Chagrin, you say?

    When I was a child, and evidently immune from any child labor laws, I worked in Sara's Store. The store adjoined our house, so it was relatively safe, so I only sparingly had to call for security backup. The call for help or assistance meant knocking on the inside wall with a can of soup from the grocery aisle shelf and waiting for my mother to cross the porch to smooth over any problem.  The problem almost always derived from the actions of "older boys," who would seize on the opportunity to engage in disorderly and larcenous behavior in the presence of an eleven-year-old, but would slink away at the appearance of an adult.
    During my time in the store, I spent many hours reading:  not books because I was working, but the reading materials in the store. One wall had an almost floor to ceiling magazine rack, including a wide assortment of comics, and I would read from these on a selective basis. Many held little interest.  I abhorred the romance magazines that so many girls were addicted to, my father always had in our house copies of the Saturday Evening Post and True Magazine,which I'd read at home, but didn't care for his Official Detective and True Crime magazines, only occasionally perusing a story or two in them.  
    Newspapers were a different story.  They were arranged on a square brown library-type table in front of the window, alongside an ice-cream-parlor chair which held the copies reserved for Sara's regular customers, who would pay in advance to guarantee their paper would be there.
   THE DAILY NEWS and THE MIRROR were the papers I read every single day. I don't know why they held such an appeal for me because I never discussed what I read in them, didn't even personally know anyone else who read them.  But they were the Tabloids, sensational at the time compared to the stuffy newspaper my parents subscribed to. These tabloids, which sold then for 5 Cents, were masterpiece of design and allure.  I would read them cover to cover, even the sports pages, which were of no real interest. Those papers were easy to hold, easier to read, and invited the reader in. Why else would I read columns by Jimmy Breslin or Pete Hamill.
    The News seemed slightly more respectable than The Mirror, for reasons unknown to me then as well as now. I forget which paper  carried every day a pair of  small single reader-submitted items titled "The Urge to Kill"  and  "My Most Embarrassing Moments."  I read them faithfully every day, even in my tender years finding them silly, but still necessary to read. I suppose no paper or media outlet today could pass off a column wherein the writer felt like killing someone for whatever annoying reason, but it was okay then to hate someone or somebody.
    The Most Embarrassing Moment item would be less controversial today:  of the hundreds, probably thousands, I read, I can recall only one embarrassed contributor :  She was on the subway, wearing a new dress, and became aware that eyes were on her---admiring her outfit, she assumed.  Only when she got home, Horror of Horrors, she discovered that the belt of her dress had been turned inside out,  revealing, in large print, that she wore a Size 12!!
    Now this is where my vocabulary became enriched.  This unfortunately embarrassed soul, as well as at least half of her fellow contributors, revealed the source of their embarrassment using the phrase, "To my chagrin,...I found, blah, blah, blah..."
    I'm trying to think if I have ever heard the word chagrin  anywhere else.  Maybe it's extinct now.