From the Nov. 30, 1979 edition of the Vineyard Gazette:
The north end of Tisbury’s Main street will change dramatically this winter, ending the era of the town five-and-ten-cent store when fistfuls of candy were bought for a penny and household trinkets were bagged for two-bits.
Ben Franklin’s five-and-ten-cent store will be converted into offices and a collection of stores by the new owners, Reid A. Dunn of Washington and Tisbury and Andrew A. Flake, also of Tisbury. They bought the building and the property for $100,000 from Benjamin W. Coggins.
In an unrelated change of business ownership directly across the street, the Gazette learned this week that Cronig’s Market will soon leave the family’s control and be run by another Tisbury family corporation comprised principally of Bruce L. Levett and Ronald H. Tolin. The two businessmen and brothers-in-law also own under various corporate titles Brickman’s (also Brickman’s in Edgartown and Menemsha), Issokson’s dry cleaning, a Circuit avenue building, and other commercial Island properties. They also are responsible for the mini-mall on Tisbury’s Main street which has been applauded by town planners, officials and civic groups.
According to sources close to the Cronig store transaction, the family business will continue at the State Road store. The sale, sources say, involves only the downtown business and does not include the real estate. The Gazette was told the sale arose because of the desire of David Cronig, manager of the Main street market, to semi-retire.
David and Robert Cronig inherited the market from their late father, Samuel, the senior partner in Cronig Brothers. For more than 20 years, they have run the operation, including the additional State Road store built several years ago, as Cronig Brothers, Inc.
Mr. Coggins, who assumed store management of the five-and-ten-cent store when his father Wallace Benjamin died in 1947, said he will miss the business.
“I probably will miss the store. After all, I’ve got 30 years of mu life into it.”
The senior Coggins opened the store as a five-and-ten when he bought it on June 4, 1939. His son said this week it’s becoming harder and harder for a small operation to make a go of it.
“It’s pretty difficult to run a small business in today’s world with all the costs like insurance and taxes,” Mr. Coggins said.
Carlyle Cronig, the real estate broker in the dime store sale, said the talents of Mr. Dunn, an architect with his own Washington firm and Mr. Flake, a builder, should produce an attractive remodeled commercial building at the edge of town. The two men, Mr. Cronig said, will have upstairs offices where the Barnacle Club now meets for card playing and chowder suppers. A second office, one facing the Vineyard Haven harbor, will be available for rent.
According to the realtor, the new owners plan to open up the main section of the building and connect the basement, ground floor and upper story with a staircase. There are plans to open the basement to a commercial venture and the ground floor to one, or possibly, two tenants.
Mr. Cronig said he remembers bowling as a child in the building basement. Upstairs, he said, there was a hardware store.
Going out in the lighted streets of Vineyard towns in this dying November is like observing an ancient custom imbued not only with the honor of time but also with the spirit of anticipation that leads on toward Christmas. The darkness of late and dying autumn in generations past was the slow work of nature and the turning of the sun in the unmarked path of the solar system. In our modern epoch, not yet dominated by human management but as nearly so as we could devise, it has a quality of stage effect, of contrivance.
The end of Daylight Saving is deliberate, allied to but quite separate from the seasonal calendar. It brings to us a suddenly darkened late afternoon and evening which we proceed to distinguish with lighted streets, shop windows, and the outspread of houses alongshore and in the countryside.
When it all comes to, if we pause on some corner in front of a lighted shop window or under a streetlight, the glow of which is marked by fingers of shadow, is that experience is only partly composed of present sensation and the rest of memory. As our days accompany us into December, the memory becomes more important and sometimes transcends all.
Some people know the truth of this because of the hurrying steps they take through the evening darkness, carrying home their packages. Just so it was, with the same hurrying steps, last year and the year before that, with Christmas in the offing. Some people are under the spell of memory as they pause in front of a lighted shop window, in the present moment but not entirely so, or as they stand at a curb waiting to cross the shining pavement as they would pause upon setting out to a farther shore.
Compiled by Hilary Wallcox
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