The times are changing (Part II)

Hartley Neita, Contributor

MORE memories of King Street in Kingston have been tumbling through my mind, reinforced by those of friends, since I started the remembrance last Sunday.

One lady said she cried when she read that the management of Times Store was closing the business. She remembered, she said, when she sat on the knees of Santa Claus in the Store on Christmas Eve when she was six years of age.

"Have you been a good little girl?" the Christmas icon asked.

His voice was hoarse and it seemed as if grains of sand were in his throat.

"Yes, Santa," she said.

He handed her a package, beautifully wrapped with Christmas paper. A photographer flashed their picture into Kodak permanence. And that picture is still in her album of the memories of her youth.

Other stores in Kingston had a Santa Claus. Issa's Retail Store, further up King Street even had a Miss Santa Claus one year. Memory is of a very beautiful half-Chinese girl wearing a bright smile and a bright red tailored Santa suit. But while young men like me were attracted to her, children wanted the one-and-only Santa who travelled from the North Pole every year, for years, to be with the children of Jamaica at Christmas.

Anticipation

In fact, all Kingston accepted the arrival of Santa in early December as the official start of festive season. He arrived in his sleigh, in a motorcade half-a-mile long travelling from the Kingston Race Course, preceded by effigies of Norman Manley and Alexander Bustamante, John Canoe dancers, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, other marching groups, and, of course, music by the Jamaica Military Band. Thousands of parents and their children lined King Street. Pick pockets who were not beaten and their hands broken by the angry crowd, were arrested by the dozens.

So, Times Store will soon be a past tense in our history. But there were others, too. Stores like Remco, The Hub, The Garden Grocery, and L. A. Henriques, have already gone, along with The English Shop, London Shop and Sports which I mentioned last week. These were stores and shops of quality. They priced their goods in Guineas, and prices were individually hand-written in pencil on tags and not pasted on with gum-back stickers. Cloth sold in these stores were tweed and shark skin for men and silk linen and tulle for women, and not rayon. Today, at shops where cloth was measured by a yard-stick and sold for pounds, it is now being weighed in scales and sold by the pound.

Oh Lord, to what have we come?!

Drama

There are the memories of Abe Issa standing in front of his store greeting every passer-by and guiding them inside the capital of his growing empire. He has now been replaced at this site by vendors on the sidewalk. His store was where the first and last escalator in a stores in Jamaica was installed. And it was where Wycliffe Bennett presented the only ever Shakespearean play, starring Reggie Carter, Judy Willoughby and Barbara Carter, in a store.

It was on King Street, too, where Michael Manley and the nice middle-class young men and women of the JBC - young firebrands like John Maxwell and Wilmot Perkins, Hu Gentles, Jean Barnes, Reggie Carter and Jean Brown ­ starred in industrial relations theatre by laying on their backs on the hot, black asphalt, blocked traffic with their bodies, and halted commercial and pleasure activity for three hours.

Before them, however, there was a strike by the young and handsome floor walkers and beautiful sales girls of Nathan's who also went on strike carrying placards on the sidewalk at the corner of King and Barry streets.

The management tried intimidatory tactics to break the strike. Like walking behind each picket and reading their letters of dismissal; and hiring a photographer to take their pictures and announcing it was being done with a view to instigating legal action against them. And going to the extent of trying to bribe them by taking the managers and clerical staff not on strike, on an all-day picnic to the Castle Gordon Hotel in Oracabessa in St. Mary in a motorcade of cars. And inviting the strikers to join them.

Why has Times Store closed? It is not because of a down-turn in the economy as has been suggested. If that was so then the economy has been on a down-turn since 1960, for that is when the L.R. DePass Record shop, and the other grand stores on King Street closed. It is because times have changed, and they did not change with the times.

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