From the vault - 20th Anniversary Edition Part 6

Here's the only picture I can find of the second Delco Plaza location, from an article in the York Dispatch about the 1989 Batman movie phenomenon and it's bounty of merchandise. (You may not believe this, but it was incredibly hard to find a Batman logo T-shirt before 1989. Trust me, I looked.)


As longtime reader stymieresh noted earlier, we called the second store location in the Delco Plaza the "Get Smart" store or the "Long Hallway" store or "Hitler's Comic Bunker", because it was actually a converted storage space in the Delco Plaza Mall that was accessed by a looooong hallway from inside the mall. Invariably as you walked down this seemingly-endless passage, you began singing the "Theme From Get Smart!" Well, I know I did anyway. We moved here from the very first space so that we could expand the back issue and games section. From what I remember, the floor area was 1050 square feet, up from the previous 333 square feet. For potential customers, opening a door and then entering a hallway that seemed like some sort of service/access thing was daunting to say the least, but many of you overcame your fears of finding the Gorgon's lair and instead found new manager Tim Smith or Ned or me at the end of your quest. Which is almost the same.

Oh yeah, and the place had no windows.


Designer extraordinaire Steve Leach made this great flier that showed people where we were located within the mall. And check out our neighbors: "FOOD?" "LIQUOR" "JEWELS" "TEETH"... Funny stuff! Sounds like a weekend in Vegas that goes horribly wrong.

I always said I needed to paint footprints from the mall entrance to the store so that people could find us. We dumped those fliers EVERYWHERE.

Three things I remember:

1. Never knowing what time of day it was or what the weather was like, except for the time golfball-sized hail pounded on the metal roof and you couldn't hear yourself even though you were shouting.
2. Hearing people coming down the hall all rowdy-like and fooling around until they finally popped into the store and realized everyone could hear them all along and knew exactly just how much screwing around they were doing. The reverse of that was hearing the door open at the far end and not hearing ANYTHING... until the silent person suddenly burst into the store just as you forgot someone was coming.
3. Beating Ned at a squad-level wargame on the Commodore-64 by cheating and blindly flipping hand-grenades around corners and over walls and whatnot so that all his guys would drop to the ground in panic and then I could then come around the corner and wipe them out. Worked like a charm. Hee hee.

What do you remember?