Burlap and Burlap

 What was the name of that fabric store in Ames, in the shopping center with Target, where mom used to go to browse fabrics and buy patterns, where they had the constellation pattern? 

It was lost to my memory, if I ever had it, since it was the "fabric store." The this store, the that store. That's what we called it, in our small town. One used the actual name only for clarity, if there was more than one option. My grandfather was a clothes horse and he could rattle off the name of all the men's store in town. When I four years old, they were all Downtown, that wonderful special place where the world happened. There was nothing more fun that roaming the blocks of Main Street looking in windows and going into stores to see what was for sale there. The world was so small and so big at the same time.

Why should I care about the name of the fabric store? No reason at all. But I like to give myself games. Can I find it? 

I go online and find digitalized versions of the Ames phone books from the 1980s and before. It must be in the Yellow Pages! Sinking into the phone books, I suddenly a young boy again with the same old fascinations of the world.  

I remember my grandparent's little game was to mutate the names of familiar places into puns. Durlam and Durlam, a men's store, was, for example, "Burlap and Burlap." 

My maternal grandfather, for example, loved having nice clothes. It was part of his delight in being an Academic, after growing up poor and going to war overseas. He knew all the local men's shops, with his favorites and less favorites. My good clothes always came from trips with him. "Matthew," he would say (he always called me by my full name), how about this pair of socks? Any purchase at a men's store always called for a new pair of socks. 

Turns out the fabric store was "World of Fabrics". It looks like it became a Joann's at some point, at least after the shopping center was redeveloped into a more modern design. It is still listed as Joann's for the moment. Soon that will pass into history.

From the Ames Daily Tribune, Wed. July 13, 1971. I was six years old. Summer sale on winter clothes.