O.C. Era Ends as Woolworth’s Shuts Its Doors

Waterless fish tanks line the back wall and the lunch counter is abandoned, its cracked red-orange booths littered with hangers. F.W. Woolworth’s looks like the Brady Bunch living room after Christmas morning.

Bart Simpson dolls and sewing notions lay willy-nilly in the aisles with other discounts going-going-gone. “90% off entire stock” scream signs made of butcher paper in the windows. “De liquidacion tienda descuento cerrando!” (liquidation; discount store closing!”)

A fixture of downtown Santa Ana since 1917, Orange County’s original dime store is closing for good after today. Woolworth Corp., an American institution launched in 1879, announced Jan. 8 that it will close, sell or revamp 900 money-losing outlets nationally in a broad effort to hike recession-wounded sales and profits.

Next week, a family-run clothing store will move into the building at 4th and Sycamore streets.

City efforts to coax Orange County’s last Woolworth’s into staying failed, said Roger A. Kooi, Santa Ana’s downtown development manager, although the store “was very successful until (the recession) last year. We tried to keep the Woolworth’s people here, but it was going to take monumental concessions.”

For 74 years, Woolworth’s has occupied a place in history and served as the backdrop for scads of personal dramas--memories as sweet as the honeycomb and pastel chocolates measured at the long-gone candy counter.

Neva Slaback paid a dime for a two-cup flour sifter 50 years ago and boasts that she still uses it today. Jim Sleeper, a writer and historian, bought his first journal there in 1941 at age 13. Carol Bowers was 17 when she got her first job at Woolworth’s in 1967, and she wound up marrying one of her customers.

“He kept coming in for contact paper, over and over again,” said Bowers, now 42 and a senior accounting assistant in Santa Ana’s city housing division. “He finally told me it was because I was wearing a miniskirt, and I’d reach up to get the contact paper, and”--she giggles at the memory--”he bought a lot of contact paper.”

They moved away, their daughter grew up, and they returned from Texas six years ago.

“It was the first place I went for lunch when we got back,” Bowers, a Tustin resident, said wistfully. “I knew Woolworth’s would be there.”

But no more.

“It’s sad,” said Lecil Slaback, 79, the second of three generations born in Santa Ana. His father was Orange County’s first court reporter, a job he would inherit. “It’s just the passing of an era that old folks like me can feel sad about.”

Those who predate the store remember the days when downtowns were swirling social and commercial magnets that seem almost quaint now in the sprawl of Southern California suburbia.

“They used to cover tables with oilcloths to protect them, and I remember my mother could only get them there at Woolworth’s,” said Elynore Barton, whose grandfather was Theodore Lacy, Orange County’s first sheriff. “Now they use plastic ones. It was a place to get school supplies or a spool of thread. . . . They had just about anything you wanted. It was always there, and you could always depend on that.”

Lecil Slaback was delivered by the county’s first doctor, who walked down the street to his family’s home at 418 W. Pine St. It was Oct. 13, 1912.

“You could walk downtown. In fact, I’d do that after school; nobody worried about you being out,” recalled Slaback, who lived nearly six decades in Santa Ana before moving to Silverado Canyon. “If I didn’t know the people at each store, I recognized them, and they recognized me.”

It was a time when the owner of a store waited on customers, when clerks didn’t need scales because they knew what a pound felt like in their hands.

“They just had trays and racks of things that really mostly did cost 5 and 10 cents. But Woolworth’s was the store of that time,” said Slaback, a local historian on Santa Ana. “And, of course, they carried everything.”

Before he married, Slaback enjoyed puttering in his family’s wood shop, building birdhouses and such. He bought his supplies--screws and nails--at Woolworth’s, “where you could buy, say, 10 screws for a nickel,” he said. There were 78-r.p.m. phonographs and “a nice candy counter, with marshmallow bananas and peanuts, penny candy.”

The heyday of the dime store in Santa Ana, to Slaback, was during the 1920s and ‘30s, when Pacific Electric Red Cars that connected Orange to Los Angeles counties for a buck a ride zipped down the middle of 4th Street, then the mecca of the county. With the exception of Woolworth’s, he said, most of the stores were “home-owned.”

There was Turner’s radio store, which had sheet music, three for a dollar. “I’d buy popular music,” Slaback said. “You’d go in and say, ‘What’s new?’--you know radio in the ‘20s was just feeling it’s own way then--and there would be a woman at the piano, and she’d say, ‘Here’s a nice one by Irving Berlin,’ and she would play it for you. That’s how you decided if you wanted to buy it.”

A stop at Woolworth’s with spare change might fetch a cats-eye marble or a wooden top or a pinwheel.

“At the stores (where the owners) knew you the best, you’d stick your head in the door and say, ‘Hi, Bill,’ and go on your way. You didn’t have to stick around for conversation. I remember the girls in Woolworth’s. I don’t remember any men. I guess I was thinking of the girls even then,” Slaback said with amusement.

“From the 1930s and ‘40s, the charm of Woolworth’s was that their merchandise was priced to fit my budget and anybody else’s who went through the Depression and late war years,” Sleeper said. “So it was a popular spot, and it was the dime store.”

On weekends, Sleeper said, “every kid in Santa Ana would converge on 4th Street for the . . . afternoon matinees.” Shows cost 11 cents. Afterward, moviegoers collected at Woolworth’s soda fountain, where Sleeper remembers older folks feasting on the 35-cent hot roast beef plate while kids favored dime ice milk malts with “six squirts of root-beer syrup.”

Even devoted Woolworth’s customers could not remember exactly when the store added its fountain service. But 48 stools and the full-service lunch counter were heralded in mid-1952, when the store moved a block west from its original location at 105 W. 4th St. to its current spot at the northwest corner of Sycamore Street. The Rossmore Hotel at the site was razed, and in its footprint a new, $500,000, 13,400-square-foot Woolworth’s store was built.

Cherry Cokes and chocolate sundaes, root-beer floats and grilled cheese sandwiches provide fond memories of those years. Visions of Coca-Colas and chili sizes spring forth with a McGuire Sisters soundtrack. Come back to the five-and-dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.

“It used to be one of my favorite places,” recalled Santa Ana City Councilman Daniel E. Griset, 47, a former mayor. Born and raised in Santa Ana, as was his father, also a former mayor, Griset spent many afternoons at the dime store in the mid- to late 1950s.

“I’d bicycle into town as a kid. Woolworth’s had a great lunch counter, and I’d come in the back door,” Griset said. “My father’s (insurance) office was right behind Woolworth’s on 5th Street. It was a place to watch interesting people when you were a kid. The potatoes and entrees were great. You’d have the Swiss steak and a scoop of mashed potatoes. . . . You could do pretty well for less than a couple dollars.”

It was a bustling place in those halcyon days of the dime store, when customers could still find Blue Waltz perfume and Hazel Bishop no-smear lipstick and white mercerized cotton thread with which to darn socks. There was a J.C. Penney’s and other downtown department stores, but Woolworth’s and other variety shops were the one-stop shopping malls of their time.

“As you can imagine, it was a different market downtown Santa Ana then,” Griset said. “It was really the shopping center of Orange County, so people would travel in from Fullerton and Anaheim. Across from Woolworth’s was Rankin’s, one of the nice department stores. . . . And next to Woolworth’s, kind of a favorite place for me, was Buster Brown shoes.”

In September, 1967, Carol Bowers, newly graduated from high school, moved with her family from Oklahoma City to Santa Ana. They lived on South Birch Street. Her first job, at 17, was at Woolworth’s. She was hired for the Christmas season in the toy and pet department, where one could buy parakeets and fish, hamsters and turtles. She earned $1 an hour.

“I was moved up to the position at the candy counter, which is where right now they have, let’s see, the purses and handbags now,” Bowers recalled. The candy “was in big glass jars, and you could buy it by the pound. Orange slices and your jellybeans, M&Ms;, chocolate-covered honeycomb, your pastel chocolates. And we used to make our own popcorn, where you put the oil in and watched that thing so it wouldn’t burn.”

She sighed. “The parades would go down 4th Street, and we would make up big batches of popcorn because everybody would buy it,” she said.

The store had its own cast of regular customers too.

There was “Miss America,” an aging woman who wore lots of makeup and “came in every day for her hot cocoa and whipping cream and free cookies,” Bowers remembered. “She wore one of those full skirts like square dancers wear, and gloves and a hat, and after (the cocoa) she always came by and bought 10 cents’ worth of pastel white chocolates, and we’d weigh it out. Every day. I think the highest thing we had in there was $1.99 a pound.”

Something most people never knew was that the manager who opened this Woolworth’s, W.G. Terwilleger, called the Salvation Army each year on Christmas and Easter eves and donated all the store’s leftover holiday candy and decorations.

“It is things like that that you remember,” Bowers said. “But all of downtown has changed so much. Even in the late ‘60s you had everything downtown: a music store, banks. It was just like walking in a small town. The store was starting on a downward slide when I left.”

Claudia Riewaldt misses her favorite waitress, Lupe, who customers believe worked at the fountain for at least 20 years before it closed a month ago.

“A lot of times, I don’t eat lunch anymore now,” said Riewaldt, a messenger for the city of Santa Ana’s building and planning division, located downtown. “There are a couple of new places opening up around here, but it was actually the people who worked over there that I got to be friends with--the manager of the snack bar and the waitresses. We’d sit and talk about things; you could read a book there or talk to the different people you knew would always be there.”

It is likewise for Patty Elizondo.

“I’ve lived and worked in Santa Ana for, let me think, 12 or 13 years, six of it downtown at (the Don Roberto) jewelry store,” said Elizondo, 26, a receptionist at Santa Ana City Hall. “When I worked down there, that was the place to go for lunch. . . . It was convenient. Your nylons would rip and you could run over to Woolworth’s. You needed a last-minute birthday present: Woolworth’s. A toy: same thing. It’s sad that they’re closing down. I don’t think we have another store like it.”