Saturday, April 24, 2010

Simpsons in the Good Old Days

My friend Sharon of The Psychic Cottage posted a blog earlier this week about her memories of the old Simpsons store in downtown Toronto (here's the link to that post: http://www.psychiccottage.com/blog/?p=1412).

It's funny that she should blog about on that topic because I was just thinking about that very same store myself last week. My mom had recently given me some pieces of vintage fabric that she'd found in her basement and also in the bag were a couple of vintage sewing patterns - the Vogue pattern especially is such a classic design that it would be as fashionable today as it was back when the pattern was first published - as well as two cards of pretty blue vintage buttons tucked inside a small paper Simpsons bag, together with a barely legible receipt suggesting that the buttons were only 25 cents per card. Can you believe six buttons were ever that inexpensive?

I don't remember the tunnel between Eaton's and Simpsons from back then to which Sharon refers (only the one that links what is now the Eaton Centre to what is now The Bay department store). What I do remember most fondly about that old store is that they used to have THE BEST toy department at Christmas time. We used to drive down from Lindsay to spend the day and my mom used to leave us kids in the toy section while she went to shop in the rest of the store. Was she gone one hour or two or more? We didn't care. We could be occupied in that toy department for hours, they always had oodles of toys on display that you could play with, and we would just wander around checking everything out. It never occurred to us to wander off either. Of course, that was back in the days when you didn't have to worry about someone snatching your child if you left them somewhere unattended.

Safe kids and cheap buttons - ah yes, those were indeed the good old days!

2 comments:

Sharon said...

Hi Cynthia. That's so cool. Funny I talk about cake and a tunnel and you talk about creative adventures and toys. I do remember the toys though. Interesting. What fun. Sharon

Frowzyliz said...

I'm trying to find some reference to the basement snack bar at Simpson's that used to sell the Waldorf hot dogs and orange drink...do you remember that, too?