Narrative posting of yesterday’s Weebly blog – Carpe Diem! They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I’d call it junk mail. I’m not sure how the General (aka – my wife) would categorize it. If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that I am home alone. My wife is in North Carolina assisting my son’s family in their move to Texas (Whoop!) I recognize that in the world of Aggie students (and my grandchildren will be one day if they hope to have their parents fund their education) the use of “Whoop!” is limited to junior and senior students. Even though I’m not a student, I figure at my age someone will think I’m a senior. At any rate, one of my assigned responsibilities is to pick up the mail from the post office. Okay, so I’ve been doing that. Even without the list the General provided, I probably would have had the presence of mind to check the mail without the need for structure. The surprise from picking up the mail is the number of catalogs we the General receives. One of the General’s rules is that the surface space on the bar in the kitchen be kept free of clutter. Since the General’s name is the name that appears on the forty-one catalogs (junk mail – my assessment, not hers) received in the past two weeks, I’ve got them stacked on the bar. Actually, some of the addressed catalogs aren’t that personalized. They are addressed to Treva Forrester or Current Resident. If the General were here, she’d have them sorted out by those exclusively addressed to her and then the second category would include those with the added notation “or Current Resident.” I’m not nearly as OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) as the General, so I’ve just got them stacked without categorizing them. One of the catalogs boasts of being “America’s Longest Running Catalog”. It is from Hammacher Schlemmer (Offering the Best, the Only and the Unexpected for 166 years). That is a pretty impressive claim. I quickly thumbed through the book and it looked identical to the catalogs you find in the pocket in front of your airline seat. JUNK MAIL! I’ll spare you the details, but several other catalogs that I’ve never heard of included: · Soft Surroundings · grand in road · sahalie · The Paragon · The Company Store · Ballard Designs · Bas Blue · The Land of Nod · Travel Smith · BLAIR When I was a kid I remember the Sears catalog. I didn’t generally need help in knowing what to add to my Christmas wish list, but the catalog was available if help was needed. We also received a Christmas catalog from J.C. Penneys. Life was simple back then. We only received two catalogs. They apparently had everything you needed. You could even purchase a house from Sears. According to my Google search, “The hour has arrived. Dad gathers Mom and Sis into the carriage. He hops in the wagon with his brothers to ride off to the railroad station. The day and hour have come to greet the first shipment of your family’s brand-new house. All the lumber will be precut and arrive with instructions for your dad and uncles to assemble and build. Mom and Dad picked out No. 140 from Sears, Roebuck and Company’s catalog. It will have two bedrooms and a cobblestone foundation, plus a front porch—but no bath. They really wanted No. 155, with a screened-in front porch, built-in buffet, and inside bath (!), but $1,100 was twice as much as Dad said he could afford. In just a few days, the whole family will sleep under the roof of your custom-made Sears Modern Home. Entire homes would arrive by railroad, from precut lumber, to carved staircases, down to the nails and varnish. Families picked out their houses according to their needs, tastes, and pocketbooks. Sears provided all the materials and instructions, and for many years the financing, for homeowners to build their own houses. Sears’s Modern Homes stand today as living monuments to the fine, enduring, and solid quality of Sears craftsmanship. No official tally exists of the number of Sears mail-order houses that still survive today. It is reported that more than 100,000 houses were sold between 1908 and 1940 through Sears’s Modern Homes program. The keen interest evoked in current homebuyers, architectural historians, and enthusiasts of American culture indicate that thousands of these houses survive in varying degrees of condition and original appearance. It is difficult to appreciate just how important the Modern Homes program and others like it were to homebuyers in the first half of the twentieth century. Imagine for a moment buying a house in 1908. Cities were getting more crowded and had always been dirty breeding grounds for disease in an age before vaccines. The United States was experiencing a great economic boom, and millions of immigrants who wanted to share in this wealth and escape hardship were pouring into America’s big cities. City housing was scarce, and the strong economy raised labor costs, which sent new-home prices soaring. The growing middle class was leaving the city for the—literally—greener pastures of suburbia as trolley lines and the railroad extended lifelines for families who needed to travel to the city. Likewise, companies were building factories on distant, empty parcels of land and needed to house their workers. Stately, expensive Victorian-style homes were not options for any but the upper class of homeowner. Affordable, mail-order homes proved to be just the answer to such dilemmas. Sears was neither the first nor the only company to sell mail-order houses, but they were the largest, selling as many as 324 units in one month (May, 1926). The origin of the Modern Homes program is actually to be found a decade before houses were sold. Sears began selling building materials out of its catalogs in 1895, but by 1906 the department was almost shut down until someone had a better idea. Frank W. Kushel, who was reassigned to the unprofitable program from managing the china department, believed the homebuilding materials could be shipped straight from the factories, thus eliminating storage costs for Sears. This began a successful 25-year relationship between Kushel and the Sears Modern Homes program. Did I mention that we have an antique kitchen clock that was purchased from Sears during that same era? It was refurbished shortly before we purchased it in 1972. It still works great and adds a touch of yesterday to our home. I guess in the 1920s, Sears was the home store. The Christmas edition of the Sears Catalog in 1975 was the subject of controversy. Some people perceived that one of the male models in the underwear section revealed a tad bit more than community standards would permit. Consequently, there were people who protested the ad. On the other hand, rumor has it that there were people who wanted to order the man on page 602. I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. All My Best! Don carpediem-lifeblog.Weebly
Posted on: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 17:47:09 +0000
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