The news that Community First Bank plans to move part of its operation to the Crocket Building has drawn attention.

Will the move itself revitalize downtown Las Vegas? We can hope. Irrespective of that, it’s great the bank’s owners, Ray and Joyce Litherland, chose to keep the bank downtown.

To many of us, the Crocket Building means a lot. For the uninitiated, we’re referring to the Murphey’s Building. For many years, that was the center of New Town. Ernie Thwaites, the original manager of KFUN, used to run a live radio spot: “Douglas at Sixth Street, where Las Vegans meet.”

So it was. That was the downtown I knew while growing up.

Let me explain:

Because of the economy or even personal preference, we Trujillo children got fed most things at room temperature. In the really early days, not only did we lack a refrigerator, we didn’t even own an icebox, and we downed our corn flakes with a mixture of room-temperature water and Pet Milk. Ah, what a joy when we got the first icebox! Once a week, the iceman cameth. Really! More than an allusion to a Eugene O’Neill play, there was a man who delivered what looked like a 300-pound chunk of ice to our residence.

The ice kept things cool — never cold. Of course, with eight grocery stores within a half mile, getting fresh food daily was simple.

We almost never tasted ice cream, except on what Mom called “special days,” when Dad borrowed a company car and transported us across town, to the county health department at the courthouse, for our yearly vaccinations, but that’s a topic for a future column. Besides, rhapsodizing about ice cream when visualizing a syringe the thickness of a garden hose isn’t appealing.

The anticipation of the taste of real, cold ice cream made the shots almost bearable. I tasted my first malt at around age 9, at Murphey’s, where the fountain treats were sublime. I’d never seen that little dealie with a rod that stirred the concoction, the way we mix a can of paint.

But rather than making this a restaurant review, let me move to other observations:

Murphey’s bulged with office and photo equipment and supplies. Need a bulb for some obscure brand of movie projector? Get it at Murphey’s. A long-time pharmacist, John S. Moore, recently explained that the upper level of the store featured virtually every kind of columnar pad for bookkeeping.

My dad, who kept books for the local Ford dealership, would walk to Murphey’s to pick up exactly the kind of accounting pads he needed. Today, a computer program can give you all the columns you require, but back then, Murphey’s stocked pre-printed forms.

In my youth, in the late-40s and decades before the Wal-Martization of East Las Vegas, downtown housed all manner of businesses: auto dealerships, banks, clothing stores, coffee shops, drug stores, five-and-dimes, flower shops, hardware stores, hotels, jewelers, movie theaters, newsstands, photo studios, restaurants, shoe shops, supermarkets and taverns. There was little of that one-stop shopping in this town.

My friends and I enjoyed counting the number of gum spots ground into the hexagonal tiles at the drug store. It’s as if people bought gum for the thrill of getting it stuck on people’s shoes, then on the tile floor.

A weekly errand was for me to pick up a couple of Roi-Tan cigars at Murphey’s. My father, for whom I fetched the smokes, insisted they come out of a humidor “so they’re nice and fresh.” Another thing he stressed was that they let me pick out the cigars from the box.

“What’s the difference, Dad?” I would ask about the elaborate protocol. He explained that in the “olden days” (olden days even to him), the familiar ring that girds the cigar was what held it together.

True, all of my life, cigars have come individually wrapped, but before that, they were placed in the box in bulk, and they weren’t always uniform. “And that,” Dad explained, “is why it’s proper to let the customer pick out the cigars.”

In my youth, the soda fountain was the main draw: a soda-and-ice-cream concoction called a “fizz” sold for a nickel; shakes and malts were 15 and 20 cents.

We Optic sellers often spent most of our profits at the soda fountain. My friend Wilfred (Billy) Martinez and I sold competing newspapers and often made the rounds together. We enjoyed chatting with some of Murphey’s staff, Roy Browning, Sketchley Moore and Erminio (Herman) Martinez. By the time Charlie Hillis took over Murphey’s, my friend and I had given up our newspaper jobs.

The tenor of the times was more relaxed than now, and possibly because local merchants dealt with virtually the same customers over and over, everybody tried harder. We always felt welcome and appreciated at Murphey’s.

After all these years, it’s great for the building to go back into use. For its entire existence (or at least my entire existence) Murphey’s has helped make Las Vegas the place Petula Clark surely described in the ‘60s, when she sang, “When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go — downtown.”