Two Guys, Grants, Rickel: The NJ stores we still miss

Growing up in Mays Landing, every shopping trip went east.

Down the Black Horse Pike, toward Atlantic City. That stretch of road was our whole retail world, and I can still picture every stop.

A shuttered Sears, its “clearance” sign left face-up in an empty parking lot. Once, Sears was where you picked up your catalog order. | Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The back door at Sears

For my family, it started at Sears, at the old Searstown mall in Egg Harbor Township.

We didn’t shop Sears like people shop today. We ordered from the catalog. My parents would call in the order, and then we’d drive around to the back of the store and wait for them to call our number.

No school year was complete without Toughskins, Sears' indestructible jeans with the reinforced knees. It seemed like every family in the early ’70s did the same thing.

Sears ended its famous “big book” catalog in 1993.

My first baseball glove

In that same shopping center was Grants. I still have my first baseball glove from there.

W.T. Grant had nearly 1,200 stores by the early 1970s. By 1976, it was gone, after what was then the second-largest bankruptcy in American history, according to Wikipedia.

When I got a little older, it was the Gap and Levi’s. You were not cool without Levi’s jeans or cords.

Across the street and up the road

Across the Pike were two Jersey classics: Pathmark, and Rickel, the big hardware store. Rickel opened its first store in Union in 1953 and closed its last one, in Wayne, in early 1998.

Like a lot of parents in the early ’70s, mine decided the living room and hallway needed brown wood paneling. It came from Rickel. I can still smell the glue my dad used to get it to stick to the walls.

I think the paneling was my dad’s idea because he hated painting. When he passed, my mom pulled it all down.

Funny thing: one of the bedrooms in my house today is paneled. It came that way when we bought the place, and it’s still up. We call it the mid-century room.

What goes around comes around.

Up the road was Robert Hall, the clothing chain that went bankrupt in 1977. For some reason I hated going there and trying on suits for my mom.

I’d give anything to do that today. She passed in 1991.

Where my radio career started

Down Tilton Road was the Radio Shack where I bought the parts to build my own little bedroom radio station. I guess you could say that’s where this all began.

And where Santa shopped

Then there was Two Guys, the store I’m pretty sure Santa used for our house.

Two Guys started in Harrison in 1946, when brothers Herbert and Sidney Hubschman began selling TVs. Legend has it competitors grumbled about “those two guys,” so the brothers made it the name. At its peak there were more than 100 stores. By 1982, they were all gone.

SEE ALSO: Woodbridge Center: NJ’s nostalgic ’70s time capsule mall

What was yours?

Most of those stores are long gone. The memories aren’t.

Every part of New Jersey had its own version. Maybe yours was Bradlees, Jamesway, Channel, Caldor or Herman’s. Maybe it was a local shop nobody outside your town ever heard of.

Tell me the store you still miss, and what you bought there.