The Wish Book, everything you always wanted before Amazon Prime.
The Wish Book, everything you always wanted before Amazon Prime.
The Wish Book
Grandma Dallas always called it “The Wish Book”. The Sears and Roebuck catalog. The three or four-inch thick, glossy paper compendium of everything you could possibly want. The catalog so big chubby little eight-year-old hands could barely hold it.
It was never called just “Sears” but always “Sear and Roebuck’s”. While we got smaller catalogs from Sears through the year, the big one, “The Wish Book”, came in early fall, just as the leaves were turning on the Midwestern maple, elm and oak trees that broke the farmsteads on the flat prairies of Central Illinois.
I imagine the postman, they were all men in those days, hated the day those monsters were delivered, especially the town postmen who walked their routes. The rural carriers, maybe hated them not so much, after all they drove from rural mailbox to rural mailbox, so the bulky catalogs didn’t weigh down the leather mail bags strapped over shoulders. The mailboxes invariably perched on top of four by four white-painted, wooden posts, could barely hold the hundreds of pages of middle America’s dreams.
Mailmen didn’t make much in those days, but their jobs were much envied as it was a steady job, with a regular paycheck, fringe benefits and never a layoff notice nor a strike. As a child
I didn’t know about the importance of steady pay checks and fringe benefits, but I looked forward to seeing that blue-gray uniform topped by smiling face bringing the world to me.
I eagerly anticipated the mail as a child, it meant something exciting to me. Something from the bigger world. I didn’t know about bills then, just envelopes from other places, whether near or far. Maybe the envelopes contained invitations to a birthday party, or a letter from a distant cousin serving in the military or the IGA shopper ad. But best of all was “The Wish Book”.
My two-year younger brother and I didn’t get to page through “The Wish Book” for the first several days after it came. My mother would peruse it first. She would review it in its pristine glory, occasionally sharing a particularly pleasing photo with us. Once she had finished with the boring stuff, that is dresses, hats, shoes and furniture, we could get our grubby little mitts on it.
It was the toy section for us!
None of that boring stuff!
Wagons, bicycles, BB guns, cap pistols and more!
Objects of desire not to be found at the five and dime stores in downtown Tuscola, Illinois. As the county seat, Tuscola featured two dime stores in the 1950’s. A Ben Franklin and a Woolworth’s, as I recall. Oh, they were good for candy bars, caps for our pistols, BBs for our BB guns and school supplies, they were otherwise boring to primary school aged boys. Just full of stuff that moms and grandmas wanted, like needles and thread, yard goods and kitchen utensils. There was only one aisle with the good stuff. The toys. And the toys didn’t compare to the wonders to be found in The Wish Book.
Grandma called it The Wish Book because each page would be poured over to see if there was something to be wished for. You could hear the capitalized words in her voice.
Brother David and I would race through each page of the toy section to see the delights. We would then go back, one page at a time, to carefully determine what we were most covetous of. Those objects most desired drew a dog-eared page so that we could easily find it again to add to the list to be presented to the jolly, bearded fat man in a red suit at the Santa Claus hut downtown.
That wish book doesn’t come anymore. The last Sears general merchandise catalog came out in 1993. Amazon wasn’t founded until a year later-1994, so we can’t blame Amazon for killing The Wish Book. Of course, Walmart was outselling Sears by the early nineties, so perhaps it was Walmart that killed the catalog, like it killed so many small-town retailers.
As I think about it, he Wish Book is still here, it’s just changed format and it’s no longer Sears. It’s that glowing screen and magic keyboard used to type in “carbon fiber bicycle” or “fishing kayak” or “thirteen-inch laptop” or whatever my latest object of retail desire is. The algorithms do their magic and the list pops up.
Instead of dog-earing the page, you just bookmark it. In fact, you don’t even have to bookmark it, those pesky little algorithms follow you everywhere. Visions of kayaks pop on your Facebook page, your news feed, your every incursion to the Internet. Hmmmm, I think I need a new kayak paddle. Oops, there it is. How did Google know?
Good thing my credit card is tucked in my wallet a couple of rooms away. I won’t go get it. Saved from the demon of acquisition and a filled garage.
Dammit, the credit card number, billing information and my life history all stored and the order form prepopulates. Don’t hit send. Don’t hit send. Don’t hit send. Oops.
I wonder what the mailperson will bring me today.
I wonder what Grandma Dallas would call the algorithms. Likely she’d call them “The Devil’s Work”.
(c) William L. Enyart 2020