Living 'way out in the sticks, I got to go all the way into NYC twice a year, once before Christmas, and once around Easter season. It was a big deal, and I thought about those trips all year, almost as we now think about going to York twice a year. We took the first ferry from Shelter Island to Greenport at 5:40 am and boarded the LIRR which departed Greenport at around 6 am. By the time the train got to Jamaica station three hours later, it was packed with commuters, and we were glad to have gotten seats way back at milepost 94.
My family was somewhere between "moderately dirt poor" and "not quite middle class" but they managed to afford a two-night stay at the Martinique Hotel at 32nd Street twice a year. There are some weird things that a kid remembers, and in my case, I remember being fascinated with all things trains, and tunnels. There was a pedestrian passageway between Penn Station and the basement of the Martinique. You could get off the train and enter the hotel without having to go outside in the weather or the street hustle-n-bustle.
From that base of operations, we went to Macy*s, Gimbles, Radio City, a museum or two, and Polk's. For some reason, we didn't learn about Madison Hardware until much later when I was around ten or eleven.
In Riverhead (Long Island) where we would shop once a month, there were two stores that sold Lionel Trains. Griffing Hardware, on West Main Street, had a small Lionel display. I picked out a flat car with pipes for a birthday present. At the other store, at the other end of Main Street, was "Kid Stuff" and I bought a 3530 generator car with my own money. It was at that store that I also bought a very strange, to me, all plastic PRR boxcar kit, made by Kusan. Strangely, the store owner didn't offer (or I didn't ask for) any information about that weird non-Lionel product on his shelves. I went back a few months later, and bought a tank car and a caboose, both kits by Kusan, because the price was right at $0.99 each. The Arcade department store in Greenport had a small Lionel display, but rarely had any new items. I wouldn't generally have been able to buy anything anyway, but I looked at the trains every time we went in. I finally did buy a #395 floodlight tower, for $4.95, when they were closing out the toy department.
Is it a kind of mental illness, that I can remember the flat car, the generator car, the Kusan cars and the floodlight tower, and how much I paid, after 60-some years? Obviously, being obsessed with trains, those purchases represented high points in my life. Of course, I can remember buying my first new car in 1966 for $2779.00 and I still have the original window sticker. I can also remember the exact odor of the steam heat, and the green vinyl seats in the LIRR cars. I remember sitting in the window seat on the left side of the car, so I could see as much of the ROW as possible, as the train moved west to the city. I remember that my left foot was really hot, and my right foot was really cold, because the heat came out of a small register along the floor under the windows. I remember that the Diesel loco was a C-liner, with 4 wheels in front and 6 wheels in the rear truck. I remember the conductor coming through and collecting the little seat tickets from the metal holders, right before arriving Jamaica station.
Forty years later, I went into Griffing Hardware to have a key cut, and asked a man who happened to be the grandson of the original owner, if there were any Lionel trains in the warehouse or attic of the store. He admitted that he had taken all of them for himself when Lionel stopped selling to small independent shops, and he had kept those favorites for his own kids. Recently, I had a non-train related phone conversation with a man, whose name I have forgotten, who said that his family were the owners of Kid Stuff. Small world.
