Looking Back at Ayres Department Store by Janice Clauser

Thursday, March 7

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recently acquired by the Crawfordsville Library is “L.S. Ayres & Company: The Store at the Crossroads of America” by Kenneth Turchi, Crawfordsville native, who was employed at Ayres during college. It’s the history of the business begun in 1872, and “For the next century, Ayres was as much a part of Indianapolis as Monument Circle or the Indianapolis 500”. He shows Ayres developing interests in specialties, discount locations, and even food products, with a constant commitment to women’s fashion that gave the store the same cachet as its larger competitors in New York and Chicago. He traces the Ayres family and the store’s history through three wars, the Great Depression, and the changing tastes and shopping habits of America in the 1960s and 1970s. The behind-the-scenes look should fascinate every reader interested in this entity we called the “store with everything.” The book’s index notes names of many active employees along the way. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Attractive covers promote the texts of new books like Michelle Rhee’s “Radical” giving her plan for better schools, making “students - not adults - our top priority.” “Good Prose” explains the art of nonfiction with stories and advice from a lifetime of writing and editing by Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder. ”The Lady and Her Monsters” by Roseanne Montillo is called “a tale of dissections, real-life Dr. Frankensteins, and the creation of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece,” a blend of literary history, lore, and scientific exploration. Another Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Moss offers a book about how the food giants hooked us, called “Salt, Sugar, Fat.” “You Are Why You Eat” is Ramani Durvasula’s treatise to change our food attitude to change our life. One of her new rules is “Pleasure and dessert should be a regular part of your life, not just a rare treat.” “Midnight in Peking” by Paul French shows how the murder of a young Englishwoman haunted Old China’s last days in 1937 as the Japanese encircled the city.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The story “Ghostman” by Roger Hobbs is introduced by a casino robbery in Atlantic City that goes horribly awry. Earlene Fowler’s mystery “The Road to Cardinal Valley” deals with alcoholism in a small California town. Carolly Erickson’s “The Unfaithful Queen” is historical Tudor fiction about Henry VIII’s charming young fifth wife whose captivating ways led her to the Tower and the headsman’s axe. “Cross Roads” by Wm. Paul Young  shows an egotistical man who while comatose in a hospital “awakens” to a surreal world where he has vivid interactions with others he assumes are projections of his own subconscious, and deep entanglements where he “sees” through the eyes of others. Jackie Collins’ thriller “The Power Trip” takes place on a luxury yacht off the coast of Cabo San Lucas, where some power-hungry elites are shocked when they find out that maybe they don’t control as much of the world as they thought. It’s a plot mixing the super-rich with a master-pirate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jonathan Kellerman’s “Guilt” takes us to Southern California’s eternal sunshine as a series of horrifying events occur in the upscale neighborhood of L.A. “The Fifth Assassin” by Brad Meltzer uses the fact of four U.S. Presidents’ death by assassin to discover a killer in D.C. who’s re-creating the crimes of these four men. Dick Wolf, architect of NBC’s Law & Order show offers “The Intercept” a Jeremy Fisk novel in which the detective takes as a signal an incident aboard a commercial jet just days before the dedication of One World Trade Center at Ground Zero.

 

The library has received three computer manuals: “Teach Yourself Visually Windows 8” by Paul McFedries, “Windows for Dummies” by Andy Rathbone, and “Windows 8 for Seniors for Dummies” by Mark Hinton.