When I was growing up at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, back in the early 1960s, my mother drove down to Kansas City one morning to go shopping and have lunch with an old friend of her mother’s. Ladies going out shopping and having lunch in the upscale Country Club Plaza in Kansas City was almost a formal occasion. I remember she put on a summery suit and heels and stockings, and I’m pretty sure she wore a pair of white cotton gloves.
When she returned a few hours later, she wasn’t carrying any bags from the shops, and she was seething. The woman she’d eaten lunch with was married to a man who owned a chain of downtown hotels in major cities around the country. They lived in a big Tudor house in Mission Hills, the Beverly Hills of the Midwest. She drove a Cadillac. She was rich.
Why was my mother so angry? Well, it was what her mother’s friend talked about throughout their lunch. That week, she had gone to the bankruptcy auction of a chain of Midwestern drug stores and had bought a thousand pairs of stockings for a nickel apiece. She couldn’t stop talking about it, my mother said. She’d bought 50 makeup compacts, a hundred bottles of her favorite nail polish and a hundred color-matching Revlon lipsticks. She’d gotten the whole load — the stockings and the makeup and the nail polish — for less than $100.