Woolworths Luncheon Counter

Madge Bumstead

Madge Bumstead

Well-known member
It's 1971, my mom and I are sitting at the Woolworths Luncheon Counter. Mom has a coffee and cigarette on the go, and me... I'm licking my chops in anticipation of the piping hot plate of french fries and vanilla milkshake that's coming my way!

What are you enjoying today at the Woolworths Luncheon Counter, and what year is it?

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Madge Bumstead said:
It's 1971, my mom and I are sitting at the Woolworths Luncheon Counter. Mom has a coffee and cigarette on the go, and me... I'm licking my chops in anticipation of the piping hot plate of french fries and vanilla milkshake that's coming my way!

What are you enjoying today at the Woolworths Luncheon Counter, and what year is it?

c80d9b42dda1cbb3d24cc30fb05d1055.jpg
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We didn't have a Woolworth's in my town, but there was a Murphy's and a Grant's. Murphy's had a lunch counter and it was before your reference as I used to visit it in the early 1960s. @John Brunner's family had an affiliation with the Murphy chain I think.
 
We didn’t have a Woolworths either, or even anything similar; but in Spokane there was a Woolworths, and we sometimes had lunch there. However, Spokane also had a huge store similar to Woolworths, called Newberry’s, and they also had the exact same kind of lunch counter.

It was right across the street from The Crescent and The Bon Marche, and my mom always went into both of those stores to check out the “bargain basement” sales. We usually had lunch at Newberry’s, but if we happened to be in the part of town where Woolworths was st, then we had lunch there instead.
My favorite was always the hot turkey sandwich because it came with dressing and cranberry sauce, both of which I really enjoy. For me, this would have been in the 50’s.
 
Alas, my first broken heart can be attributed to a beautiful young lady who worked as a waitress at Woolworths.
Yes, it was around 1964 when I got a P/T job stocking and washing dishes is when we first met.
Ah………my first kiss with my first real girlfriend WHO ALSO SENT ME MY FIRST AND ONLY DEAR JOHN LETTER AFTER I JOINED THE ARMY!!!
 
Oh, I'm having a BLT with potato chips and an ice cold Coca Cola over shaved ice in a paper cone-shaped cup in a metal holder. The whole thing cost maybe 50 cents.

I'm downtown with my girlfriends and after lunch I'm going to buy a 19 cent Tangee lipstick, which I'll have to make sure to wipe off and hide the case in my purse, because I wasn't allowed to wear lipstick yet.

Then we're going to a movie where we'll see the main flick, the second feature, cartoons, and a newsreel and I'll buy a Bonomo's Turkish Taffy because it's only a nickle and I have to hold back 25 cents for the bus to get home.

Ahhhh, Saturdays..... 1959 or 1960.

I could only eat at the Woolworth counter when I was downtown with my friends because my grandmother was firmly convinced that sitting at a dime-store counter was a one-way street to dying of ptomaine poisoning. I made sure she never heard about it.

When i was with her, we ate at the Tea Room at Ayres Department Store, where ladies ate "properly".

The Woolworths counter was a lot more fun. We could always flirt with the Soda Jerk.
 
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My dad managed GC Murphy stores his entire career...Pennsylvania, Indiana and lastly in Virginia, so we would always be there and not Woolworth's so much (even though they always seemed to be in the same business district.) I used to love going behind the luncheon counters after closing and making myself a chocolate/cherry/vanilla soda from the separate syrup dispensers dispensers, and then the seltzer water nozzle. They also made some pretty good food there.

The town I lived in northern Virginia outside of DC had a Rexall with a lunch counter well into the 90s. I think I ate there once or twice. It was never very busy, but by then there were tons of real restaurants and the work centers had disbursed.
 
We had a GC Murphy, a Kreske, a Woolworth and a McCrory, all within 3 blocks in our downtown.

I can't remember if the all had lunch counters. I only remember eating at the Woolworth one, which was definitely the biggest.

I can remember years ago that our local KMart had a sort of restaurant/lunch counter that had pretty good food, cheap.
 
We didn't have a Woolworths but we did have a local version of it in Marinette, known as Lauermans. It was a large, three-story department store with full rooms for each department, and a long lunch counter at the front. Lauermans had soft-serve ice cream cones before anyone else in the area, with a choice of chocolate or butterscotch toppings. The building is still there, and still known as Lauermans, but it's divided into a few different businesses, only one of them (a furniture store) retaining the Lauermans name, and the upper two floors are apartments now.
 
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Mary Robi said:
We had a GC Murphy, a Kreske, a Woolworth and a McCrory, all within 3 blocks in our downtown.

I can't remember if the all had lunch counters. I only remember eating at the Woolworth one, which was definitely the biggest.

I can remember years ago that our local KMart had a sort of restaurant/lunch counter that had pretty good food, cheap.
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I encountered a KMart with a lunch counter once, but for the life of me I cannot recall exactly where it was. Somewhere in Virginia, I'd imagine.

I used to like going to Ben Franklin, but those were few & far between. My father's Murphy stores sold critters: chameleons, turtles, fish, parakeets. There were always "Free Tweety!" birds flying around the store. The fish could only look on with envy, I'd imagine.
 
Ken Anderson said:
We didn't have a Woolworths but we did have a local version of it in Marinette, known as Lauermans. It was a large, three-story department store with full rooms for each department, and a long lunch counter at the front. Lauermans had soft-serve ice cream cones before anyone else in the area, with a choice of chocolate or butterscotch toppings. The building is still there, and still known as Lauermans, but its divided into a few different businesses, only one of them (a furniture store) retaining the Lauermans name, and the upper two floors are apartments now.
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A couple of my father's Murphy stores were multiple-level. One had an escalator. There was a tube delivery system through out the store (sort of like the drive thru teller, but I don't recall how it was powered) that messages and paperwork would get sent through. Each manager & assistant manager had their own sequence of *DINGS* that would play over the PA system, so they'd know to go to the thing and grab their messages.
 
Mary Robi said:
Oh, I remember the pet departments at the dime store/5 and 10/10 cent store..... whatever you called it. It was always fun to look at the parakeets and the guppies.
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We called them 5 and 10 cent stores.

We had drugs stores with soda fountains, only thing was the druggist would fix us up with a castor oil cherry coke pre=ordered by mama.
What a way to ruin a coke, thank goodness most of that castor oil stuck to the ice.
 
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