Lafayette Landmark??

Sometimes the things that make a building a landmark we will miss have more to do with the feelings they generated than the building itself.

For as far back as I can remember, until sometime in the early 1980’s, there was a military surplus store at the “5 points” area of Lafayette. When I was a kid, it was called McHaleys’.

The building has a weird shape, with several floors. There were wonderful nooks and crannies full of stuff, some of it clearly laying around for several years just waiting to be discovered and cherished by someone like me or my little brother!! In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, McHaley’s was packed with a cornucopia of goodies. My little brother Craig and I would go there any chance we got. In the days before political correctness, and in the naiveté of our youth, this place was heaven. We would show up with a buck or two in our pockets, and dig around for what seemed like forever. We could dig through seemingly unlimited piles of stuff, and imagine we were Sgt. Rock from the comics, or President Kennedy on PT 109, or legendary sniper Carlos Hatchcock, or any one of a million other cool things. We could pick out one or two things we might want to buy, and then look at a bunch of other stuff, then change our minds about what was the coolest thing we could get with the money we brought. Maybe today we would come home with a set of Gunnery Sgt. stripes for our jackets, and next time we would get an old shirt, or a hat.

We loved McHaley’s so much that one Christmas, our Grandma Schnarr gave us enough money for each of us to go in and buy a set of real, honest to goodness combat boots! She knew that the fun for us was going to the store, so she let us go ourselves. We wasted the better part of the day in there “looking for combat boots”. I loved that place!

McHaley’s eventually ended up morphing into a pawn shop/jewelry business under a new name, at a different location. The military surplus store is a thing of the past. Even though I assume the building is still there, I would call McHaley’s a landmark that is gone, but never forgotten.