When Eastgate Mall opened in 1962, it offered convenient shopping with a fraction of the walking and parking that it would take downtown. In the early years of Eastgate, one could buy eyeglasses, shop for groceries, or have a car repaired there. If a customer just wanted to make one stop, the G.C. Murphy store – one of the mall’s original tenants – had a lot from which to choose.

George Clinton Murphy opened the first five-and-dime store that bore his name in 1906. The retailer joined a market that was crowded with similar stores of S.S. Kresge, J.G. McCrory’s, and F.W. Woolworth. Through low prices, a variety of products, and service to its communites, the G.C. Murphy chain had grown to more than 500 stores by the time that Eastgate Mall opened.

Advertisements in the local newspapers heralded the welcoming of G.C. Murphy on September 20, 1962. Customers were given a chance to participate in drawings for prizes each day. Over 6,000 customers responded in person to the promotion.

Grand opening specials included a hair dryer with suitcase, and a Magnum Chord Organ. Prices that seem unbelievably cheap to us today were a pair of pants for $1.37, and a slice of cake with strawberries, ice cream, and whipped topping for 27 cents. One could buy a Wearever cartridge pen for 66 cents. Remember how those pens could become writing implements of destruction when they leaked in a shirt pocket?

Murphy’s was a cool place for children and teens to kill time, hang out, chill out, or whatever the slang was at the time for such an experience. Like many of its competitors, G.C. Murphy had a lunch counter where burgers/fries/Coke always tasted better than those at home. The cost of outfitting a restaurant today with all of the chrome that they used would be staggering.

The store’s music department had the discounted hits of the day, including my favorite, the bargain bin of 45 RPM records. Three for a dollar they were, which brought them into my range of available funding. These were the tunes that had fallen off the top 40 charts, and that had a small hole drilled into them to mark them for discounting. I remember buying a cheap copy of “In the Summertime” when it was way past summer.

The pet department at G.C. Murphy was a favorite of all ages. Of course, they had fish – from guppies to goldfish – and birds, iguanas, and newts. Some readers may also recall going there to purchase white mice for high school biology classes.

Employees of G.C. Murphy tended to stay with the store a number of years. An 8/15/1972 Chattanooga News-Free Press article noted that the Eastgate store still had nine of the ninety original employees.

Local resident Sue Marshall, now a nurse, recalls joining the Northgate G.C. Murphy store in 1973, one year after the mall opened. She remained with Murphy’s for three years. “It was just like a family. We would see familiar customers, and it was never dull and boring; always the place to be. Anything you wanted was right in that store.”

Ms. Marshall remembers working in all the areas of Murphy's, and helped with assembling lawn mowers, weighing the customer-selected bags of candy, and inflating helium balloons. The lunch counter served three meals a day, with preparation beginning with the arrival of the lady who made the biscuits for breakfast. The baby department offered a promotion of a free bassinet to new moms of twins.

An era of retailing ended, though, with the 1983 closing of both the Eastgate and Northgate locations of G.C. Murphy. The Chattanooga Times reported on January 14, 1983 that the two stores were the chain’s last units in Tennessee. At the time, the corporation was continuing expansion of its Murphy Mart stores to go up against rival K-Mart, which had evolved from the smaller S.S. Kresge stores.

A very interesting Web site, www.murphymemories.com,
has detailed information on the complete history of the G.C. Murphy Company.

If you have memories of the local G.C. Murphy stores, please send me an e-mail at jolleyh@bellsouth.net.