By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
A couple of times each year in the 1960s and early 1970s, usually for back-to-school, Christmas, or Easter shopping, my small town family would journey to the nearby “metropolis” of Ogden, Utah. It was there that I learned the mighty buying power of the American nickel.
Ogden, then Utah’s second largest city (population about 70,000), had a wide selection (relatively speaking) of large shopping venues downtown. Our favorite was the grand old J.C. Penney on the corner of 24th Street and Washington Boulevard, the one with a huge store name sign on the roof.
James Cash Penney started his famous retail business in Kemmerer, Wyoming, under the name “Golden Rule stores.” In the early 1900s, the company headquarters moved to Salt Lake City. His Ogden store opened in 1937 in a vintage structure dating back to 1911.
The three floor store catered to classic one stop department shopping. I can still hear the elevator operator bark, “first floor men’s and children’s clothing, shoes, and jewelry; second floor women’s clothing and accessories; third floor appliances, furniture, home goods, toys, sporting goods.” There even was a bargain basement and a mezzanine with an optical shop and a shoe shine stand.
During our visits there, my older siblings would scatter to their favorite departments leaving Mom to browse through the various levels with me in tow. Always trying to make ends meet, Mom would eventually find the layaway section where the store would hold merchandise for us in a special room until we completed payments on it.
These Penney’s visits revealed how I suffer from a curious affliction. Something in the retail air, even today, makes me very sleepy. The only cure for this situational narcolepsy was the main floor candy counter, the one place where I snapped to wide-eyed attention.
It was a large glass rectangular display case revealing a smorgasbord of delicious treats. There were all sorts of chocolates, caramels, Boston baked beans, taffy, hard candies, gums, sour jawbreakers, licorice, nuts, and even seasonal items such as Easter eggs or goodies wrapped in Christmassy foil.
When Mom had endured enough of my shopping boredom whining, she would reach into her purse and hand me a nickel. She told me to meet her back at the elevators in a few minutes. Awakened by my newfound commercial autonomy, I made a beeline for the counter.
I always ordered the same thing. “Five cents worth of circus animal cookies please,” I told the counter attendant, holding up my nickel to demonstrate my economic bona fides. Using a metal scoop and a counter top scale, she would measure out the precise amount I ordered and put it in a small white paper bag.
I savored the contents of the bag─seven, sometimes eight, pink or white frosted cookies, each one covered with sprinkles. I would try to determine the animal I was about to eat, but they usually were fairly unidentifiable, due either to my zoology-deficient education or the large amount of frosting concealing the beast within.
I nibbled the frosting off the sides and then from the top and bottom, trying to remove it all without breaking the cookie. Then, having devoured all (or at least most) of the frosting, I finally chomped down on the less desirable, but still delicious, remaining sugar cookie wafer.
This wonderful J.C. Penney store was there until the late 1970s, when it was demolished to make way for the new Ogden mall (which in turn was torn down in 2003). The mall had a new and modern J.C. Penney store, but I do not recall it including a candy counter. Thus, the new store never had the same appeal for me, and it always made me drowsy.
Today, you can buy a full-sized bag of my beloved counter circus cookies in the grocery store, usually the famous Mother’s brand, but who wants to do that? Typically, I lose all sense of self-discipline and eat too many or even all of the cookies in one sitting. This results in what WebMD might call “circus animal gluttony,” aka a simple excessive sugar hangover.
We suffer sometimes today from what I call “too muchism.” Too much of a good thing is not so good. Instead, I yearn for the good old days when I could buy just five cents worth. Not everything in our modern world is an improvement.
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, will be published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.
