I recently wrote about the movie Peeping Tom. I mentioned a scene, particularly creepy, where a news agent sells a girl a candy bar after selling an older man pornography. Writing about this reminded me of my own youth. After we’d moved to Rouseville, the nearest town with shops in western Pennsylvania was Oil City. It had a reasonable downtown then—a couple of blocks with a Woolworth’s, Thrift Drugs, a movie theater (the lamented, lost Drake), stationary stores, and the like. By the time I was in fifth grade I’d begun to discover books. (Ours was not a reading family, being much more of the television crowd.) Finding books in Oil City was a bit of a challenge. There wasn’t a bookstore. The nearest regular bookshop was all the way over in Meadville, and Mom didn’t want to drive that far too often.
I’ve noted before that I bought used books at the Goodwill up in Seneca (where we bought clothes and household items as well). If you stayed downtown in Oil City, though, you could find books for less than a dollar in a bin at Woolworth’s. (I still have a few of those cheaply printed and bound “Easy Eye” editions on my shelf.) There was, however, just a door or two down, a mysterious shop where I’d spied a rotating wire rack of paperbacks. I was curious and although Mom never forbade us to go in, she certainly didn’t encourage it. I was a tween ravenous for new reading material. This shop also sold magazines and tobacco products. Some of the magazines had their covers obscured, and although on the cusp of puberty, I was really only after books.
One time I went in to give the wire rack a whirl. I seem to recall that the owner gave a rather wry look when a minor, myopically focused on books, wandered in. The fare there was not what I was used to. There was a novel about Bigfoot, I recall. I thought maybe that would be of interest, but I didn’t buy it. When I walked out, I had that creepy feeling that seedy places seem to leave palpably on your skin. I guess it might’ve been the feeling of that innocent little girl wandering into a shop selling nudie pictures to buy a candy bar—probably because it was the closest shop to home. Such downtowns, and undoubtedly, such stores still exist. They’ve become rare. Downtown Oil City is no longer recognizable when I go there. Now, it seems, there’s nowhere to buy books at all.