As 5-and-10-Cent Stores Close, Some Towns Lose Their Anchors : Landmarks: For more than a century these outlets have been part of the fabric of American life. Discounters and malls are ending a heritage.

Jim Cooke, 50, turned out the light and locked the door the other day on one of the landmark buildings in this city of rich heritage. He has no doubt that Charleston will absorb the loss.

The heritage this building leaves behind, though, goes far beyond architecture and far beyond the city limits.

The building housed the S. H. Kress variety store. It is one of at least 320 other variety stores across the nation that has shut down recently or is scheduled to soon.

Each one that closes takes with it another piece of a singularly American creation. In the course of a century, variety stores have become part of the very fabric of American life. Today, though--at least in the eyes of everybody Jim Cooke’s age and beyond who can remember their earlier mystique and fascination--they seem on their way to becoming an anachronism as dated as the phrase they gave to American folklore and song: 5-and-10-cent store.

The hollow shells of 5-and-10s grow apace in downtowns across the land, fossils of a lost age of innocence. Nothing in their remains could give archeologists digging up the 20th Century a clue that these were the gathering places for generations of wide-eyed schoolchildren; the places where the thrifty types began and ended shopping trips downtown; romantic places where sweethearts met to listen to love songs at one counter and buy friendship rings at another; predictable places that, through a century of extraordinary change, of fashions and fads and vanities and novelties and ups and downs, remained steady and reliable mooring posts.

The vital signs of those that remain are not encouraging.

“We have to adjust with the times,” Jim Cooke says, putting on a brave face. He knows about adjusting to the demands of merchandising. He has made 16 moves in his 26 years in the dime store business.

“When we went to self-service and a checkout line instead of a cash register behind every counter,” he said, “the customers fussed, but they adjusted. I believe there’s still a place for downtown variety stores. If there isn’t, people will just have to get used to the big discount stores.”

For some five-and-dime regulars, that will take a lot of getting used to.

One customer at Cooke’s close-out sale, Geneva Price, recalled in tears how she had been a customer since this Kress’s opened in 1931 on King Street, one of the premier trade centers of the entire South. She came on weekend shopping trips from her home 20 miles away. She says she “will flat out not go” to another store, not even the McCrory’s variety store still open down the street.

She and other customers brought cameras and took pictures as a way to keep in memory the familiar lunch counter; the plaster ceiling decorated with rosettes, vintage Charleston craftsmanship; the glazed brick facade with ironwork balcony and art deco carvings. All the photographers wore long faces. “It’s like being at a funeral,” Geneva Price said.

Charleston’s Kress store is one of 229 being shut down by McCrory Corp., which also does business under the various names of other chains it has acquired over the years. Woolworth Corp. has begun a more gradual shutdown of 90 of its “general merchandise” stores.

Indeed, the notion of a funeral has occurred to others in cities and towns across the land who feel abandoned, if not betrayed.

“I can’t help but feel it’s the end of an era,” said Ruth Robinson, watching her neighboring merchant in Williston, N.D., lock the door at Woolworth’s for the last time. “I always had good feelings when I went in. It was a little more personal than some of the larger chain stores.”

In West Virginia, two McCrory’s closed in Parkersburg, another in Huntington and a fourth in Charleston where Marybelle Reed, wordlessly shaking her head, had shopped for 46 years. “It’s just so sad,” she finally said.

In New England, 40 dime stores have closed recently, including J. J. Newberry’s, another McCrory’s operation. It had been in business on the square in Bellows Falls, Vt., for 62 years, since the day you could buy a mustache cup for a dime and an inkwell for a nickel.

In Florida, the Woolworth’s in Tampa closed after 50 years and McCrory’s in Sarasota after 70, having survived a depression far worse than today’s economic slump. McCrory’s manager, Lorrie Sacco, says the ones she feels most sorry for are regular customers who live in nearby nursing homes and retirement hotels, pensioners left with no convenient, or familiar, place to go for their meager needs.

Both corporations, Woolworth and McCrory, said the economic recession has sped the pace of closings.

McCrory’s reported a $42.3-million loss in just the first nine months of last year, missed a Feb. 15 payment on $3.37 million in debt securities, and on Feb. 26 filed for bankruptcy protection from creditors until it figures out how to pay the bills. Woolworth’s, besides losing money on its 90 variety stores, is also closing 810 of its clothing, shoes and sports equipment stores.

But the demise of the downtown dime store began not in a recession but in boom times a generation ago with the growth of suburban malls and giant discount stores, K mart, Wal-Mart and the like.

“A discount store on the outskirts of town may answer the needs of consumers,” says Carl Milofsky, “but not the needs of the town.” Milofsky, a sociology professor at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa., explains:

“A 5-and-10 is the type store that adds a great deal to a town’s sense of community. It has a close-knit character people can identify with. It becomes like an anchor.

“A discount store outside of town has the opposite effect. It draws people away. When a 5-and-10 goes, a neighborhood loses part of what holds it together.”

After the current closings, Woolworth will still have more than 900 “general merchandise” stores in America, about 950 fewer than a decade ago and many of them located in shopping malls. McCrory’s will have 820; besides its McCrory’s, Kress’s and J. J. Newberry’s, these also include stores named T.G.& Y., McLellan, H. L. Green, and G. C. Murphy. Over the years the McCrory’s chain has included Silver, Elmore, Britts and Kittinger stores, names that have long since vanished from American Main Streets, along with scores of independent dime stores and small chains such as Edwards’, Eagle and Rose’s.

An irony of commerce is that both K mart and Wal-Mart have dime store origins.

The K in K mart stands for Sebastian S. Kresge whose “green front” 5-and-10s dated back to the turn of the century. As for Wal-Mart, it’s founder, Sam Walton, started in the late 1940s with 15 Ben Franklin dime stores. Both went into the discount business in 1962.

Now K mart operates more than 2,300 discount stores and Wal-Mart about 2,000. Combined, they number approximately the same as America’s 5-and-10s at their high-water mark in the 1960s.

Perhaps time sweetens the memory, but Americans of that generation and before tend to become downright sentimental when they talk about the 5-and-10s of their youth. Nothing about a shopping mall seems to inspire the same devotion.

“The five-and-dime where I grew up,” recalls a Houston native, “had a sort of musty, dusty oilcloth smell. They used to have bolts of it on rollers in the back of the store next to the molting parakeets and the goldfish in their slime-encrusted tanks.

“To prowl the aisles looking at the toys, the rainbow of hair ribbons, seven jillion kinds of buttons and thread, every kind of candy, it was heaven. I still have some of the dishes and kitchen stuff my mother and grandmother cherished.”

Another, in the grip of nostalgia, remembers detouring through the Woolworth’s on State Street in Chicago every time he went downtown, “to see whether the guy was demonstrating the Veg-a-matic produce slicer. I bought one for my mom, and she still uses it.”

A veteran 5-and-10 fan from Milwaukee remembers listening to phonograph records--”try it before you buy it”--and a fan from Newark remembers the piano player entertaining buyers of sheet music. In one pre-television year, Woolworth’s sold 20 million sheets of music and 5 million phonograph records.

They were experiences anyone in America over 40 would recognize.

So ubiquitous were dime stores nationwide by 1931 that Billy Rose and Mort Dixon could write a tune all America could hum: “It was a lucky April shower, it was a most convenient door, I found a million dollar baby in a five-and-ten-cent store.”

So much a part of the culture had dime stores become on Feb. 1, 1960, that when four black college students in Greensboro, N.C., chose a racially segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter to stage a sit-in, the tactic spread in two months to similar counters in 54 cities and lit a fire under a nearly dormant civil rights movement.

“We picked Woolworth’s because it was a national chain with different policies for different parts of the country,” Franklin McClain said recently. He was one of the four and now lives in Charlotte, N.C.

“That was all we considered at the time,” he said, “but I’ve thought about it in later years and decided we couldn’t have picked a better place. “Nothing was more typically American than a Woolworth’s. Everybody could identify with a dime store, especially the ordinary people.”

Shortly after the Woolworth Corp. announced its store closings it hastened to assure the people of Greensboro that that store would not be among them. It now has a plaque out front commemorating the historic sit-in.

Frank Winfield Woolworth, at age 27, opened his first “Great 5-Cent Store,” in Utica, N.Y., on Feb. 22, 1879. It failed.

The reason was one that today’s dime store managers can appreciate--not enough walking traffic. He moved four months later to a corner building on a busy street in Lancaster, Pa., opened for business June 21, took in 2,553 nickels the first day ($127.65) and an American institution was born.

Three years later John Graham McCrorey, age 22, opened his first store in Scottdale, Pa. Like Woolworth, who wrapped his parcels in newspaper, McCrorey also kept a sharp eye on the overhead. When he hired the sign painter he dropped the “e” from his name and it became McCrory forevermore.

First McCrory then Woolworth, in 1883, added 10-cent items to their stock, but Woolworth sweated over the decision. “As soon as we added 10-cent goods to the line,” he wrote later, “we took away part of the store’s charm.”

Woolworth’s, again reluctantly, raised its top price to 20 cents in 1932. By 1935 none of America’s established 5-and-10s, their charm still intact, had a price limit.

In Kay Blackwood’s view, charm does not seem to rank very high on the scale of virtues at any of the discount stores he has seen. At least not compared to the McCrory’s dime store he runs in Rock Hill, S.C.

“This store was built back in the ‘20s,” he said with obvious pride. “That’s the original ceiling, embossed tin. That’s the original hard maple floor, good as new. You don’t see those anymore. We used to oil the floors once a month.”

The source of that distinctive dime store aroma?

“Probably.”

Blackwood started at Kress’s in Spartanburg, S.C. He has served the company the last 40 years in eight different stores in six states. His store in Rock Hill is not on McCrory’s closing list.

“We’re doing fine here,” he said. “I hope McCrory’s doesn’t try to turn our stores into discount houses. I believe we’ll survive if we just stay what we were to begin with, a dime store.”

Two doors down from Blackwood’s store is a Woolworth’s. Nothing unusual about that, at least not a generation ago. Time was when you could find as many as three dime stores on the same block.

Except this Woolworth’s has been closed for more than a year. Nothing, alas, unusual about that either.

With cupped hands you can make out through its darkened window a concrete floor. No, on closer look the floor is hard maple, all right. It is covered with dust the color of ashes.