In a message dated 19 Nov 2004 11:06:13 -0800, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa
Hancock) writes:
> Telecom editor wrote:
>> ... in 1963, I was employed by the fund raising committee to build a
>> new McCormick YWCA ... one of the guests at the luncheon was Myrtle
>> Walgreen, ... she reached in her purse and pulled out a check for
>> **fifty thousand dollars**
> I presume by that time the Walgreen chain had started and was
> properous.
Walgreen's had a very busy store (complete with lunch counter
and soda fountain) in downtown Oklahoma City certainly in the early
1940s, and it wasn't new then.
That was when downtown was the principal business area, and the
first suburban shopping center had been opened on N.W. 10th Street, 10
blocks north of downtown.
The nearest Wal-Mart supercenter to me today is at N.W. 136th
Street, a couple of miles from where I live.
Wes Leatherock
wesrock@aol.com
wleathus@yahoo.com
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The two principal Walgreen's stores in
downtown Chicago (Randolph and State Street, also two blocks south at
Madison and State Street) were both active stores with lunch counters
and basement cafeterias as well during the 1940's also. Like today,
there are/were five or six Walgreens stores in the downtown Chicago
area, but none of them have lunch counters or cafeterias any longer.
The two Woolworth dime stores in downtown Chicago (almost directly
across the street from each other on State Street) still have their
restaurant things however.
Lisa Hancock also noted in her message on this that some corporations
could be quite generous with their money and the one in Chicago in
those days which comes to mind for me was the phone company. During
the early/middle 1960's, Dr. Martin Luther King was a regular guest
preacher both at Chicago Temple on Sunday mornings and at Sunday
Evening Club at Orchestra Hall. I always went to hear him speak and
meet him each time he was in town, usually three or four times per
year. Both at the Chicago Temple and at the Sunday Evening Club they
*always* made a point of printing in the program words to the effect,
"The personal expenses of Dr. and Mrs. King on this visit to Chicago
and the honorarium for his message to us were met with a gift from the
Illinois Bell Telephone Company." And Dr. King did not come cheap as
a speaker, either. Temple paid him five hundred dollars to speak and
I think Sunday Evening Club did the same, always through Illinois Bell
which was a very generous, good corporation. PAT]
Wesrock@aol.com