Originally published 11/30/11)
Twenty
years ago, on the afternoon of December 24, I plunked a blank tape into my
radio-cassette-turntable combo player, which I still have and occasionally use.
Employing the finest technology of the time, I arbitrarily taped a radio
program on WPAT “Easy 93,” and repeated this act several more times during the
ensuing thirty-six hours. Beginning on Christmas Eve at noontime and lasting
throughout the entire Christmas Day, this AM and FM easy-listening radio
station in the New York City metropolitan area furnished listeners
with—yes—thirty-six of hours of commercial-free Christmas music every year. My intention
was to record this music for posterity. I reasoned that it would be nice to
have tapes of this diverse Christmas music selection to play during times other
than Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I sensed, too, that WPAT, its
easy-listening format, and annual Christmas presentation just might not be
around forever. And, as it turned out, I was right.
The
station dubbed this longtime holiday tradition of theirs, “The Spirit of
Christmas,” and featured mostly instrumental versions of familiar seasonal
favorites, and some completely unfamiliar. During these yearly music marathons,
a deejay’s voice would periodically intone between tracks, “Our gift to
you…thirty-six hours of your favorite holiday sounds on WPAT…Easy 93.” And mere
words can't do justice to the bona fide
easiness of Easy 93. The only
other occasional, and very brief, interruptions to this Christmas music
extravaganza involved the station thanking its very generous sponsors—those who
made “The Spirit of Christmas” possible.
Well, with
the holiday season officially underway, I thought it was high time for me to
dust off these twenty-year-old cassette tapes of mine and start listening to
them. Yes, I still play tapes but, alas, a couple of my WPAT “Spirit of
Christmas” recordings have self-destructed with the passage of time. Still,
when I heard the dulcet tones of a WPAT announcer thanking, among others, Mr.
Carmen Maggio of the “Romance Emporium” in Clifton, New Jersey for making the
1991 edition of “The Spirit of Christmas” possible—something I had heard
hundreds of times while listening to these tapes—I paused and typed in the
man's name in a Google search whim. Foremost, I wondered if the “Romance
Emporium” was still in business. I had for decades assumed it was an independent
Victoria’s Secret kind of place and was sort of surprised it took me so many
years to wonder enough about this business to check it out.
Sadly, the
“Romance Emporium” is no more. Foremost, my search unearthed Mr. Maggio’s 2010
obituary and, it seems, I had gotten it wrong. It wasn't the “Romance
Emporium” after all, but the “Rowe-Manse Emporium,” a neat play on words. It
also wasn't a Victoria's Secret-like outfit, but a specialty department store.
The place fell by the wayside in the early aughts, a casualty of big-box
discount retailers, the Internet, and ever-changing tastes, I suppose.
Rowe-Manse Emporium-type stores are hard to come by nowadays, and Christmas
shopping is indisputably less interesting and less exciting without them. Once
upon a time, these little big retailers exhibited both heart and incredible
uniqueness, something that's in short supply in the aisles of Wal-Mart and
Target.
