Hello, Retro Lovers!
Today we visit Oakland, CA. and travel back to the years 1940 and 1950.
It's Easter and the stores and churches are out in great numbers in the local newspapers. New clothes are big and selecting just the right church to visit in them is even bigger! Enjoy these ads and church notes from these special retro years and remember that these ads were run all through "Holy Week" and the church notes took up at least FIVE pages in the Saturday paper the day before Easter Sunday.
Oakland had some neat smaller shops and some wonderful department stores such as Kahn's and Capwell's, both now gone.
Enjoy and Happy Easter!
Charles:-)
1 comment:
I grew up in San Francisco so a shopping trip to Oakland was a rare treat. The BART trains didn't exist yet, and driving across the Bay Bridge was too daunting for my mother, so it had to be on a Saturday so Dad could do the driving. I remember Capwell's was a huge store, covering the whole block between Broadway and Telegraph on 20th Street. Mom and my sister would start at I. Magnin while my father and I waited in the cafeteria in Capwell's basement. Capwell's was owned by The Emporium, a San Francisco store we shopped at regularly, and all the signs used the same typeface as the Emporium, except where Emporium stores had the Big E logo on them, Capwell's signs had the classy Capwell's script instead. Their tag line was 'The East Bay's Finer Stores'. In my little 6-year old brain, all those ads on television which ended with 'Available at finer stores everywhere' suddenly made sense. Why, they were talking about Capwell's of course!
When I moved to Berkeley to go to college in 1977, I furnished my whole apartment from Capwell's basement, not being able to afford anything 'upstairs'. It was a great old deparment store.
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