Hey Bakers, not to go too far astray here, but what does Bankruptcy Liquidation mean to you.
But moving on, when I was a child , one half century ago , I lived in a post WWII tract home with my parents and siblings, gobs and gobs of siblings. We were sardines in a can. Due to our family size, we did not have a ton of money to splash around. But once in a while, my mother would give each of us a couple of quarters--the so called allowance. It literally was a couple of quarters once in awhile. I think the quarters would come from my grandmother who would slip a roll to my mother when she would visit. She would hop on the Intercity bus on Kennedy Boulevard( then called Hudson Boulevard) in Union City, after taking the Boulevard Bus from our ancestral home in Jersey City. Our wonderful grandmother would come with little gifitng to her grandchildren and for several weeks after quarters would be doled out.
My brother would spend his on Topps Baseball Cards and if he had retained that shoe box he would now be a wealthy man. My older sister never spent hers at all, and in fact still has the first quarter she ever received---no lie, and she has become a well to do person. She is actually a very generous person , but at the same time incredibly cheap, but that is a story for another day.
I would take my two quarters and I would walk the mile or so to the little store up on the main road and I would buy a package of Hostess Cup Cakes or Hostess Snow Balls. The walk was under the tree cover of a county road, heavily traveled , lacking a sidewalk. It was back then a country road, today the local Community College is on that road. The little store has changed hands several times, but it retains its essential character , newspapers, soda, cigarettes, lottery tickets. Before leaving my mother would caution me to be safe on the road. The walk was long for a child, no child of today would be allowed to make that walk by himself. After the hard work of the walk, the reward was always the same. I would go and sit on the log barrier that surrounded the parking lot and I would slowly eat the cupcake, saving the icing that I peeled from the top for last, I would lick the cream filling out of the cupcake before devouring the cake. I would eat the snowball in similar fashion. Occassionally I would go the Twinkie Route, but not often as they did not have the substance of the other products. I would savor the treats as a delicacy. These things did not come often in those days, which is hard to understand from the perspective of today where we have cupcake specialty stores all over the map. So these little treats were meaningful beyond anything of today.
It has been 50 years since I have imbibed. But in the theme of the Big Yellow Taxi, I left work and ran down to the local 7-11 and for what might be the last time I did allow myself to go home once again.
My advice to you, act now before it is too late.