From the managing editor, October 2022
This is the time of year when, as a child, I began thinking about Christmas.
Christmas wasn’t immediate, but it was on the horizon. I knew how to read a calendar.
I don’t know what my mother went through to buy presents, but I am sure it was not easy. Nonetheless, I spent my spare time desperately wishing for things that were out of reach, both physically and financially.
In my childhood memories we didn’t spend a whole bunch of time in big stores.
We might stop at a pharmacy, but that was not a place with dozens of aisles like now, filled with tempting gifts and oddities. The most you could find at the pharmacy might be some greeting cards, maybe a Timex watch display, or an area with sewing notions.
Our major trips were to go to the grocery. When I was growing up east of Asheville there weren’t grocery stores everywhere, and those we went to had just the basics.
My earliest grocery store memories are of the A&P, located on Lexington Avenue in downtown Asheville. I also distinctly remember a Winn-Dixie located downtown near the courthouse.
That store closed when Winn-Dixie moved east to the new Tunnel Road Shopping Center, which was billed in the 1960s as Asheville’s first modern enclosed mall.
When the grocery moved, mom went with it, as it was closer to our house. The trip no longer required that we drive through the Beaucatcher Tunnel in heavy weekday traffic just to go grocery shopping.
The presence of the grocery attached to a shopping center opened up my world, in a sense. Like any child of the 1960s, my mother gave me an astounding amount of freedom—or maybe it was just because I was the fourth child and she was tired. Anyway, I’d ask to go walk around the shopping center while she did the weekly shopping, and she’d let me go with instructions to be back in 15 or 20 minutes.
Mason’s, a department store, was the major anchor in the shopping center, but it was on the opposite side of the facility, down the escalators. Mack’s Five and Dime was that way, too, where I liked to look at yo-yos or scale models or GI Joes or gerbils. But seldom did I have permission to wander to that side of the shopping center on my own. I was expected to stay up on the upper-level interior mall area, near the grocery.
That’s where I found the electronics store.
I don’t really know what the major draw was at the store. Maybe it was like a knock-off Radio Shack, selling transistors, wire, speakers. I really don’t recall.
What I do remember is that they had a wrist transistor radio displayed in the front window, with the little white wire ear plug so you could listen and not disturb anyone.
I think that radio was what introduced me to the concept of intense and irrational desire.
I stood in front of that store, staring at that thing every time we shopped at that grocery.
The radio was larger than a wristwatch and it had a watch band so you wore it, like Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio. This thing was just an AM radio, but it fascinated me. I could not stop thinking about how much fun I imagined it would be to have a wrist AM radio to wear, with the ear plug so I could listen privately.
Did it matter that we could only receive three of four AM radio stations at my house, including Billy Graham’s station up the road near Swannanoa?
No. I didn’t care.
If I remember, the wrist radio price was $14.95, which was a fortune. This was a time when an acre of land was $100 or less.
Needless to say I didn’t get the radio that Christmas, nor on any other Christmas. That radio never became mine, despite my complete infatuation.
It’s good I never got it, despite the cumulative hours I spent staring into the storefront window.
It was my lodestone, but as I grew older, not getting it taught me that disappointment is human, and bearable.
—Jonathan Austin