The picture you see above is something that happened in my hometown yesterday. To most people, I’m sure this looks merely like an old building that has just burned, but for me it’s so much more than that. It’s also a precious piece of my childhood going up in a cinder.
This building was for many years the old Uptown Newsstand, owned and run by Mr. Johnny McDaniel. If Norman Rockwell ever painted a picture of a Newstand and its owner, it would look like Uptown and Mr. Johnny. I rode my bike there religiously every week for comic books and —when I had enough money left over — Delaware Punch.
Uptown was one of only a few places in town that sold what seemed to me a very exotic drink. But I had to have it (at least I thought I did!) because my orthodontist had instructed me to lay off carbonated drinks after installing braces on my adolescent teeth. He told me to try something like Delaware Punch instead. And there it was at Uptown.
After seeing Back to the Future in the summer of ‘85, Uptown was the place where I bought skateboard magazines like Thrasher (yes, I had a skateboard phase). Again, Uptown was the only place in town I could buy a title like this. For a kid in small town south Louisiana, Thrasher was like a window into a whole other world—mainly Southern California in the heady days of the upstart Powell Peralta and its professional skate team.
There is no way for me to put into words the thrill it was to walk into that shop every week. Long before the Avengers and X-Men became household names, they were the exclusive domain of a small comic book universe that I grew to love. You could keep your Supermans and Batmans and Wonder Womans and the other DC titles. I was a Marvel-only kid, and I couldn’t get enough of it.
I still own hundreds of these comics right now, all wrapped individually in plastic bags, preserved just as they were when I bought them 40 years ago. I’m pretty sure the collection is worth a nice sum of money by now because so many of them are collector’s items. But they are priceless to me, and I don’t want to sell them. I bought most of them right there in that building that is now destroyed, and I got more than my money’s worth in memories and joy.
Someone reading this is probably thinking, “Wow, Denny. Sounds like you were a real nerd.” Yeah, I think I was. Maybe I still am. But who cares anymore about that? I love my hometown, and I cherish these memories warts and all.
There are a handful of places in DeRidder, LA that I wish I could remake into what they were when I was a kid, and the Uptown Newsstand is one of them. It is long gone now, but I will never forget it.
Louisiana: Massive fire in DeRidder on Friendly Corner. Sad to see old historic buildings like this burn down. All the beams are probably rich fat lighter pine and there’s no stopping it once it’s really burning. History and town character going up in smoke. No injuries reported. pic.twitter.com/HNisbpZwck
— 👮♂️🚒 Tales of Badge & Blaze™ (@ScottEnlow) February 1, 2026
