Photography by Frank di Piazza
Your first-grade teacher didn’t stay up all night cutting out those leprechauns or fashioning fancy turkey feathers out of different colors of construction paper. She went to Bradburn’s Parent Teacher Store and bought “decoratives.”
The real secret is, you can go there, too. Exhausted parents find clever games to help them teach their kids to speak, tell time, count, read, write—essentially, decode the world. Glass blowers buy 1,000-foot rolls of colored paper for packaging. Coffeehouses buy poster board. One guy even buys pipe cleaners for some mysterious industrial use.
Founded by William Bradburn in 1946 and family-owned for two generations, the shop’s packed with things that will make you smart or creative or just giggly; there’s a second childhood down every aisle. Why buy a plain beach ball, asks company vice-president Terry Parkinson, when you can buy a light-up inflatable globe and hold the whole world in your hands? Why watch TV when you can play with Shrinky Dinks or make silly sculptures and add googly eyes? Kids can test their career aspirations with role-play sets (Mrs. Parkinson’s personal favorite, the “veterinarian,” comes with a stuffed canine patient). Younger kids like the bright, 3-D magnetic learning games: “The fridge is a great spot,” Mrs. Parkinson says, “because the kitchen’s where the family is.”
Play doesn’t have to stop as kids get older, either. Science is more fun, Mrs. Parkinson notes, when “you can make goop and gels and crystals and snow,” or experiment with your own hydroponics lab. History’s cooler when you can read a speech by President Abraham Lincoln in his own handwriting. And car travel’s a lot calmer with magnetic dioramas that absorb attention—and don’t scatter pieces.
Parents shop at Bradburn’s to keep their kids organized, from job charts and homework schedules to good-behavior trackers. Grandparents buy ingenious books with stories on the left-hand page and shorter, simpler summaries on the right-hand page, so the child can have a turn reading aloud without breaking the flow of the story. Families come for plays that are already divided into parts, so they can act them out on a long summer’s evening. And adults show up after they’ve watched Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? one too many demoralizing times; Bradburn’s has refresher workbooks on math, civics, grammar… (“Fifth grade’s an awfully long time ago,” Mrs. Parkinson points out gently.)
Bradburn’s practical-but-clever inventory honors four basic facts: Grown-ups miss being kids. Kids are easily bored sponges for knowledge. Parents are teachers. And teachers need all the help they can get.
