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I always believed that I would live into my 90s hale and hearty because the women in my family did. Great Grammie lived into her 90s after spending some time in a Tuberculosis Sanitarium. Grammie lived nearly to her 90s, but shoveling snow and falling put her in the hospital with a broken hip, and that did her in. Mom lived into her 90s but spent the last 30 years in a nursing home, victim of a major stroke.
She seemed to enjoy my calls to her at the nursing home, and she would respond with one of her three words to my jokes, stories about our travels, and the people we had met. By the way, her three words were; Ayah (Maine accent), “NO”, and Shit! She was a bad ass to the very end!
When we had our Colbath’s Paperback & Comic Bookstore, we would sometimes bring Mom to visit for the day, and she was happy to be out of the house and among young people. She would sit quietly in her wheelchair and often nap. It was obvious to the customers that she wasn’t always totally aware of her surroundings.
One young customer brought a three-comic pack to the counter to purchase, but Mom suddenly grabbed the package and screamed, “No!”
You can imagine that everyone in the store stopped and stared.
She paid them no mind and just held onto the package, refusing to let go, while saying loudly, “No.”
She allowed Shirl to take the package from her and open it. It had two comics of good value and one of our collectibles in between. The kid thought no one saw him slip it in and would have got a better bargain than we intended if Mom hadn’t seen him.
He didn’t admit to trying to steal from us, and he didn’t get his bargain, but he left the store anyway. It was suggested to him that he not return.
Mom, however, received lots of thanks and was taken to dinner, where she had a special drink in her honor. The drink had a little alcohol, which she wasn’t supposed to have, but she earned it.
That bookstore was fun, if not very profitable! We enlisted both of the kids to help (with no pay), but they always got free meals.
We had tons of Romance Books, and the women loved to come in to pick out the newest ones. Many of them kept a small notebook of the titles they had read so they wouldn’t repeat purchases. We decorated a Refrigerator box like a castle filled with toys for their kids to play in while they shopped as long as they wanted.
The other thing we did was to fan all the books out as we sprayed Lysol on them. We have never had a single person complain of an allergic reaction to any of our used books. It took time and a little expense, but the reward was the word-of-mouth advertising we got.
We weren’t getting rich, but we were keeping our heads above water until the building’s owner decided he needed it for his own business. We tried to find a new rental, but alas, the fire codes made that impossible, at least for us.
We planned to use one of our rental houses and were in the process of preparing it for our business. But a home owner next door protested to the city that we were distributing Porn magazines to kids. NOT TRUE! We did have some Playboys displayed flat on a shelf about 6 feet off the floor. Most youngsters couldn’t reach them or see them. I never was able to understand how a few playboys could harm youngsters recovering from drug abuse, but the city sided with her, and we lost. We lost that battle, and with a rental property seemingly unavailable, we decided to close the store.
The person who sold the original batch of books and comics to us planned to file a lawsuit to reclaim all the books and comics we had traded for and purchased. We would have gladly given her the original volume of comics and paperbacks, but she wanted it all!
To keep from the possibility of losing not only our original investment but also what we had earned, we filed for bankruptcy. We retained a considerable volume of comics and paperbacks that we sold from our garage, which kept us afloat until we sold the house and relocated to Arizona.
It’s great to have friends because we couldn’t store all our comics and Paperbacks in our single garage, so one of our friends kept them for us.