Trip Down Memory Lane Pt. 5 - The Mall

I almost sat down and wrote a political blog, but being that I don’t think my opinion really matters to anyone, I think I will leave it at I am very scared at the direction this country is going.  I think all of us are pretty sick and tired of worrying about the current state of everything and maybe some of us would like to go back to simpler times.  So without further ado, I bring you another installment in the trip down memory lane series.  (Cue fanfare)

Let’s recap.  I’ve talked about playing pretend, vacations, the sleep over, and discipline pertaining to when I was a young buck trying to survive the 70’s and 80’s.  I hope most of you were able to read them and were taken back there with me and had your own memories stirred for a brief second.  Today’s blog will be about another memory of mine that was actually sparked just the other day on a shopping trip with my family.

So everyone climb into your mental time machine, buckle your seat belts, and keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times because I don’t have any insurance on this blog, so you are out of luck if you lose any appendages.   BLAST OFF!!!!!

I was first introduced to this miraculous, magical, mystifying place when I was merely 6 or 7 years old.  (Nice use of the letter M if you ask me)This place was the purest place of peak perusing that my peepers ever peered on.  (Okay, I’ll stop)  There was never any doubt that this American institution would bring smiles, shoppers, singers, and even Santa himself, a seemingly endless supply of happiness for years and years to come. (I know, too many S’s even though I said I would stop. . . . Sorry!) I can only be talking about one place that you could buy clothes, popcorn, play arcade games, fall in a fountain (more on that later), pester security guards, bother clerks, and do all of it under one roof.  Ladies and gentlemen, I of course am talking about the MALL!!!!!  (Cue second chorus of fanfare)

It was 1975 when my tiny little feet opened the doors for the first time and unlocked the joy that this building was going to give me for the next decade or so.  It was equivalent to when you open a jar of dry roasted peanuts and you get that little “whoosh” of air the first time you break the seal, but instead of smelling peanuts, I smelled throughout the years, popcorn, pretzels, ice cream, arcade tokens, movie theatre, leather, clothes, and fun.  It was like walking into your own personal playground and it was up to you as to what adventure you were going to have that day.  Were you going to head straight to the arcade and blow all your money there?  Were you going to go right to Spencer’s and buy trick gum or a whoopee cushion?  Were you going to rush off and look for any friends you had there, because chances were pretty good someone you knew was there?  The possibilities were endless. 

Now the name of the mall that I pretty much grew up in was Rolling Acres Mall, located in Akron, Oh.  My family would end up going there almost once a week if my memory serves me right.  It was the perfect place for a family to go.  Back then, life wasn’t as dangerous as it is now and the parents didn’t have to put a leash, GPS, or a homing beacon on us kids.  The only rule that you had to obey was, “Don’t leave the mall and meet at the fountain at such and such time.”  That was it.  You would arrive as a family, but as soon as you opened the mall doors and stepped inside, it was like a kid stampede running away from our folks because we were free to roam.  In fact, I think I heard my folks utter tiny whispers of joy once inside those sacred walls, because not only were us kids free, but the folks were free from us too.  Free babysitting was just one of the many perks that came with the mall.  Now I finally understand why we went there so much . . .  pretty smart Mom and Dad, pretty smart.  Now sometimes your folks would make you stay with your selected brother or sister, but as you got older, that was usually not enforced.  Of course, most times, once you got out of your parents line of sight, you split up anyways.  So uch to see and so little time, was the rule in the mall.  It was almost as exciting to us kids to hear, “Let’s go to the mall.” as it was to hear, “Let’s go to Disney.”, because the mall was open year round and it was NOT a 20 hr. drive to get there. 

Now as I hit my early teens, the boy in me kicked in and it was usually straight to the arcade for me.  I would run there until I heard that overweight, elderly security guard that couldn’t stop a person in a wheelchair let alone a real criminal, yell, “No running!”  Being that my parents raised me to respect anyone older than me, I complied and slowed down to a fast walk.  The arcade was such a wonderful store in the mall because it was one of the stores that you could hear from far away.  You could hear the “beeps” the “bongs” and the “blips” as you approached, promising you the chance to destroy aliens, eat dots, drive a car 200 mph or fly a jet plane.  Once you walked in, you never seemed to notice just how dark it was in there, you just became a 12 year old boy moth that was drawn to the lights.

Now depending on how much you were able to rustle out of your folks, this determined the amount of time that you were going to spend in here.  It could be as little as a half an hour, which was the minimum, or upwards to staying in there the entire time until you had to be dragged out like some cult member being saved.  One thing, however, was that you didn’t have to spend money to be entertained.  You could just wander around and look at the machines as they promised you fun and enjoyment if you would just spend your quarter on them.  The machines would almost tease you by showing you actual game play and that was great all by itself.  Of course you could always just stand way too much in someones personal space and watch them play, but that usually didn't end up well once they told you to back off.

I would almost always take a lap around the room and mentally pick out what I wanted to play before I even approached the machine known to us as the Giver of the Change.  He was a great machine because only he and he alone, could open the portal for you to step into the video gaming zone.  “Why didn’t we just ask the employee?” you might ask.  There are two reasons for that.  Number 1: the employee could almost never be found and Number 2: If you did manage to find him, the chances were that he was in a bad mood and wasn’t going to do a dang thing to help you.  I never understood that.  How could someone that worked in the most heavenly place on earth be in a bad mood?  I would have killed for that job.

So once you converted all your useless paper money into priceless tokens, you would then get lost in video game land.  The thing that sets it apart from today’s arcades is that it only took one token to play a game as opposed to the 8-120 tokens that it takes nowadays.  I walked into a arcade last week and they actually had a mortgage broker up front offering their services so you could play more than one game.  It’s ridiculous now.  Back then though, you could easy squeeze an hour out of a five dollar bill and it was worth every penny of it.  I learned how to drive, how to catch, and how to kill a mutant in that place, and they are all life lessons that I’ve brought with me throughout the years.  Once the pockets became empty and your had watched all you could, you would drag yourself out of that sacred place because there were still so many things to see. 

Another one of my favorite stores in the mall back then was Spencer’s.  While the arcade had the sounds and the lights, Spencer’s had its smell.  I really never could figure out just what that smell was, but once you smelt it, you knew you were in a Spencer’s.  I think as a kid I thought it was pot, and I blamed that for being the reason I was hungry when I walked out of there.  It was incense however, but it was definitely a trademark smell for them.  Not only did the smell draw me there, it was because Spencer’s carried the coolest items that a kid could lay their beady little eyes on.  They had an entire joke section that was like crack to me.  (Wow. Two drug references in one paragraph.  I better go to rehab.)  Bad tasting gum that looked like real gum, invisible ink, which was one of my favorites, whoopee cushion, jar of peanuts with a snake in it, and so many more great ways to torture your friends.  That was the Promised Land to a pre-pubescent boy.  I think I must have bought every trick in there at least once.

Now the other thing Spencer’s had at that time was an “Adult Section”.  I’m sorry, but once you put “Adult Section” on anything in the store, 11-16 year old boys are going to figure out how to look there, and I did.  I treated it like Mission Impossible to get around the shelves without being seen by the clerk.  Then once in that section, especially if you were there with a friend, you would look at the bottom two shelves of stuff and just giggle like two little school girls.  “Look Matt.  Ice cubes shaped like boobs.  *snicker, snicker*”  “Hey Scott.  Look at these edible panties.  What would you do with those? *snicker, snicker*” Who needed sex education back then?  Just go to Spencer’s to learn everything you needed to know or head over to the Smoke and Magazine shop and peruse the magazine selection in tha back. 

Once I either pulled myself away or was kicked out of Spencer’s, it was time to just wander.  That is what made this place the best.  You could spend all day in there and not spend a dime and still have fun.  Of course, there were times that I was with friends and we decided to make our own fun, much to the chagrin of the other shoppers.  One of my favorites is when we discovered those little white poppers.  They were those things that looked like huge sperm, sorry but that’s what I thought, and when you threw them on the ground they would explode with a loud “Pop”.  Well being that part of Rolling Acres Mall was two stories; it was only the right thing to do to throw them from the top floor to the bottom floor as customers walk beneath you.  I can remember several times we would plan our attack, and trust me when I say that we were very smooth at it, and some unsuspecting shopper would yelp in fear as the explosion went off next to them as they sat on the bench.  I actually learned a few “colorful” words after one lady jumped so high off that bench I swore she was going to jump all the way up to the top floor where we were standing.  Once or twice, the security guards would spot us and tell us to stop, but overall we got away with it for years. 

Then once we discovered smoke bombs, and that of course needed to be worked into our routine.  Rolling Acres had a glass elevator going from the top floor to the bottom floor in this huge courtyard area.  Well, some things were just too good to pass up.  So we would wait until we would be able to ride the elevator down by ourselves and then once the door would open, you would have to make sure no one was waiting to get on, and then one of you would light the smoke bomb and the other would hit the button to send it back up.  It was freaking hard to get the perfect setting and there were many times we would have to ride the elevator up and down many times in a row to get the proper set up.  Well the beauty once you pulled it off, was that the elevator was a pretty slow one so you had time to run around to the courtyard and watch as the pod filled up with smoke.  Then the doors would open and the person that was waiting to get in would freak out and that’s when it was time for us hooligans to dart back into Spencer’s to hide.

The fun at the mall is what I miss the most.   I just scratched the surface of all there was to do at the mall.  Some of my favorites besides what I already mentioned were the flavored popcorn shop, the smell of the leather store, the toy store, the movie theatre, and the fountain.  Yep, that was the first real fountain I ever saw in my life and it was amazing to me.  It was in the original center of the mall and it was just huge silver tubes spitting water into the air and cascading down levels until it reached the moat at the bottom.  Such a marvel and one day, I even got an even closer look at it.  (I told you I would get to this)

I remember it like it was yesterday.  I really can’t remember the age, but if I had to guess, it would be either 11 or 12.  It was winter time and we all headed to the mall to save electricity.  “Let the mall keep us warm for free as opposed to our own electric bill.” My dad would say, and that was fine with us.  We walked in the mall and the coats came off and handed to the folks because there was NO WAY we were going to lug those things around the mall.  Well it ended up being my brother and me running off together.  We did all the usual things, and eventually we ended up just watching the fountain.  Well there happened to be a area that you could sit on around the fountain that was roughly 3 feet off the ground and probably 2 ½ feet wide.  The water came right up to the backside. 

Well I decided to walk all the way around the fountain like some miniature tight rope walker proving to the world, well at least those around the fountain, that I was the master of my balance and they only wish they could be me.  I made it all the way around the fountain with much ease and I decided to go ahead and do it again.  Well there happened to be a kid sitting on the ledge at the first corner, so I decided to take a large step around his back because there was no way I was going to cheat and step to the floor.  I took the step and as soon as I did, I sensed a disturbance in the force.  I ended up doing that whole un-balanced sway that looks like some form of interpretive dance until I fell.  The only problem was I didn’t fall to the ground on my right, NOOOOOOOO. . . .I fell right into the water on my left.  It would have been okay if I would have just stepped in the water and then jumped right back out, but this wasn’t one of those falls.  It was a fully committed trust fall right into the 2 foot deep moat.  My little body was dry one second and humming the Rocky theme, to fully submerged underwater humming the Yellow Submarine song now.  I raised my head above the water, as much as I didn’t want to, saw my brother doing what any sibling would do at that moment, laughing his butt off and offering no help, and slowly climbed up from the depths like a tiny version of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.  I tried not to make eye contact with all the strangers that were now gawking at me.  How rude!!!!

Once back on land, all I could think of was that if Mom and Dad saw me like this, I was dead.  So I stood there dripping and begged my brother to go get my coat from the folks.  I figured I could just wear the coat and they would never know.  Of course, the fact that my feet squished when I walked and my pants didn’t have a dry spot on them, kid of told me that I didn’t have much a chance of pulling this one off, which I didn’t.  My brother got my coat back to me, and we continued to walk, squish, around the mall until it was time to leave, which was like only a half an hour later.  Once they saw me, they freaked because as it turned out, my parents were talking with some friends of theirs a ways down the mall and once I fell in, their friends saw it happen and pointed this out to my folks by saying, “Some kid just fell in the fountain.”  To which my parents not being able to make out that it was me, responded, “Where are that kid’s parents?”  I guess it’s a good thing I was too far away from them at that point for them to know it was me, because I’m pretty sure they would have just held me under for awhile.  I will say though that it was an extremely cold ride home!

Oh the mall how I loved you and I wish such a magical place existed now.  Now I walk into a mall and pray to God to make it stop.  I don’t know if it’s my age, or just the fact that malls don’t seem fun anymore, but it just feels different now.  Sure there are interesting things to look at, but those things that are so interesting seem to cost the most.  Sure Spencer’s is still in business, but it doesn’t smell the same anymore and the whole store is pretty much the “Adult Section”.  What’s the fun in that?  About the only thing that I enjoy about the mall now is the food court.  So much food to choose from and so little time.   *Sigh* I guess it’s my age.  RIP Rolling Acres Mall.  I miss you.

Smile!!!