Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 26, 1993 TAG: 9301260352
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Dwayne Yancey
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A CATALOG OF MANY A CHILDHOOD
Something died Monday, and it was more than the Sears catalog.It was a piece of America's soul.
My soul.
And maybe yours, too.
It's a country thing; you city folks wouldn't understand. But growing up out in the sticks of rural Virginia, my best memories of childhood didn't come from staying up late to watch The Beatles on Ed Sullivan.
They came from the Sears catalog.
Most of the quaint myths about rural America are, of course, wrong, just as most of the myths about anything are probably wrong. I never met a farmer yet who relied on the Farmer's Almanac for the forecast; the ones I knew growing up in the Shenandoah Valley merely called the weather line. But the Sears catalog was everything Norman Rockwell could have imagined, and maybe more.
To my grandparents, the Sears catalog was truly a marvel, a kind of 19th-century 800 number that had brought the Industrial Revolution to their Rockingham County farm. In my mind, I can still take a tour through the barn, where family elders would grandly point out the rusted old farm implements that great-granddaddy so-and-so had ordered by mail back before the turn of the century. The first in this part of the county to own one of these, they'd say. Never will forget the ruckus at the post office when it came in.
To my grandparents' generation, the Sears catalog was such an institution they never felt the need to identify it The language they used always struck my ear as faintly exotic. The book was never "the Sears catalog." Instead, it was simply "the Sears and Roebuck, as if the company existed only in catalog form.
For them, it did, and perhaps that was part of the mystique.
By the time I was growing up, the Roebuck part of the name has long since disappeared, but the catalog itself was as revered as the Bible, and maybe more universal.
Certainly it was more utilitarian. From toddlerhood through adolescence, there's hardly an aspect of my life that the Sears catalog didn't touch.
The catalog was the very foundation of my childhood, one that occupied a special place in the Yancey household. In my case, that was generally beneath my posterior at the kitchen table, at least until I was old enough to sit in a chair without a booster. My parents insisted on a firm upbringing, and there's nothing firmer, I assure you, than a stack of Sears catalogs.
But the secret to the Sears catalog, and eventually its demise, was that it was aimed at the mass market, at least the dwindling mass market of rural America.
Back home, back then, there were a handful of days where the whole world seemed to stop in its tracks.
One was the week of the county fair.
The second was the opening day of deer season.
And the third was the day the Sears catalogs arrived in the mail.
The anticipation would build for weeks, and my mother carefully studied the arrival time of Mr. Magalis, the mail carrier, for even the slightest delay suggested he was lugging a carload of catalogs that would keep him out on his route until well past dark.
When the catalog finally arrived, the whole family would gather 'round and set aside a special night to make up our order. Sure, we could have driven to a shopping center in town - we weren't far out in the boonies - but it wouldn't have been the same.
A shopping trip to town was a chore; leafing through the Sears catalog splayed out on the kitchen table was a family experience.
It also was an education in the ways of the wider world.
All my father's talk about grain allotments and equipment depreciation and real estate assessments never made much of an impression of me. But it was through the Sears catalog that the declining importance of agriculture finally hit home, when I found that the Christmas toy section had shrunk its offering of farm sets to a single page.
It was through the Sears catalog I learned about economics, when I made my annual plea for a pool table and my father made his annual lecture on the value of a hard-earned dollar, and besides, we had no place to put one.
It was through the Sears catalog I even learned the rudiments of sex education. Many a farm boy I know got his thrills by sneaking the Sears catalog off to his room, where he then spent his idle hours perusing the lingerie ads. A poor boy's Playboy, as it were.
Snicker if you will at these small-town ways. But spare a moment, too, to mourn the passing of another piece of Americana. A page in American history has been turned, and this time there's no order blank inside.