding out in a men’s room stall.” And that is all she would say on the
subject. We drove home the rest of the
way in silence.
We
continued to see Mr. Brown at Fowler’s until I entered high school and started
getting my clothes in the Men’s Wear Department.
Later
I realized that a small article like the one about Mr. Fowler was enough to
drive some men from town in disgrace. I learned
of other men who were fired from their jobs, whose wives left them, and at
least one who was beaten to a pulp outside a bar. But the Fowlers, a very nice couple, treated
all of their employees “like family.”
Mr. Brown had been with them for years and was very good at his job. In those days a man could make a not
extravagant but comfortable middle class living as a commission floor salesman at
a Department store. No matter what private conversation they may
have had with him, they were loyal to Mr. Brown and even left him in the Boy’s
Department instead of exiling him to some position where he would never come in
contact with Boys. That had to cost them
customers.
And
then there was Mom. I may have learned
more from her about kindness and compassion that day than in all of the Sunday
school classes that she ever sent me to.
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