STYLETHREAD -- LET'S TALK SHOP!

Aw, this made me a little misty.  I am gonig to be sad to see our local chain, Hecht's go (I've heard it most likely will in the wake of this merger).  It's nothing exciting, but I have grown up with it. 

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OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

By LETITIA BALDRIDGE

Published: March 8, 2005

Washington — SOMETIMES I feel as though my life has been defined by the department stores I have known and loved, but these stores may soon exist only in my memories.

Last week, Federated Department Stores, which owns Macy's and Bloomingdale's, agreed to buy May Department Stores, which owns Lord & Taylor and Marshall Field's. It's likely that some of the stores will close or be absorbed into others. A precious way of life will be gone.

So, too, will a personally memorable one - it sounds strange, I know, but my close emotional relationship to my mother was based in some measure on our visits to department stores.

These stores have been part of my life since I was a child. When I was young, my family would visit New York from Omaha; we spent countless adventurous hours in Best & Co's store for children on Fifth Avenue (where else?). My first polo coat came from there, and it seemed as though everyone else's did, too. Blouses with Peter Pan collars, brown Girl Scout shoes before moccasins supplanted them and white cable-stitched knee socks were de rigueur. Everything was always available, if not in front of your eyes, in what seemed like a wink of an eye.

My first job was as a salesperson at the College Shop in the J. L. Brandeis & Sons store in Omaha. It was summer and I was 14 years old - but I was so tall, I looked much older. This was the beginning of World War II. We sold skirts and sweaters. We reveled in all the luscious colors of cardigans in the College Shop, some of them banded in plaid grosgrain ribbon. If you were "pinned" to a boy who belonged to some kind of club, you wore his pin on the upper left side of the cardigan, above the heart.

These were also the years when my mother and I would visit Marshall Field's if we had more than a couple of hours between train changes in Chicago (You couldn't go anywhere from Omaha without going through Chicago.). We gave it the same worshipful respect we paid on visits to great cathedrals. Like Marshall Field's, Wanamaker's in Philadelphia - with its interior floors open and spiraling up to the top from the center core, revealing acres of merchandise - was another hallowed destination.

The store design meant you were in for what seemed like miles of walking. But we looked forward to getting exhausted, because there was always a stop at Wanamaker's lunch place, with the most delicious fresh sandwiches, salads and chocolate sodas in the world and the sounds of children and adults alike sucking on their straws for the last delicious sip.

And, oh, the restrooms in all of these huge, great old stores! They were vestiges of paradise, usually with aging attendants, smartly dressed in uniforms. Talking to them was a distinct pleasure - and they were always at the ready with a sewing kit to fix that button that was coming off, or a towel (a real one of course) to wipe off your rain-drenched clothes and shoes, or a comb for your wind-whipped coiffure.

In the mid-1940's, when I was in college, the Christmas season was the only time we were allowed to ride the trains from Vassar to New York City. We would come into the city, stopping at Bonwit Teller or B. Altman for a little black dress, at the delectable Lord & Taylor for a bottle of perfume or at Bloomingdale's, where you could find anything for any purpose.

The salespeople never forgot you. They made little notes on you, your family and where you were in life each time you stopped to buy or to custom order their merchandise. It was such a safe, predictable world. It was also intensely personal - everything directed at you and no one else.

And you couldn't stump a salesperson. I tried, but never succeeded in those great old stores. A gift for a little boy making his first Communion? What ever would I get for a girl being Bat-Mitzvahed? What could I possibly give a bride and groom who have absolutely everything - times 24 of them? There was always something those fabulously trained salespeople could find that no one else would have thought of - or would have taken the trouble to think of.

I miss those grand old department stores that have come and gone all over the country. In my travels I always looked forward to finding myself at home in one of them, among smiling clerks who inevitably made me smile, too. When the parent companies combine how many of these salespeople will lose their jobs because the technical revolution is changing how and where we shop?

Granted, a few of my old favorites are still left - Bloomingdale's, Lord & Taylor, Saks Fifth Avenue. But will they be there tomorrow?

Letitia Baldrige is the former social secretary and White House chief of staff for Jacqueline Kennedy.