Christmas Shopping at the TG&Y

As we officially approach the end of the annual Christmas shopping season, I am finding special inspiration in some of Jack Marshall's classic holiday photographs.

When I was a kid, Christmas shopping was easy. You saved your allowance, supplemented it with income from odd chores and perhaps a little parental largesse, and a few days before December 25 you headed to the TG&Y Store and knocked it all out in less than an hour. No muss, no fuss.

What's that you say? You haven't heard of the TG&Y Store? Well, let me tell you...

Long before the big Shreve Memorial Library that now occupies the site off Kings Highway between Patton and Preston just east of the bayou in Shreveport, there was an outdoor movie house called King's Drive-In Theatre. In the mid- to late-1950s, the theater closed and the state-of-the-art Shreve Island Shopping Center opened in its place.

It was the newest idea around, something totally revolutionary, called a strip mall.

The center featured a big A&P supermarket (relocated from near Centenary College), a small department store called Beall's, the Shreve Island Drug store (which featured 5¢ cherry Cokes at the soda fountain), a dress shop called Sa-Ru's Fashions, a barber shop (75¢, four chairs, no waiting), a dry cleaners and the greatest thing ever to hit our end of town, the TG&Y.

TG&Y was sort of like Walmart, only smaller and cheaper.

Back then I had no idea what TG&Y stood for. The kids in the neighborhood concocted a slogan that went something like, "Take It, Grab It, and Yell" for how we felt when we went shopping there. Jack Marshall liked to call it "T-Gyp-and-Y." The chain's slogan was "Your best buy is at TG&Y."

(The all-knowing Wikipedia now tells me that TG&Y actually represented the last names of the store's three founders – Tomlinson, Gosselin and Young. The chain was based in Oklahoma City and at its peak boasted more than 900 stores. After a series of sales and consolidations, the last vestiges of TG&Y went out of business in 2001.)

My brothers John and David and sister Mary and I did all our Christmas shopping there. We also hoped Santa was smart enough to shop there too, because it seemed to us that the store had everything we wanted. Mary had her eye on a Chatty Cathy doll, and I was a big fan of coin collecting and model airplanes. Lucky for us, TG&Y was just the place to find such things.

In Jack Marshall's photographs, you can see mannequins (top of post) sporting the latest scarves for Mom, Mary and I reaching for our dreams (above), Mary enjoying the Chatty Cathy display (below), and finally, Mary counting her pennies to see if it all adds up (end of post).

I fear I am starting to sound like –no, I fear I am becoming – an old fogey who too fondly remembers times past. But I make no apology for happy memories of walking into that TG&Y a few days before Christmas with considerably less than $10 in your pocket and buying something for everyone on your shopping list, with enough left over for a bag full of Hershey's Kisses to give you strength for the bike ride home.

For some reason, I especially remember a framed painting I bought one year at TG&Y for my grandmother, my father's mother whom we called "Muds." It was a mountain scene and I thought it was beautiful, and I hoped fervently that Muds would appreciate it, for she was an accomplished oil painter herself. I recall that the painting, frame and all, cost 79 cents. I remember the delight on my grandmother's face when she unwrapped the present on Christmas Eve, as we all gathered to open the non-Santa presents before going to Midnight Mass at St. Joseph's.

But what I especially remember is that for the next 20 or so years, that 79¢ painting hung on the wall of Muds's little house on Rutherford Street and then in the nursing home where she spent her last years, proudly displayed among her truly beautiful oil paintings.

Because for 79 cents at the TG&Y, you surely could show your grandmother how much you loved her.

Here's to your own successful last-minute Christmas shopping!

– Tom Marshall, New York City