Sears' bankruptcy brings back old memories

Last week, the Sears corporation filed for bankruptcy protection -- and I had an attack of nostalgia remembering my childhood days of pouring over the vast, 1500 page/100,000 item "Sears Roebuck Catalog," which was mailed to our house every year.

It was nothing like the slick-coated-paper, high-style catalogs of today.  It was utilitarian for rural and small town folks who had no other access to the shopping our city cousins had.

I'm thinking of the 1940s mostly.   Living in a small town with little shopping choices beyond basic needs, the catalog was a window into the availability of a range of things, from the necessary to the frivilous.   It was a highlight of my pre-teen years to go to Atlanta to visit my cousin, whose mother, my Aunt Myrtle, actually worked as a secretary for one of the executives in the Atlanta Sears Roebuck store.  I got  to go visit the great place -- and was disappointed that they didn't have all the goods displayed.  It was primarily a mail-order business in those days.   So the catalog was the thing.

But that big building I visited still stands, now converted to apartments rising above what has become the trendy Ponce City Market.    The old Atlanta Crackers baseball stadium was just across the street -- and after we visited Aunt Myrtle at her job in the Sears Roebuck building, we went to a baseball game.    It was an exciting trip for a small town boy in the 1940s.

An article in yesterday's Atlanta Journal-Constitution referred to Sears as "the Amazon" of its day.   I suppose, in the way of a retail-by-ordering experience;   but Sears in the 1940s was an institution in a way that I don't believe Amazon is or will become.    Amazon's virtues are efficiency in delivery and low prices.    Sears' catalog was a window into the world -- and it was all for sale.    But, first, it was a valued thing unto itself and for you.

We called it "the wish book."   Hours would be spent pouring over things you wanted -- as well as things you didn't even know you could want.   Often it was the first knowledge people would have of some new style of washing machine or radio.  As a teenager, I ordered the equipment for my first photo developing darkroom, including my prized enlarger, from the Sears catalog.    That was about 70 years ago.

Kids would pick out what they wanted Santa to bring.   A farmer could order a cream separator;   his wife could buy a Sunday dress and shoes, as well as a washing machine;   there were toys for kids, household items, clothing, bed linens and even mattresses.   And for young boys (before the age of Playboy and internet porn) there were always the pages of models wearing the advertised underwear, sometimes just a wee bit racy -- at least in the imagination of a young boy's budding sexuality.

The current focus on Sears, as it goes under, has even brought a new insight into what else the Sears Roebuck of my youth was for some people.    I heard an interview on NPR (I was late tuning in and didn't get the name of the speaker).  She was telling of an additional advantage the Sears catalog was for African-American people in that Jim Crow era.      Black people were either barred from shopping in certain stores, or limited to certain areas with cheap goods;  or else they had to wait until all the white people had been taken care of.     And of course they had to encounter the "white only" rest rooms and drinking fountains.

But they could order from the Sears Roebuck catalog without any restrictions.    The order form did not ask for your race;  the person filling the order didn't care who was buying it.

If this valued institution, which has lost its glory days, does go under -- may our memories and our surviving purchases Rest In Peace.

Ralph

PS:  This is a bit indelicate, but for the rural folks without indoor plumbing, the left-over Sears catalog from last year was often kept in the outhouse, it's pages serving yet another purpose in substitute for store-bought toilet paper.