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!
The first pair of shoes I ever bought for myself, I bought at Gaylord's....it was '71, I was fifteen, and they were sneakers, for which I paid about three bucks for the pair. I'd gotten the money collecting pop bottles.
ReplyDeleteIt used to be fun tromping around in fields behind shopping centers or near construction sites, looking for pop bottles to return for money. (We also used to look for tire valve caps that were left on the ground by gas station air pumps. Why? I don't know.)
ReplyDeleteIdea....why don't we each do an entry on bottle collecting?
ReplyDeleteTire valve caps? I dunno, either.
I have only one memory of Giant Tiger. I must have been 4 (I was born in 1964). I rarely remember receiving gifts except on special occasions like birthdays and Christmas, but one evening my Dad took me shopping at Giant Tiger where I picked out a scuba G.I. Joe set. It is a special memory because it was just me and my Dad, Mom was home with my brother and sister.
ReplyDeleteWow I had my first job at 17 at Giant Tigers (or Gaylords) whatever you want to call it, this was back in 1977-78 while in High School. I started in the Toy dept, and I was a cashier when it was very busy, we had the most ancient type of cash registers I've ever seen, each row of keys had the same numbers across so depending on where you entered would be the amount of the purchase, 10 cents, 10 dollars ect. That taught me how to count back change because we didnt have an amount tender key so we had to learn to be accurate so our drawers werent short and that method has stuck with me all these years, I think I made $1.90 per hour back them. I usually worked 5-9 during the week and 12-9 on saturdays, I will always remember my first job there.
ReplyDelete