A building gone, not a memory

I turned the corner, and it was gone.
The number of times I’ve turned from Main onto Pleasant Street on my way home must be in the hundreds of thousands.
And every time, the building at the north end of the street, where Pleasant made a T-intersection with Votaw Street, was there.
Until last week, when a bulldozer made quick work of it, erasing an icon of my childhood and leaving behind a stone parking lot.
The building didn’t look like much, and it had been vacant for awhile.
But over the decades it was home to a number of different businesses.
Most recently it had been a flower shop. But it had also been a beauty shop and a neighborhood grocery. For a brief time in the 1970s, it was possible to get your palm read and fortune told there.
Often, the building served commercial purposes at the front and was home to proprietors in the back.
For me, it will always be Welch’s Grocery and will always be associated with that masterpiece of junk food, the Hostess Cupcake.
Welch’s Grocery was in the now-vanished building in the early 1950s. It later moved to a building on Western Avenue which had been home to Cash’s Grocery. That happened about 1960.
(Small town residents of a certain age are capable of driving younger people crazy by recounting the corner mom and pop stores of their childhood. Best advice is not to let them get started.)
Welch’s had the advantage of being the closest to home when I was a kid. It had the disadvantage of being on the other side of Votaw Street — Ind. 67 — a stretch of highway that petrified parents of wandering children.
In those days, one of my best friends — Jim Klopfenstein — lived just down the street on Pleasant. His house was about halfway between mine and Welch’s grocery.
And for a few years there it seemed I spent nearly as much of my life at the Klopfensteins’ as I did at home.
Jim’s parents were younger than mine and distinctly less formal. (It was Ann and Wendell, never Mrs. Klopfenstein or Mr. Klopfenstein.) They also were a little more inclined to having kid-friendly snacks on hand.
That’s where the Hostess Cupcake first made its appearance in my life. My mother believed — correctly — that they were overpriced and under-nutritious. Jim’s mom probably agreed, but she was more indulgent.
I can’t remember what they cost in those days. A dime? Certainly it was less than a quarter for a pack of two.
And on many an afternoon, when we were both about 5 or 6, Jim and I would be given a few coins and granted permission — after a lecture on looking both ways before we crossed the highway — to go to Welch’s Grocery to make the big purchase.
Then, having braved the traffic and completed our transaction, we’d stand on the front porch of the little grocery store, watch the semis go by, and shove that chocolate cupcake with the squiggle of white icing into our usually dirty faces.
A bulldozer can eradicate a building in a day, but you can’t erase a memory like that.[[In-content Ad]]