Hanlin’s served up Coke, literature

I was a Hanlin’s guy.

Not at lunchtime, but after school.

Lunchtime during my junior high and high school years was just short of a madhouse.

Portland High School, like most small-town Indiana high schools in that era, had no cafeteria.

Instead, every noon hour throngs of hungry kids would swarm the town looking for a bite to eat.

Some had the good sense to brown-bag it. Some went home. But a huge chunk of the student population poured out of the doors looking for lunch.

There were, in that era, about a dozen options: The Jay Garment Company cafeteria, a couple of greasy spoon joints near Sheller-Globe or Standard Brush and Broom, downtown drugstores with toaster ovens and dreadful barbecue sandwiches, the Delbert Beals eatery with its “Lunch” sign in neon out front and more.

If you had enough money in your pocket, you could actually get a well-balanced meal from Fred Puckett at the Quaker Trace.

My own lunch pattern bounced around.

But after school, I was a Hanlin’s guy.

In the early years of junior high, my buddy Steve Ogborn and I tended to favor Calhoun’s drugstore, stopping in after school for a green river. But for some reason, I gravitated across the street to Hanlin’s where the big Rexall sign hung outside.

There was something about the place, something that’s hard to describe in this era of national brands and uptight marketing when retail outlets tend to look alike.

Hanlin’s had its own unique character.

Some of that came from the staff. There was a woman named Goldie, who seemed to hate kids, teenagers in particular. When she retired, the late Dorothy Shinabery took over that role, keeping her eagle eye on kids whose sticky fingers might pick up a Butterfinger or two out of the candy rack without paying for them.

And then there were the girls behind the soda fountain, working in their after school jobs while a bunch of us were hanging out for our after school Coke.

The soda fountain had, as I recall, about 10 or 12 stools facing the counter.

Most of the time, it was a place to re-cap the day, make a few stupid jokes and goof off. But I have vivid memories of an October afternoon during the Cuban missile crisis when conversations ended with a nervous wish that we’d be back next week. No one knew for sure.

Aside from the soda fountain, Hanlin’s boasted what was then the best newsstand in the county, maybe 12 feet long with dozens of magazine titles to browse through: Argosy, Stag, True Confessions, Hit Parader and more.

For those with more “adult” tastes, there was a cardboard box with Playboy and its imitators.

Wedged in between the soda fountain and the newsstand was a double rack of paperback books, and that was my favorite spot of all.

Much of the rack’s contents amounted to crap.

But the supplier, whose truck came around about once a week, had a maverick side.

It was at that paperback rack that I was introduced to Japanese literature.

Think of that. In small-town Indiana. In a Rexall drugstore.

Yet that’s where it happened.

I picked up a paperback copy of “Seven Japanese Tales” by Junichiro Tanizaki. A few weeks later I was able to grab “Some Prefer Nettles” by the same author.

Both of those books are still to be found in our living room bookcase, along with eight other books by Tanizaki.

Hanlin’s is gone, but it’s safe to say that at our house at least its influence continues to echo.

As I said, I was a Hanlin’s guy.