J C Penney
There have been three J C Penney store locations in Sanford.
The last, at the Mall, was one of the original anchor tenants. Two floors with escalators right near the food court. Now, in the face of Amazon push button shopping, it is going the way of the dinosaur.
The second store was located in the so-called Sanford Plaza, a development that was doomed from the start. Along with Publix, Penneys was an anchor store there also. A nice, for the time, movie theater was way in the back, The store sat along side 17-92 across from what was the United State Bank of Seminole, which is the Georgia brick building with Scotty's windows. To passers-by on the highway, the Penney facade was a blank wall. There was no traffic light to help you get in or out of the plaza which is the same situation today.
The first Penney's store was on First Street across from the present Colonial Room restaurant, which is in the western part of what was McCrory's Five & Dime. In that store you could buy canaries and budgies, mollies and betas, and a baby turtle with Sanford Florida painted on its back.
The Penney's store had two doors, the one to the right ushered you into the ladies section, the one to the left to the men's part of the store. In the 1950s, Seminole High School teachers, George Dabbs and Ernie Cowley, worked there on Saturdays and in the summer to supplement their salaries.
The unique feature of the store was the payment system. The cashier was on a mezzanine at the back of the store. Spaced alongside the walls below were receptacles with cables that went up to the mezzanine. When you bought a shirt, Mr. Dabbs or Mr. Cowley would put the ticket and your money in a mahogany canister, pull a rope with a mahogany handle, and send the whole thing across the store up to the cashier. If successful, it would click into its place and the cashier would take the ticket and return it and your change back to the original station.
Problems were apparent with this method immediately. If Mr. Dabbs gave the canister too much power, it would crash into the socket on the mezzanine. The cashier would stand up and give him a dirty look. If not enough force was used, the canister would almost get there and then slowly roll back on the cable to its low spot. A yardstick would be retrieved, and the canister would be pushed back to its starting point for another try.
George Dabbs would later become the first head of the teacher's union in the State of Florida. Wonder why?
