We Had The First Super Kmart In America
And now it’s being torn down.
We shopped for groceries at the A&P supermarket in town. It was a half hour away and smelled like cold meat and brown paper bags. You got a dinner plate for every so many dollars spent until you had a complete set. Those are the plates we still eat from, scraping gravy from a scene by Currier & Ives.
Maybe they’re worth something by now, even the ones that are glued back together.
Kmart was across the street, like a beacon on the hill. That’s where I bought jeans in the “husky” section and grabbed candy bars from the checkout displays.
These two things may be related.
The manager of the Kmart seemed to live in the store. No matter the day of the week or the time of day, there he was, wearing his red vest and seemingly in all parts of the store simultaneously.
Decades later, this one attorney would drop by the office every so often and I’d think, “Man, why does he look so familiar?”
It took me a while, but I finally figured out he was also the manager of the Kmart. Even attorneys need health insurance.
Our SUPER Kmart, the first of its kind, opened in Medina, Ohio, in 1991, which seems both very long ago and also just yesterday.
