This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Once upon a time near Rock Island, there was a hardware store that did not take American Express. It didn’t take Visa or Mastercard, either. It took cash. And what it did with cash is an amazing story.
Hansen's Hardware in Davenport was an old-fashioned store: it sold real hardware. The hardest hardware, hammers, nails, hinges and soldering irons was on first floor, and the softest—waffle irons, kitchen strainers and women's utensils were on third.
What made Hansen's special, however, were the miniature trolley cars that took your money and returned your change. You would give the clerk a five-dollar bill for your 98-cent screwdriver. She wadded the money into a small oblong metal lozenge and sent it up toward the ceiling on two wire tracks. Zip, it would turn at right angles near the ceiling, whizz past the saws, vises, and the crowbars, turn the corner at the rakes, and continue along until it suddenly turned again and disappeared up through a hole in the ceiling, toward some unseen cashier in a cage high above.
In less than a minute, the little trolley would drop through that hole, trace its way back, and drop into the clerk's hands. Inside would be four dollars and two cents. You could hear it coming ahead of time if you listened to the wire tracks.
On busy Saturdays, many money trolleys would be rising and descending at the same time, but none ever got caught in the traffic. How did each of them know which was its own exact stop?
While girls were up with their mothers looking over bread knives, and dads talked over repair projects by the plumbing fixtures, boys would stand and watch the trolleys, more fun than their own electric trains, wishing perhaps that they could just once be as small as the acorn-hatted brownies in the funny papers and ride the disappearing wires.
The trolleys and their whines and clicks are gone the way of cash. Hansen's has moved to the mall, where Visa and Mastercard machines give out ominous beeps and buzzes as they check your perhaps overextended credit. Wouldn't you gladly pay cash if it would bring the trolleys back?
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
