Ken Winograd: My Dad’s Toy Store

by Ken Winograd

My dad had two nuggets of wisdom for me, his youngest of three sons. First, Don’t ever ever ever go into retail. Second, Marry a school teacher. What I should do for work exactly, he wasn’t explicit about, although the moment he learned that I had started a teacher education program, his eyes filled with tears: I was not going into retail and, concurrently, I was positioning myself to marry another school teacher. I did that ten years later, but Dad was dead by then.

My family owned a small, unremarkable store that sold toys and juvenile furniture, one of hundreds of small retail family operated enterprises on and around Hobart Street in Perth Amboy, New Jersey before big box stores took over the world. Although some friends called it a mom-pop operation, my dad worked alone, six days a week, and on a couple of those days he closed shop at 9:00 at night.

He was always tired, as far as I can remember. With flat feet and bloated varicose veins, like a prize fighter after fifteen rounds, he had nothing left in his legs when he got home from work, too tired even to play catch. I can’t imagine the claustrophobia of his feet, with thirty years of standing, shlepping, and stooping in crappy shoes. Still, those flat feet didn’t exempt him from the infantry and a Purple Heart in the war.

His work in the store was marked by cavernous spaces of time that had nothing to do with sales and profits. In this space of nothingness, my dad read the paper, smoked his pipe, did small talk, sat and worried. He sat for hours, and I with him when I wasn’t in school, waiting. Waiting for the next customer. Waiting for the next big sale. Waiting for the latch on the store’s front door to snap, followed by the rusty cry of hinges and . . . a customer! My dad banked his life (and ours) on random strangers magically walking through that door, for no apparent reason other than that their kid had a birthday party coming up. Birthday parties and Christmas put my brothers and me through college.

Small talk soothed his angst as he waited for the next big sale. People loved my dad because he listened, and I never heard him tell anyone to go to hell. He had his friends on Hobart Street. There was Hyman, the optometrist, who argued about the stock market and Vietnam. I thought he was so funny, but now, forty years later, I realize that his haughtiness challenged my dad’s equanimity. I found it odd that they would spend so much time talking in the store but never once socialized away from Hobart Street, except when Hyman came to our house when we sat shiva for my dad.

Mr. Abe Soft, elegantly dressed with a look reminiscent of Claude Rains in some Capra movie, sold real estate and parlayed his money and connections to a position in the state legislature. Their encounters happened outside the store, as my dad stood on the sidewalk, pipe in hand or mouth, when business was slow. The conversations with Mr. Soft were briefer, more formal than with the others. I sensed that Mr. Soft was a bit of a snob, and there was a standoffishness between my dad and him. I think my father imagined a different life for himself when he looked at Mr. Soft, with every white hair perfectly combed, polished fingernails, soft Italian shoes, and a soft job sitting in a cushy chair or driving an air-conditioned car as he sold and bought houses.

Then there was blind man Barney, owner of the newspaper stand across the street. According to legend, he had lost his sight in a barroom fight as a young man. Sometimes Barney had to leave his newsstand early, and my father would send me to take him home. Barney held my arm as I led him to his small tenement apartment, walking the length of Hobart Street. I imagined people staring at me and the old man with his hollowed-out, lifeless eyes, and I squirmed the whole distance, my face fixed on the cracks in the sidewalk.

I did my time in the store, as my older brothers before me had. Nostalgia aside, life in the store was mind-numbing and torturous, and I can only love my father more for how he gave his life so that I can now have mine. The buzzing and glare of the fluorescent lights were exhausting. The floor was plastic tiles, frayed on the edges, turned up and out, and the walls were undulating waves of disrepair, the plaster cracked, the lines an aged road map full of dead ends.

For long stretches, especially in the summer, there was nothing to do but reread the sports section in the verbose Times (in the morning) and the overwrought Post (in the evening). Then came the ritual of straightening and dusting board games and toys, dolls and cribs, all chronically dusty and unevenly stacked. Customers were strangers, all of them, and I showed faux politeness for these people who kept me away from friends and television. I suffered the embarrassment of “store cop” when I had to stalk teenage shoppers, often my own age, who my dad feared would shoplift.

All work and no play: Dad didn’t like it when I played with the toys, to the amazement of my friends, who thought it an oxymoron when I said that I was working in a toy store.

His truck embarrassed me. He parked it in front of our house, and it stayed there in the evenings and on Sundays. On the truck, in colored letters: Herb’s Toy and Juvenile Furniture Store. The truck was a moving advertisement, better than paying for commercials on television or in the paper, which he couldn’t afford anyway. Painfully self-conscious, I wanted my dad to be like other dads who drove nice cars with plush seats, not a run-down truck with garish letters identifying the owner and son as purveyors of cribs and high chairs. And instead of wearing cologne or some nice-smelling aftershave, my dad smelled like cardboard when he came home from work, after a day of carrying, touching, ripping, folding and trashing thick russet paper.

One memory reshapes everything, disturbing this otherwise glib narrative of adolescent self-centeredness. December was the month that paid our bills for the whole year. The last two weeks before Christmas were the worst, a crazy busy time when none of us sat and waited. Encumbered by his flat feet and bloated veins, Dad was in physical and emotional pain for much of the month. Like other men of his generation who didn’t do emotion-talk as we do now, he didn’t tell us how his legs hurt or how he worried about the bills coming due in January, but the pain was inscribed on his face. I look back and imagine feeling and naming his pain, to help him know he wasn’t alone, that I understood. But there was not time for personal disclosure, collective hand-wringing or self-help mantras amid fifteen-hour days and wall-to-wall people, all asking questions to which only he knew the answers. He negotiated the chaos well. I never saw him lose his mind. Maybe he was just too tired.

There were a lot of poor people in town, especially immigrants from Puerto Rico. My dad had an arrangement, called “layaways,” whereby people selected the toys they wanted, and he put them in the storage area in the back of the store. People paid just a few dollars a week. Just before December 25th, the people picked up the toys, all paid in full, and were ready to place them under the Christmas tree.
On many Christmas Eves, as we prepared to close the store, there were some layaways that hadn’t been picked up. These toys usually belonged to poor families who could not afford to finish paying. I figured that they had not organized their lives well enough or worked hard enough, and that this, perhaps, would serve as a useful lesson for their children, who would have fewer toys under the tree. Tired, ready to go home and light candles and eat latkes, I was unaware of my unearned class and white privilege, so my biases about lazy, unintelligent, or disorganized Latinos went unchecked.

When it was time to lock up the store and go home, Dad began to unearth a pile of papers behind the counter, looking for the city map and a flashlight. He told me to load up the truck with the abandoned treasures from Santa. He stood at the counter for twenty minutes in the darkened store mapping out the routes to six or seven homes, all in the poorest parts of town. Predictably, as we stood in the back of store with one tiny light illuminating the map, rogue shoppers, usually anxious indulgent parents looking for one more needless toy, knocked on the door. “Let me in!” they called, while I thought the opposite, “Let me out, for the love of God!” He couldn’t turn anyone away. But it had nothing to do with money.

Snow began to fall, and the truck was loaded up and ready for delivery to a group of unsuspecting families. At the first house, he stopped the truck, I jumped out and lugged a box of toys to the Rodriguez’ door. I rang the bell and left the box. As I turned, my eyes met those of Mr. Rodriguez. He smiled and waved. No words.

At another house, a front door opened and a little girl stood behind her mother. I placed the toys down in front of the little one. She gasped and pointed to the shadowy figure of my dad in the driver’s seat of the truck: “Mama, es Santa Claus!”

We drove on to the next house, and on and on until we had delivered all the layaways. Our deliveries were now gifts.

Around ten o’clock, both of us somnambulant and smelling like cardboard, my dad and I arrived home in time to light Khanike candles and eat latkes. My mother never asked why we were so late. She knew. And my dad never talked about it. He didn’t talk unless he had to.

All this happened forty years ago. My adolescent self-consciousness is largely gone. Now I imagine sitting in my dad’s truck, quietly next to him, soaking in the sweet scent of tobacco. I close my eyes and again walk on the creaky old floor in the store and slide my fingers along the dusty boxes of board games. I imagine blind Barney holding my arm as I walk him home, this time without embarrassment. I visualize the crush of people in the store in December, my mother working the cash register, everyone calling out to my dad, “Herb, where are the Barbies? Do we have any Candylands left? What do you recommend for a nine-year old boy? Herb, Herb, Herb…”

I feel my dad’s presence now, as I dream of his random acts of lovingkindness. I feel silly when I remember how embarrassed I was by my father’s world. I regret my embarrassment when my mother cajoled us to kiss him when he was dying and I imagine, now, kissing him good night. Then my embarrassments drift away, and I let myself cry in a way my father never did.

Ken Winograd lives in Oregon with his wife and two children. A schoolteacher, he enjoys biking, movies, and walking the dog. He is working on a new piece about his mother and the mysteries of her perfect kugel.