Word has reached Your Humble Narrator, from across the continent in my beloved home town of Erie, Pennsylvania, that The Peanut Shoppe, longtime fixture on the southeast corner of 10th and State Street, closed last week. A day or two later came the news that proprietress Anna Linebach, known throughout town simply as "The Peanut Lady," had passed on, at 89.
This one hurts. I've loved that magical place since I was a small child, and my Mom bought me a green plastic Mr. Peanut bank there, which lived for many years in my room and forever in my heart...
It was the street-level corner store of the 14-story G. Daniel Baldwin Building...
...Erie's tallest skyscraper (it's now called "Renaissance Centre"). Ms. Linebach was a crusty Austrian, given to griping about the weather, an ongoing challenge for her since her best marketing tool was leaving her door open and letting the smell of roasting nuts waft out onto the sidewalk and lure in hapless passersby. I was often one of them. My friend also used to buy raw peanuts there for his parrot.
In my college years I would walk over to buy tubs of cashew butter, which Ms. Linebach would grind herself, nodding at me approvingly and saying, in her German accent, "Dot meggs a noise zaandwich [that makes a nice sandwich]."
A few years ago my brother, knowing my fondness for the place, sent me this t-shirt...
I'm wearing it today, in Ms. Linebach's memory. RIP Peanut Lady.
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