There was this three story used and new bookstore called Kay Book store. It was next to the best Army/Navy store on one side and a dirty book store on the other. I use to take Cleveland's version of the Subway, the Rapid Transit. For on dime I could get on about ten blocks from my house and get off at the Terminal Tower and walk up and out onto downtown Cleveland....

I remember it in black and white and I guess that was because the sandstone buildings had absorbed so much of the pollution from the Industrial Flats just west and south of downtown.

Still, there was the giant pretzels, the smell of roasting nuts that you could buy fresh by the ounce, and the half milkshake half ice cream cone that Higbees had just around from the corner of the terminal that abutted to the basement of the department store.

But the real treat was Kay Books. I always went to the top floor first to look over the huge pile of Comic Books that the deliver guys brought back from the drug stores and malt shops and five and dime stores that sold comic books.

There was always a few that I had missed and on a rare occasion, I would find a mint book from a year or two before that had been over looked.

The main floor was crammed with books of all kinds but it was the basement that all the old stuff was that I checked out only a few times. There were all these wonderful books from the late 1800's filled with obsolete text books that talked about science that was set aside.

When they shut the book store up in 1983, I went over one last time, this time I was in College. Downtown was on it's last legs, everything of worth was in the suburbs by now although there was nothing like Kays anywhere that I knew of. I bought a few books, looked around and left that part of my life behind.