The following essay won first place in the Wisconsin Regional Writers’ Jade Ring Contest. The author grew up in Oak Park on north Maple and Forest avenues. Pigney’s was a family-owned shop on the south side of Chicago Avenue, just east of the gas station at Harlem. As Ms. Davis puts it, “Anyone who went to O.W. Holmes School knew Pigney’s, especially since they had a huge case of penny candy.” Pigney’s, she says, was there until at least 1961, when she left for college.
