Boston Department Store Blog

Another photo of that street corner in Downtown Crossing.

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Great photos. What the hell is the "Home of Unkle 5PH"??? (Raymond store photo).
 
JohnAKeith said:
Great photos. What the hell is the "Home of Unkle 5PH"??? (Raymond store photo).
Click to expand...
That was Unkle EPH, the store mascot, sort of like Colonel Sanders or Ronald McDonald.

I think he might have come complete with corncob pipe and rimless, squared-off specs like the ones Sarah Palin sometimes wears. In the Raymond's ads, he misspelled as nearly every word as the copywriter could invent a malapropism for. He was sort of a forerunner of BostonBred.

His function was to be such a hick that he made Raymond's decidely downmarket customers feel good about themselves; most of them knew how to spell "uncle."
 
^ Yeah, and the hat probably fell apart.

Raymond's sold mostly junk. What good is it to get a fire-sale bargain on something that's sub-standard?

An old story: the unscrupulous exploiting the poor (through flattery).
 
Raymond's is before my time, but it seems to inspire a lot of nostalgia among people older than me. It couldn't have been that bad if people remember it this fondly.
 
^ It's Uncle Eph and the misspelled words. After all, they did go out of business.
 
The prices were pretty good. It probably occupied the market niche now held by Kmart. They used to serve flat watery Coke at the soda fountain.
 
Hello, All!
I see that not all of you know much about Raymond's...It seems harsh to say "junk" really, Kmart is a good way to think of it...it was known for items that we may well call lower priced...and it had a very well known rug department that was used by all sorts of folks in all the income groups. It was a bit "out of touch" by the 1960's when it moved over to the old RH White's building and was much more "fun" in the earlier days when Boston had so many shops to look into on a shopping trip. In the end they even tried having a few live peacocks in one of the Washington Street windows to try to bring shoppers down to their new location. Oh, well.
And yes, it holds a special place in the hearts of the generation now well into their senior years based on the emails I have read from some of my visitors.
For a few more bits of information on Raymond's please see:
http://shoppingdaysinretroboston.blogspot.com/2008/10/some-fun-raymonds-trivia.html

Enjoy....Charles:rolleyes:
 
Do you happen to have a list of where all the other Gilchrist stores were? I'm curious how they have been reused, or whether they have been demolished.
 
Hello, Ron!!

I have a 1964 ad for Gilchrist's that lists them all...I think that was all there were until they closed by 1977.

gilchrist's028.jpg



I shall try to find out more about the re-use of the buildings.

Charles:)
 
I'm most curious where they were located in Cambridge, but I'd like to see all of the addresses if you happen to find them.
 
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