Book Stores in the 1960's

South Gate Book Store was the first place I bought a regular book.  Not a comic book, mind you.  A real paperback book.  It was Ernest K. Gann's FATE IS THE HUNTER.  I had seen the film, loosely based on the book, at the Vogue Theater and wanted to read the book itself, which I had read was far superior to the movie.

South Gate Book Store was located on Tweedy Blvd.  I would like to show you an image of that store front, but it no longer exists.  In fact the entire block where it was located is gone, replaced by a Lucky Super Market parking lot.  Inside the book is a gold, embossed sticker:

The exact address was 4167 Tweedy.  The LO 9-1265 was the phone number of the store.

After I met Daylin Butler at East LAJC, we would often drive to West Hollywood to the Pickwick Book Shop located there.

On a Friday or Saturday evening, we'd spend at least a couple of hours pouring through the stacks of books carried by the store.  The above photo is what the current location looks like.  About all that is familiar to me now is that the book shop was two stories. 

 

Pickwick Book Shops were located all over Southern California, as the bookmark below indicates:

 

 

When mom moved to San Pedro after I left for Air Force OTS, the Palos Verdes Peninsula Center was quite a bit closer, so I shopped for books there rather than drive to West Hollywood. 

 

Of course, while in college, I'd also buy books at the bookstores at East LA and Cal State Dominguez Hills.  Another chain I used to buy books at, now also defunct, was B. Dalton booksellers.

 

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Records Stores 1960's, Part III

Beside the Long Beach Fwy, on Firestore Blvd., it may now be a Target; but back in the late 1960's/early 1970's, this was a similar type of store called Two Guys.  They had a large record section and reasonable prices. 

Both Mike and I owned cars at this point, so we were no longer tied down to shopping for records at a local drug store or super market or department store, within walking distance or reached by bus.

Soon enough, however, even a store such as Two Guys could no longer compete with stores specifically opened to cater to a younger clientel looking only for top 100 albums. 

These stores looked as if they were for a generation that was entirely unconcerned about merchandising and physical appearance.  One such store opened in Huntington Park, on the other side of the street from Elliot & Craun and down a few blocks.  Bare bones interior with record covers dotting the walls, they carried all of albums from the popular groups.   I remember buying The Association's BIRTHDAY there, another album that I liked every cut.

While we were attending East L.A. Junior College, we met Lida Meek, whom Mike would eventually marry, and her friend from Bell High School, Dennis Madura.  Dennis and I would become friends because of our mutual enjoyment of music.  He owned a Roberts 8-track tape recorder/player.

I buy one, as well, and would take this with me to Air Force OTS and eventually to Minot, making my own 8-track tapes until cassette tapes came to dominate the home-recording market.

Dennis eventually found another of these counter-culture record stores in Downey, and that became a steady destination for us.  Not far from a Carl's burger joint where we would get a hot-fudge brownie sundae, I would often spend hours there, flipping through the bins.  Unlike the virtual silence of Elliot & Craun, or any of the other stores carrying records, these types of outlets always had music playing.  I bought Elton John's first album, having just heard "Your Song" over the speakers.

Another record store opened in West Hollywood, and I would buy a few records there, such as ABBEY ROAD, as an import.

Eventually, beyond these smaller outlets and local record stores, Dennis and I would soon drive up to West Hollywood, to the newly opened, holy grail of record stores for the next few decades to come:  Tower Records.

Especially when I would fly home on leave, Air Force friends in Minot would ask me to purchase a number of albums for them at Tower.

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Record Stores in the mid-1960's, Part II

Probably during the Christmas seasons in 1965-67, Mike and I would become more adventurous and take the bus beyond Huntington Park into downtown LA to do our Christmas shopping.  Our primary destination was The Broadway Department Store, on Broadway.



One year, likely 1965, we were both wow'ed by the pretty young, dark-haired woman who worked at the perfume counter, who spoke English with a lovely, and very romantic, French accent.  This might have been the year I bought dad a collection of colognes called Nine Flags, each fragrance in a small bottle for each of the countries, most of them European, represented by its national flag.  Dad, always old school, had probably never gotten cologne before and did not seem to know what to make of this present when he opened it that Christmas. 

The Nine Flags men’s cologne collection came out in 1965, it was still being sold well into the early 1970s. It was distributed by the Colton company of Boston, Massachusetts and was marketed by Gillette in the United Kingdom.

Each bottle held 2fl oz of cologne and was ball shaped and had a long neck covered with a brushed aluminum screw cap. The name of the cologne is on the bottle part of the cap and on the label on the base.

This ingenious collection was full of international flair and each cologne was named after its own country and scent. Each scent was tinted with a different color. I have also seen these in atomizer bottles, but more commonly in the splash type bottles.

Before Nine Flags, teenagers seemed drawn to Jade East cologne.  That's the fragrance I owned, perhaps the year before, 1964, when it was introduced.










But enough of colognes.  We were often at the Broadway to also buy records, more specifically record albums.  Two albums come to mind when I recall our visits to The Broadway:  Jefferson Airplane's SURREALISTIC PILLOW and Vicki Carr's IT MUST BE HIM.



This was one of those albums, apart from a greatest hits collection, in which I liked every cut.  We Five's YOU WERE ON MY MIND, and the Beach Boys' PET SOUNDS were two others.  And, of course, most Beatles albums.

When we were finished with our shopping during the day on a weekend, we would have lunch at Clifton's Cafeteria, across the street and down the block from The Broadway.  Mike invariably would order spinach, which I thought was absurd to actually, you know, pay for.

Another place we would buy records was at the Sears store on Bullis Road in Lynwood.  Checking google maps, it no longer appears to be there anymore.  A couple of the albums I remember buying there were The Beatles white album and The Mystic Moods Orchestra's MYSTIC MOODS OF LOVE.




Difficult to see the album here.

And, not all that surprisingly, it did have a romantic fragrance when you slid your fingernail down the plastic cover and opened it up.  Well, it was the 60's.

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