Sandy from Sheffield Lake emailed me to tell me about her 1967 Giant Tiger memory. "I remember being in the checkout line at Giant Tiger with my Mom, Dad and brother," she said.
And then it happened: her brother accidentally sprayed automotive de-icer into his eyes.
"I didn't see it happen," she said, "but all of a sudden, my brother was whisked away to the emergency room at St. Joe's. I remember the massive eye patch that he came home with."
Sandy was only four at the time – and she can't remember if her father ever bought the de-icer he needed!
"Now stuff is so securely packed you almost need an engineering degree to get things open," she notes.
Dennis worked in management for many years at the steel mill. "It was very convenient having a store like that right outside the plant gate," he noted.
"I bought my first pocket calculators there for $9.95 each. One for me and one for our department clerk," he remembered. Before the calculators, Dennis pointed out that they "still had the ancient mechanical calculators" where you had to "turn the crank toward you to add and away from you to subtract."
"With the pocket calculator, it was instant and we were amazed, it took so little" he remembered. "This was back in the days when spreadsheets were 11x17 blue ruled paper with a red double line column marker to the left, carbon paper and #2 pencils, no xerox machines, etc."
Special thanks to Sandy and Dennis for their anecdotes!
