As I looked through the boxes of figures, I found an old Shogun Warriors figure I bought at K-City in Logan. In one box was a few G.I. Joes that I bought at the Hobbs Department Store in downtown Williamson back in 1982.
There were several toys that I bought at the K-Mart in South Williamson, Ky., at the Southside Mall and several I bought at Watson's, which was located in the Southside Mall and in downtown Logan.
I can remember K-City very well. The store used to be the location of the first Kroger here in Logan and my dad had worked there so I knew a lot about the building and it was always fascinating to shop in a store where my dad had worked.
I remember how unorganized everything in K-City was near the end and how sad it made me when it finally closed down. As high as the prices were on toys, I always enjoyed going there — even in the dead of winter when it was so cold inside the toy department. K-City just seemed to have those little odd toys that no other stores in the local area sold — like the small Shogun Warriors die cast figures.
Walking up the entrance ramp into K-City, there would always be children's swimming pools hanging on the walls and, over the years, those plastic swimming pools faded badly. The toys were in an upstairs part of the building and you had to walk up another ramp to get to that part of the store.
Lining the walls as you walked up the ramp were toys on pegs and I remember there was no heat in the toy department, so it was always very cold when we'd come shopping there around Christmas every year in the late 1970s. My parents always made me bring a coat, because I had to stay warm if I was going into the toy department.
The last time I shopped at K-City, everything was on clearance and in the books section there were coverless Battlestar Galactica comics that had been through a flood. I remembered seeing those same comics when we shopped there after the store had been flooded many years earlier.
I bought my Super Joes figures (the later, smaller version of the old 1960s G.I. Joes) at Maloney's in South Williamson where the Walmart is located now. That store later became Hecks and then L.A. Joes before it closed down.
The shelves at Maloney's were so overburdened with toys stacked nearly to the ceiling that my parents never let me just pick stuff up. They were always afraid I'd be buried in a landslide of action figures and Tonka trucks. After the 1984 flood washed through the store, the mud-covered merchandise was put on sale out in the parking lot and many people, including myself, rummaged through the nasty items. I didn't buy anything, because the prices hadn't come down all that much and my parents were afraid I'd catch typhoid or tetanus from the flood mud that was still on most everything.
Hobbs Department Store in downtown Williamson was one of my all-time favorite places to shop for toys. The toys section in Hobbs was also in the upstairs part of the building and I can remember the store had bins in which the toys sat. Coming back down that staircase and looking out over the store was, what I imagined it looked like like peering down over Macy's. The G.I. Joes sat on the floor in a clothes basket and they later moved to the shelves when more figures and vehicles were released. Hobbs also had a spinner rack on which you could find bat-and-balls, water pistols and those wooden airplanes with the styrofoam wings. My parents bought me an entire set of the M.A.S.H. figures back in 1983 there.
On that spinner rack is where I found my bagged, 3-pack set of Stars Wars comics. In that pack were issues #1-3, but they were reprints and marked as such on the covers, which was disheartening, because I knew that reprints weren't worth nearly as much as the original prints. My Grandad Clark bought those for me and I read them as we walked to meet my Mother and Granny J.C. Penney's, which was then across the street — and didn't have a toy department.
Hobbs later closed down its downtown Williamson store after it had opened a huge store in the Southside Mall. Hobbs went out of business not long after the mall opened and Watson's took over the space and Watson's later changed its name to Peebles.
At the Hobbs mall store I bought my first Masters of the Universe figure, which was Skeletor, and later I bought He-Man and Teela there. The last thing I bought at Hobbs was a bicycle tire for my Huffy BMX bike, which cost me $16 and caused me to be broke for the next few weeks (that was a lot of money back then and I had to save my lunch money for it).
Also in downtown Williamson and in downtown Logan was the G.C. Murphy's store, which we always called "The Dime Store," and always had a great toy section. I bought a Mego Star Trek Klingon figure there, as well as my first Star Trek The Motion Picture action figure, several Sgt. Rock figures and a few others at The Dime Store.
I also remember the G.C. Murphy's store had bathrooms that you had to pay a dime to enter. G.C. Murphy's also had a great little restaurant in the front of the store.
Watson's had a small toy section in the back corner of the store and that's where I'd go when my Mother was looking for shoes. I bought several G.I. Joes there, as well as at least one MASK vehicle and figure set. I remember buying Battle Cat from the Masters of the Universe collection there and I remember Watson's was the only store in the area that sold the NEW He-Man action figures when they became smaller. Watson's also had a very good selection of Hot Wheels cars. When I was visiting my aunt here in Logan back in 1982, I bought some Hot Wheels Crack-Ups from its toy department in the basement.
In Gilbert, there was S-Mart, where my Granny bought me several Marvel Classics Comics featuring War of the Worlds and Ivanhoe and, after we'd shopped there, we'd drive over to the Rita Mall and then to Monitor to shop at the Super S.
S-Mart didn't last long, but Super S later became Ames and then the building burned and now it's a parking lot with a small flea market on the weekends.
There was a lot of excitement for us when the Rita Mall was built. It was our first mall! Even though it was an hour drive over to Rita, we'd make the trek on weekends to do some shopping. The Southside Mall opened in 1981 and we started shopping there, which was always a treat. There are hardly any of the old stores from the Southside Mall that are still in business.
Looking through those old boxes of toys really brought back a lot of fond memories. I'm sure I'll get nostalgic as I go through more of those old boxes, but that makes the work so much more fun.
Do you remember where you bought your first toy?
I enjoyed your naostalgia article very much, but apparently you were born (or moved to Logan) after the "first Kroger" store moved from the original location. The first Kroger Store in Logan was located on Stratton Street (just up the street from the Middleburg Theatre) back as long as I can remember, and I was born in the 1930s. We used to carry groceries from the original Kroger Store (on Stratton St.), walking across the "new" bridge (later called the Blue Bridge that is no longer in existence); Walking through Deskins Addition (AKA Black Bottom) and all the way to the top of City View Hill where we lived, carrying enough groceries to feed the family and later to feed 10 boarders for a week. We were very hot and "sweaty" in summer months and half frozen in the winter by the time we got home to the top of City View Hill. That was in the 1940s. I wouldn't trade those days for all the WalMarts and KMarts and the "Big Box" stores of today's world. Yep, I still have my first "toy" that I can remember; a child's solid oak rocking chair that was purchased at the Middle Dime Store for $1.98 for my first birthday.