“When I was dating my husband, Guy, when we were young teenagers, the little outing we would do, right after Thanksgiving dinner, was go down there and stand in that long line in the cold and walk past those Christmas windows,” says Renée Pipitone, 73, a former board member for the Summit County Historical Society of Akron, OH. “They were so well done. And the animatronics [were] cool. … The costumes on the characters were gorgeous. … The whole thing was quite magical.”
“Dad would walk from Akron U. … He would walk through the book department to get to the lunch counter. And he would buy me one of the Bobbsey Twins books. … He wouldn’t buy me another one until I finished the first one, and I went through the whole series. He bought them one at a time at his lunch hour.”
“I remember walking in onto the main floor, and all those wonderful smells from perfume counters and everything — and then we’d go up the escalator … [higher up] until you were on that narrow wooden escalator, which was fascinating to me.”
“One time, they had an 88-cent sale. And they had taken one whole floor of the parking deck, and that was the sale. Everything on those tables was 88 cents. … I was probably six or seven, and I don’t know what mom bought for herself, but she bought me this wooden doll furniture — little doll, like Ginny doll-size furniture, and it was a little fold-out bed, with a little mattress. There was a little dresser that the drawers pulled out. … I still have it.”
Akron-Summit County Public Library
