Businesses

“thousands of cases each week,” according to The Commercial Appeal, included “cola, club soda, root beer, black cherry, peach, lemon-lime, grape, strawberry, orange-pineapple, orange, fizzer, cream soda and diet-cola.” (The newspaper did not define “fizzer.”)

The bubble burst by the mid-1970s, and now the Pop Shop effervesces again only when a vintage bottle pops up on ebay.

Pinocchio’s

Tucked inside a converted house on Brookhaven Circle like an enchanted cottage in a fairy tale forest, this laborof-love children’s bookstore operated for 35 years, from 1977 to 2012. (By that time, the owners ranged in age from 73 to 80, so they — quite understandably — retired.)

Founded by Miriam Epstein, Judy Korones and Suellen Blen, the store hosted tea parties, reading circles and other events, cultivating a family atmosphere around an intelligently curated stock of timeless classics and quality new books.

Yellow Submarine

One of multiple brainchildren birthed, like wigged-out Athenas, from the brow of the late Memphis counterculture avatar Jim Blake (whose Barbarian Records label was the sonic home of Jerry Lawler), this beloved/infamous “hippie shop” at 637 S. Mendenhall, in the heart of pro-henry Loeb East Memphis, offered waterbeds, smoking paraphernalia, records, lava lamps, concert tickets and blacklight “Peace” and Paul Mccartney posters that were as likely to find themselves on the bedroom walls of clueless elementary-school kids as inside dorm rooms and crash pads.

A 1970-or-so successor to Blake’s Midtown store, Atlantis, Yellow Submarine was notable for a large painted sign that recreated the famous cartoon image of the Beatles and their canary-colored conveyance, as introduced in the 1968 film that was the store’s namesake. Of course, the Beatles broke up, and eventually Yellow Submarine, too, was grounded, to be replaced by Vic’s Auto Repair. The brick building, now painted green, still stands, tucked behind the Belmont Grill.

Piggy Wiggly

Like such other essential 20th-century innovations as the family chain hotel, absolutely-positively-overnight delivery and (arguably) rock ’n’ roll, the concept of the self-service grocery store originated in Memphis, when Clarence Saunders opened the first Piggy Wiggly market at 79 Jefferson in 1916.

Now owned by New Hampshirebased C&S Wholesale Grocers, the Piggy Wiggly brand lives on, with more than 500 stores in 18 states; you can find one just down the road in Olive Branch or way down the interstate in Nashville, but not in Memphis: The supermarkets that used to dot the Bluff City with their happy pig-face logos are here no more, most having been converted to Cash Saver groceries and other stores. However, you can visit a replica of Saunders’ original store inside the Pink Palace (now known as the Museum of Science and History), the pink Georgian marble mansion that originally was Saunders’ home.

Poplar/pop Tunes

From its flagship Poplar Tunes location at 308 Poplar, where young Elvis Presley was a frequent shopper (and where the author of this article randomly encountered the duo of Ike Turner and St. Louis R&B star Oliver Sain, circa 2001), to its string of Pop Tunes sister stores around the city (the most famous of these was on Summer Avenue, heralded by a large neon sign circumnavigated by blinking musical notes), the Poplar/pop Tunes chain provided a musical education for the swing/pop/rock/ disco/hip-hop generations, from 1946 until 2009.

The site of “Memphis’ Original Record Shop,” on the northwest corner of Poplar and Danny Thomas, is marked by a Shelby County Historical Commission marker. In its post-pop years it was a Chinese restaurant and then a bail bond office; it’s now a husk, plywood panels covering the large windows that once advertised access to Perry Como, Little Richard and Three 6 Mafia.

Boss Ugly Bob’s

Operating almost in parallel to Pop Tunes though for a shorter timespan, this record store chain, founded by musician and WLOK deejay Robert “Boss Ugly Bob” Karriem in 1971, served a clientele especially interested in blues, soul, jazz and gospel — like the music produced at Stax, down the street from the first Boss Ugly Bob’s location at 726 East Mclemore.

The flagship site was hit by an arson fire in 2006; reported “Action News 5” on it website: “Inside the record store, charred cd’s, dvd’s, and and other items remind you that an important piece of Memphis history got destroyed in the blaze.”

Happy Hal’s Toy House

It was a synergy made in marketing heaven: Harold Lee Miller, a ubiquitous presence in many Memphis households from the 1950s through the early 1970s as “Happy Hal,” the lovable host of an afternoon children’s show on WHBQ-TV Channel 13, also was the owner of “Happy Hal’s Toy House,” a toy store that opened in 1955 at 1210 Lamar.

Needless to say, Miller and his handpuppet sidekick, the blue-hued and taxonomically indeterminate “Lil’ Bow” (described by Miller in a 1988 interview as “a cross between a mouse and a chipmunk-type thing”), frequently plugged the store and its subsequent incarnations, on Union and Monroe, during the program, between cartoons and “Little Rascals” shorts.

The so-called “King of Toys” retired in 1986, by which time he was running not a toy store but a “toys and gifts” import business out of an office at 666 Beale. Miller died in 1997, at the age of 74.

Katz

Brothers Ike and Mike Katz launched their drug store chain in 1914 in Kansas City, Missouri, but Memphians could be forgiven for assuming the four Buff City locations were locally owned; after all, a lot of care went into the manufacture of the 1963 “glass-walled” Katz store on Poplar at Angelus (now the Center City Shopping Center) and the creation of the “giant bewhiskered” cat head that beamed out over the parking lot in front of the 1964 Katz at the Eastgate shopping center. (That general vicinity was ground zero for large sculpted mascots: almost next door, a Big Boy statue hoisted a huge hamburger; while across the street, a grocery sack-toting colossus heralded the presence of a Giant food store.)

With its cafeteria, sporting goods section and more, a Katz store was more like a Walmart than a Walgreens. “Katz’s Eastgate Store Features Self-service” proclaimed The Commercial Appeal, which reported that the pet department boasted “tropical and gold fish, monkeys, chameleon, lizards, turtles, hamsters, love birds” and even a “tropical marmoset.”

The Peanut Shoppe on Summer

No relation to its goober doppelganger Downtown, the historic Peanut Shoppe on Main Street (which opened in 1949 and is still going strong), the Peanut Shoppe at 4305 Summer closed during the last week of 2017, after more than a half-century of distributing legumes by the millions.

Notable for the iconic Mr. Peanut sign that greeted customers near the entrance, the store was “a Memphis landmark,” declared The Commercial Appeal, that had shared “a section of Summer Avenue with the city’s first Mcdonald’s restaurant and another local landmark, the iconic Pop Tunes record store” (see above).

The Shoe House

To paraphrase the familiar nursery rhyme: “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children she didn’t know what to do. So she opened a store on Lamar Avenue.”

As probably every person who drove past 2995 Lamar in 1965 quipped, in emulation of Ed Sullivan, Memphis had acquired “a really big shoe” — a roadside children’s shoe store, shaped like a giant clodhopper, with a folksy slanted shingle roof and a cute crooked chimney. Probably more photographed than patronized as the years passed, the shoe — built by Memphis shoe-store magnate Phillip Raiford — squatted, like a refugee from Route 66, on what was originally a rather rural stretch of road; when the store opened on March 28, 1965, as “The Shoe House,” an advertisement in The Commercial Appeal promised it would be “filled from ‘heel to toe’ with sparkling shoes for young boy and girls.”

The ad declared the shoe had traveled “from the land of fantasy — to the city of Memphis,” but perhaps it should have booked a return flight: By 1981, according to the Memphis Press-scimitar, it was a “shoe-shaped disco known as the Spanish Perm,” and it made the news when a 17-year-old was stabbed to death there at “a spring party attended by students from several schools.”

Inevitably, the shoe was given the boot by the march of time: The pressures of demographic change and the capitalist growth imperative proved inhospitable to its whimsical architectural novelty, so the shoe was demolished, in 1995, to make way for a strip mall.