Saturday, August 30, 2003
Swan, the Toasty Shop and the Beauty Academy Girls.
Sights stir memories. Today it was the house on the south side of Swan. Three houses still stand side by side there. The middle one has pigeons on what must be a buggy roof. I walked by that house thousands of times but I never noticed it until the girls from the beauty school moved into the attic apartment.
We hung out at the Toasty Shop in 1958. It was shaped like a diner car but packed between other businesses in a thriving downtown. A large steel door with a window allowed entrance to a vestibule where similar door, different only because it had a diagonal push bar, provided entrance. This arrangement kept the winter air from blowing into the Toasty. There was a long aisle with booths or counter on either side. The front window looked out on 7th Street, Business US 41, a half block from the intersection with US 40. The old buildings that were on that half block disappeared in stages: there were still second story gambling joints in the 40s, until the mid 50s, there were taverns in the alley across from the newspaper building and until the mid 60s, when people still shopped downtown, many would stop in the Toasty Shop for coffee, snacks or a sandwich. Girls who worked downtown frequented the place as did coeds from the teacher’s college and the sweet smelling girls from the Terre Haute Beauty Academy. One day two girls pushed the door and spilled into the Toasty Shop and our lives. The short one was cute with short blond hair and an impish face. The taller was, clearly, something special. I looked for flaws and found none. But I was slow.
My friend said, “I’ll take the tall one.” They were soon married and have been since.
It didn’t work out for me and the blond. She never married and last I heard she was a cosmetologist in a women’s prison. Last month, a friend of theirs recognized my name. She’s past 60 now, and working as a receptionist. She wanted to know if I once lived on south 8th Street. That’s how I found out, much too late, that the girls from the Beauty College cruised my house in those days. I had to laugh at that because I knew I was never home. I was always out on the main drag, Wabash Avenue, looking for them.
