Uncle Thommy McAn

What’s with people buying shoes on-line? I don’t get that, ‘cause, what are the odds that the shoes are going to fit? Don’t you end up sending back half the shoes? Can you send back just one shoe? “The right  feels OK but can I get the left in a 7½?”

When I was a kid we had shoe stores everywhere, and kids would have to go to shoe stores with their Moms ‘cause Moms needed lots of shoes. Dads only got to have maybe 3 pairs and one of those was either golf or bowling shoes. And nobody ever saw Dads buy shoes. Never. Regardless, you’d have to go with Mom to these shoe stores with the long rows of chairs. Each chair had its own ashtray, these two foot high metal receptacles that sat on the floor between the chairs. They had these retractable metal covers that you could make open and close. For us bored to death kids, these were cool percussion instruments. Moms hated these things ‘cause they were noisy, they never got cleaned, and when you played with the lids, ash and soot would come floating out.

I bet if you asked 100 smokers how they started smoking, at least 10 would say it’s because they liked the ash trays at Thom McAn’s and Nobil’s.