TIME CAPSULE MEMORY
“Sweet Treat”
Back in 1952 when I was thirteen and living in Fairview, New Jersey, my girlfriend and I would do our holiday shopping in the Big Apple. We’d always save 15¢ for a soft ice cream in a glass at Woolworth’s. You could get either vanilla topped with chocolate syrup (my favorite) or vanilla topped with strawberry syrup. Today I have a candy scale that I purchased at a garage sale. The woman said it came from Woolworth’s when it went out of business. It sits on my living room coffee table, reminding me of the glass partitioned counters, the smell of wood, and the wonderful affordable items displayed throughout the store.
—Marilyn Rietzel
The First Woolworth’s “Refreshment Rooms”
On August 31, 1910, the first official F. W. Woolworth & Co. eatery opened on 14th Street, New York City. Managed by J. U. Troy, it was known as the Refreshment Room, a phrase Woolworth had picked up in England. This original restaurant was a far cry from the Formica-counter decor of later Woolworth’s luncheonettes. The room was located in the rear of the store, in a space measuring 27 x 60 feet. The dining area featured sixteen Carrera-marble glass-topped tables and a forty-foot glass-topped counter. Behind the scenes, modern kitchen equipment hummed. The aroma of fresh flowers wafted throughout the dining room, where customers were served by uniformed waiters and waitresses who had been strictly instructed “to please.” The dishes were china, the tablecloths were linen, and beautiful artwork filled the walls.
Frank quickly duplicated this Refreshment Room concept in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He opened his in-house restaurant the same day, in October 1911, that he premiered his new and improved five-and-ten store in the Woolworth Skyscraper on the corner of Queen Street and Grant. On opening day, 37,000 Lancasterians came to the new Woolworth’s to shop, and another 3,279 patrons were served free “sampler” meals on opening day. One of the overriding favorites was fried oysters; harried waiters served over 5,400 portions. Roth’s Orchestra played the “Woolworth March,” along with popular songs of the time, such as “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” and “Shine On, Harvest Moon.” VIPs from the F. W. Woolworth Company, as well as from the state of Pennsylvania, joined Frank W. Woolworth in celebrating his latest spectacle.
Frank W. Woolworth (seated far left) and a table of local dignitaries gathered together for the grand opening of his elegant “Refreshment Room” in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1911.
Like the stores themselves, Frank’s Refreshment Rooms boasted “no item over 10¢.” Restaurant sales that first day in Lancaster were modest, a mere $29.95; partly because many people came just for the free food selections and did not order anything else from the regular menu. By the weekend, though, sales had skyrocketed, especially since the press had covered the event and word of mouth spread quickly.
Frank Woolworth soon opened up similar Refreshment Rooms across the country. If a store did not have the square footage to accommodate such a grand establishment, then he compromised with a smaller restaurant, or a standup counter, which was an early version of today’s take-out emporiums.
By 1928, the company was proud to announce that 90 million meals per day were being served in Woolworth’s coast to coast.
Frank Winfield Woolworth (1852-1919)
Charles Sumner Woolworth (1859-1947)
Frank first designed the famous Red W logo in 1886. A blue variation of the W was designed for the company’s centennial celebration in 1979.
Many people do not realize that Frank’s first “nickel and dime” trade was not conducted with actual coins, but primarily with post-Civil War paper money called shinplasters.
Woolworth’s earliest five-and-dimes were small, simple, sidewalk level store fronts, such as this one in York, Pa.
In 1900, the Merchant Prince erected his first wholly-owned, six-story “skyscraper” in Lancaster. It featured two floors of merchandise, an elaborate chandeliered Refreshment Room, and floors for executive offices. On the roof, nestled between the golden poles, sat an English-styled garden and a full Vaudeville stage!
Frank Woolworth shocked New York’s upper crust when he first opened a five-and-dime on posh Fifth Avenue.
This Woolworth’s in St. Petersburg, Florida was typical of the style of Woolworth stores prospering during the 1930s and 40s.
By 1929, eighty percent of Woolworth’s had refreshment rooms or lunch counters. The Salt Lake City, Utah store boasted the longest counter in the region.
During the company’s hey day, landmark towns like Scottsdale, Arizona and Atlantic City, New Jersey drew record-breaking crowds.
One of Woolworth’s most popular features was its plethora of decorations and favors suitable for holidays and special events. The above photo shows the wedding and bridal shower, c. 1935.
The magnificent Grand Arcade lobby of the Woolworth Building. Since 1913, it has been one of the most frequented tourist spots in New York City.
Woolco-brand cottons, yarns, and all manner of sewing materials remained best-selling items for decades. Due to Frank’s distaste of “wasting money” on paid advertising, this elaborate 1917 magazine ad represents one of the few published before Frank Woolworth’s death in 1919.
Stunning architectural features in the Woolworth Building lobby include this “Labor & Commerce” stained-glass mural. Reportedly, the woman’s face (center) is a likeness of his beloved mother, Fanny McBrier Woolworth.
Frank Woolworth’s mahogany and gold gilt executive desk was an exact replica of the desk of his hero, Napoleon Bonaparte, which Frank saw during a visit to Napoleon’s Palace in Compeigne.
The sixty-story Woolworth Building opened to great fanfare in 1913. Frank Woolworth paid 13.5 million in cash to create his “Cathedral of Commerce,” which reigned as the tallest building in the world until 1930.
Today, five-and-clime nostalgia collectors are seeking out everything from old coin wrappers to celebrity items to Christmas catalogs.
Wooleys’ Post-War Luncheonettes
After World War II, most of the lavish Refreshment Rooms were replaced with lunch counters and luncheonettes. Along with Formica counters, the company started to introduce special in-house promotions, like the Banana Split Balloon gimmick. Customers would pop a balloon from a line of balloons that were strung overhead. Inside each balloon was a small strip of paper. The customer paid whatever price was written on the paper, and sometimes, if they were lucky, the huge banana split “House Boat” was only a penny. One former customer from Wisconsin remembers taking the used ice cream container home with her and using it as a bathtub for her Barbie doll; her brother used his as a vessel for his G.I. Joe figurines.
Other F. W. Woolworth food promotions were created specifically to meet the needs of America’s agricultural community. For example, if farmers found themselves with a surplus of products, they would work with Woolworth’s to devise a “Dairy Month” or a “Vegetable Week.” So, for certain periods, regional Woolworth’s would add a supplemental menu, featuring, for instance, tomato soup, fried tomatoes, tomato sandwiches, and any other tomato concoction the company could dream up. In fact, it was a surplus of turkeys that triggered the popular “year-round” turkey dinner at Woolworth’s, a meal that had been traditionally served only during the Thanksgiving holidays.
At the forefront of all this activity were the Woolworth’s waitresses, who sometimes doubled as cooks in the smaller sites. These waitresses wore company-issue uniforms, aprons and caps, and had to be very good at their jobs in order to keep up with the steady lunch business. Like other food purveyors across America, they developed their own “food lingo.” The waitress (only rarely a waiter) would jot down an order for two poached eggs of toast and then yell back to the cook: “One order of Adam and Eve on a Raft, pa-leese!” Some lunch counter lingo, like “BLT” and “mayo,” eventually became part of the everyday culture in homes. However, there were many phrases that remained characteristic of five-and-dime lunch counters and local diners. Peggy Trowbridge, who r
uns an Internet site (http://www.miningco.com) called The Home-cooking Guide, recalled her early experiences at Woolworth’s, a place where, “almost as much fun as eating the ice cream was listening to the waitresses in their starched pink uniforms placing orders with the cook in their own special language and then trying to figure out what in the world people were ordering!”
TIME CAPSULE MEMORY
“The Pick-a-Balloon Game”
My childhood Woolworth’s was in Long Island, New York, and I remember the store as being huge with displays of amazing items, everything from bobby pins to goldfish. The big attraction was the lunch counter where they had food unlike what I was served at home—thin hamburgers on white rolls, hot dogs, on soft buns, greasy grilled cheese sandwiches and best of all, banana splits “pick a balloon” game. I recall this from when I was around 3 years old; it is 40 years ago but it is etched in my memory.
—Jill Nussinow
Special Promotions
F. W. Woolworth Co. often dreamed up special food promotions to help farmers deal with crop surpluses. These photos show examples of dairy and turkey promotions during the late 1930s.
A discussion of the F. W. Woolworth’s lunch counters would not be complete without mentioning some of the loyal customers who graced those red stools. There are countless stories of customers who ate at F. W. Woolworth’s every week for years, sometimes every day for decades. The Woolworth News (Spring, 1993) reported that Mrs. Dora de’ Venau stopped in Store #1674 in New York City for thirty-five years. Every morning, en route to her job at the Boys and Girls Club of America, Mrs. de’ Venau ate breakfast at that particular Woolworth’s, and when she was out of town, she found Woolworth’s luncheonettes in other cities so as not to break her tradition.
In Suffolk, England, one customer visited the same Woolworth’s for over fifty years. According to a 1989 column by Andy Parker for The Daily Press, the customer’s name was Henry Lee, who at that time was eighty-three years old. Henry started going Woolworth’s luncheonette in the mid-1930s. By 1989, he was still attending, but he was grumbling about the price of coffee (“Sixty-six cents for a cup of coffee? If these people had lived through ’29, ’30, and ’31 they would understand the value of money.”). Coffee prices aside, Henry Lee, and scores like him, patronized the Suffolk store like clockwork. Where else in town could they still be served fountain sodas in classic-shaped Coca-Cola glasses, and thick foamy milkshakes made fresh to order?
Woolworth Lunch Counter Trivia
A sampling of the food lingo used in F. W. Woolworth, and other lunch counters
ADAM AND EVE ON A RAFT: two poached eggs on toast
BABY, MOO JUICE, SWEET ALICE, OR COW JUICE: milk
CROWD: three of anything
DRAW ONE: coffee
FIFTY-FIVE: & glass of root beer
GENTLEMAN WILL TAKE A CHANCE: hash
GROUNDHOG: hot dog
HOUSEBOAT: a banana split, made with ice cream and sliced bananas
IN THE ALLEY: serve as a side dish
MIKE AND IKE OR THE TWINS: salt and pepper shakers
MURPHY: potatoes
NOAH’S BOY: a slice of ham
WRECK ’EM: scramble the eggs
—Source: Peggy Trowbridge.
The End of an Era
The Woolworth food centers and luncheonettes that opened between 1963 and 1997 were more streamlined and less quaint than their predecessors. These were modern food facilities, geared toward a population always on the go, who demanded top quality “fast food” at traditional Woolworth’s prices. Full-service Woolworth’s cafeterias opened by the hundreds in shopping malls, with large, tailor-made restaurants incorporated into the design of equally giant Woolco stores. To help meet the demand, F. W. Woolworth Co. increased the number of executives and managers involved with its food service industry, as well as the number of Woolworth’s trucks carrying perishables to the stores. Yet even with the debut of these new and improved “modern” food facilities, there still remained hundreds of the old-fashioned lunch counters, left virtually unchanged from the day they opened before World War I. A visit to one of these lunch counters, usually found in more rural towns, offered the customer a pleasant trip back in time, and the warm smile of a crackerjack waitress who proudly boasted she’d been with the company for over thirty years.
In the summer 1997, the last of the Woolworth’s luncheonettes and cafeterias started closing down in North America, along with the last of the Red-Fronts. Not surprisingly, the food service employees were among the first to be laid off, their final responsibilities being to shut down the cooking facilities and equipment, and pack away timeworn menus and dishes. Many veteran waitresses and waiters took their Woolworth’s aprons and caps with them when they left—a bittersweet reminder of the thousands of cups of coffee they’d served to steady customers, and the earfuls of gossip shared by locals en route to work or play. During this course of the final shut downs, some Red-Front managers used the eerily vacant lunch counters and stools to display final sale merchandise. Along with boxes of sewing needles and costume jewelry, they offered up mementos such as root beer glasses and metal ice cream dishes from the lunch counters. Customers who arrived too late for one last grilled cheese sandwich were met with the following sign, propped over the old soda dispensers: “Sorry. Closed.”
Signs like this one in 1997 were, for many, a symbol that the age of the five-and-dime was officially over.
There is one lunch counter, however, which was spared.
Part of the counter from the Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth’s store is now on display at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. This particular Formica icon has a special significance beyond the nostalgic, living in the realm of one of most tumultuous periods in America’s history.
Woolworth’s In Turmoil: The Lunch Counter Sit-Ins
The student-led sit-in at the Woolworth store in Greensboro was the beginning of the largely youth-led social reform movements of the 1960s. Four 17- and 18-year-old African American students inspired a generation of Americans in the pursuit of equal justice and equal opportunity.
—Smithsonian Online, http://www.si.edu/1d/sitins.v2.4.html
On February 1, 1960, at 4:30 P.M., four African-American college students walked into their local F. W. Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and forever altered American history. They achieved this by asking for a cup of coffee, and were told, “We don’t serve Negroes here.” Instead of leaving, the students stayed there until the store closed that evening. And so was launched the first extended, nonviolent racial discrimination sit-in of its kind in a restaurant, the first such protest to make national headlines. After it was all over, neither America nor the F. W. Woolworth Co. would ever be the same.
The students in this scenario, dubbed by the media as the “Four Freshmen,” were Ezell A. Blair, Jr., Franklin E. McCain, Joseph A. McNeil, and David L. Richmond. They were all enrolled at nearby North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College (A&T). Driven by their own frustrations with racial inequality, and encouraged by a local business owner named Ralph Johns, the teens decided that Woolworth’s was a symbolic and central place to begin expressing their discontent.
“The Four Freshmen.”
By 1960, the F. W. Woolworth Co. had firmly established their slogan as being “Everybody’s Store.” In fact, Woolworth’s did cater to everyone, when it came to welcoming people into their stores to purchase merchandise. But the rules sometimes changed at the lunch counters. Most of the East Coast lunch counters had been integrated for years, but the restaurants in the South, especially the Deep South, had two sections for food service: one for the “coloreds” and one for the “whites,” often with crude signs posted to this effect located near the food service areas. North Carolina was considered a moderate Southern state when it came to discrimination, but it still smacked strongly of old “Jim Crow” attitudes, especially when it came to service in movie theaters, motels, and restaurants. In 1960, the Fou
r Freshmen knew full well they were entering the Elm Street Woolworth’s with the intent of violating regional tradition. They knew they were expected to bypass the long, bustling lunch counter reserved for “Whites,” and proceed to the nearby counter area set aside for “Negroes,” where they usually ate their meal standing up, or, as was the local preference, took their food outside. But this particular sunny winter day, they did not abide by the rules. They felt compelled to take a stand against the dehumanizing racial discrimination that had pervaded their town for too long.
Remembering Woolworth’s Page 20
