The Strand would eventually morph into the trashy and verboten Greenbrier Theatre
I was born in Kanawha Valley Hospital
in 1941 and grew up in Charleston. I no longer dwell there, but get
back occasionally to visit family. Wish I could do it even more
often. Almost every photo I see of Charleston on the net triggers a petite madeleine or
two. . .or more. I had a Charleston Daily Mail paper route downtown in my late
adolescence. And I can recall every stop on that route as if it were
yesterday. I had several subscribers in the Security Building on
Capitol Street. On the ground floor there was a concession stand and
the man who ran it was blind. He informed me one day that he could
FEEL the difference between all paper currency denominations. Blew my
mind! There was a barber shop in the basement but I always patronized
the Lyric Barber Shop on Lee Street whose schtick was a very
light-skinned troupe of barbers who snipped away at a strictly white
clientele. A couple of doors down from the Security Bldg stood
Frankenberger's, a men's clothing store. If you told me back then
that the day would come when there would be no more Frankenberger's
I'd have thought you were out of your mind. To a pre-adolescent such
as I, it seemed timeless and eternal (I think it folded sometime in
the eighties). The very nice woman who ran the boy's department was
Mrs. Satterfield. When I was nine or ten I was in a filmed TV
commercial for Frankenberger's that, for some peculiar reason, only ran one
time. . .very late at night on WSAZ. Almost at the corner of
Quarrier and Capitol Streets there was a Planters Peanut Shop with a
mechanical be-derbyed Mr. Peanut in the window. He tapped on the
display window glass with his cane every few seconds year in, year
out. I can still recall with vivid sense memory the sound this made.
Eventually he/it tapped a hole right through the window and so the
operators of the place scotch-taped a quarter over the hole and he
tapped THAT. Eventually I worked for my two big teen-year heroes,
L.T. Anderson at the Charleston Gazette and Bob Turley at 'KAZ Radio. The records
mezzanine at Galperin's, the first escalator in Charleston (at the
"new" Stone and Thomas Department Store) , the "dirty" movies at
the forbidden Lyric and Greenbrier, etc. I
could go on and on. I guess I'll save some of it for some other long
dark night around the campfire. Or another blog post.
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