Myrtle on Department Stores

Myrtle adds the following to my post on department stores:

Our family has been connected with department stores. Grandpa Binder worked for Klines Department Store, and when he died, Uncle Ben and Uncle Jack both worked for Klines. I don't know if you remember Klines had an Easter window every year. One year, Uncle Jack brought home some of the baby chickens. We were living on Leland at the time. We kept them in a large cardboard box in the kitchen for the first few days. Then, they got bigger, and started jumping out of the box. I came home from school one day, and they were gone. I don't know what Grandma did with them, but imagine she killed them as they were pooping all over the kitchen.

My Mom would drag me downtown on the bus shopping. I hated going shopping, and to this day, I only like to go long enough to buy what I started out shopping for. I hate spending much time at the mall. As a child, I liked the Sears Roebuck catalogue. They had wonderful things in them that I could imagine having. Howard liked the catalogue, as they kept one in the out house, and in cold weather rolled up a few pages of it, lit it, and defrosted the seat before you sat on it.

When we were in Oklahoma City, I was on the board of the YWCA. They told with pride how the wealthy department store owner's wives integrated the city. Their husband's stores would not allow Negroes to sit at their lunch counters. The wives had a fund raiser for the YWCA with a concert, and allowed the Negroes to attend for the first time. The YWCA was one of the first organizations to integrate fully.