COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:A good run, too bad it didn’t last

Kind of sad, I think. The Balboa Village Market — an icon on the Balboa Peninsula since 1938 — closed its doors last week, at least for now if not for good. The world was a very different place in 1938, which was, like, 68 years ago, give or take. I don’t remember a lot about 1938, but I do know there was no cable, cellphones were the size of overnight bags, and there were maybe seven television stations, which was ridiculous.

In later years, the Balboa market had a number of independent owners, the latest being Bob and Scott St John, who are father and son but no relation to Jill. The St Johns tried mightily to make it work over the last five years, but, alas, it was not to be. They did everything they could to revive the market’s storied past as a focal point for the neighborhood, where locals would stop in every day for some fresh coffee, fresh bread and fresh gossip, but the chemistry just wasn’t there. “It just didn’t work out because the customer base has changed,” Bob St John told the Pilot.

They even allowed kids to charge a soda or candy to their parent’s account and offered free deliveries in a bright yellow golf cart tricked up to look like a little panel truck. That’s the part of the story that got my attention.

I could say I have a long history with the Balboa Village Market, except that I don’t. But I sure have one with the corner market in the Bronx neighborhood from whence I came.

When I was an annoying little nerd with glasses, which I still am other than the little part, Sam’s — not Sam’s Grocery or Sam’s Market, just Sam’s — was the glue that held our block together, and I am quite pleased to report that it is still there, still open for business, although it hasn’t been called Sam’s for years. I stop in whenever I get back, just for a moment, but long enough to hear the voices and see the faces of all the people who live in my head whether they are still here or not.

Sam’s is small, considerably smaller than the Balboa Village Market, but it’s as important to the people who live on the block as any fire station or hospital. It has the same wood plank floors now as it did then; at least one of the same coolers, which amazes me; and the same two aisles that are almost impossible for two people to get through at the same time.

What it no longer has — and I suspect there was a lawyer involved in this somehow — are the wall shelves that were stacked to the ceiling with boxes and canned goods.

Sam had a long pole with levers on the bottom and pincers on the top, and he was a master at grabbing whatever a customer wanted off the shelf and dropping it into his free hand — no small trick when you’re catching a 1 lb. can of coffee and a 16 oz. can of tomatoes while you’re holding a cereal box between your knees.

Sam, by the way, was Sam Arzoumanian, a pretty big name on the block because he was the only Armenian in a sea of Italians and Irish. He was forever talking about life back in Armenia, and not one of us had any idea where that was. Someone decided, Tony Peccoraro I think, that Armenia was an island off Australia. When we said how come, he said, “Because they both start with an A and end with A.” Nobody came up with anything better so we just went with that until we got to high school.

Like the Balboa Village Market, Sam’s had free deliveries, only it wasn’t with golf carts, it was with us. Whenever Sam had an order ready, he would stick his head out the door and shout “Delivery!” and one or more of us would come running. You got a quarter from Sam, which was not bad, and a tip on the other end, hopefully.

Most of the deliveries were to the apartment houses up and down the block, which I wasn’t crazy about. The elevators were like phone booths, only smaller, and the halls were long and dark and you could smell everything everyone had cooked for the last three meals.

There was an old woman whose name I cannot remember for the life of me who lived in a fourth-floor apartment that all of us dreaded going to. In fact, for a long time, I was the only one who would go there, even though I hated it. It was always dark as night, and she was always really cranky, which is an understatement. Most customers would quickly check their order then hand you a quarter or fifty cents, which meant you scored 50 or 75 cents for five minutes work, which meant life was good. Mrs. Cranketta, on the other hand, made you take everything out of the box and line it up — cans with cans, boxes with boxes — then carefully check everything against the hand-written receipt, kvetching the whole time about, “This isn’t the size I wanted,” and “Why did he send me this?”

I was always tempted to say “Because you’re a cranky old bat, that’s why,” but I knew she’d turn me into a toad if I did.

The whole ordeal took about 10 minutes, which seemed like an hour and a half. Why did I keep going back? Because when it was over Mrs. De Grumpy would reach into her purse and, incredibly, toss a dollar onto the table. That is a genuine, Federal Reserve, green, picture-of-George Washington-on-the-front dollar we’re talking about. It’s hard to explain what that meant in 1958. I could live for two days on a dollar, and here I am with $1.25 in my pocket between my base salary and Cruella’s tip.

That is when I decided that this is the greatest country on the face of the earth.

So there you have it. Bob and Scott St John of Balboa Village Market, we salute you for trying to make it work. We’re so bummed it didn’t. Remember, time and tide wait for no man, any port in a storm, a watched pot never boils, never up, never in, and, well, I guess that’s it.

I gotta go.