Fifty years isn’t even a wink in time, but a lot has come and gone in what I hope will be a little more than half my lifetime. Before I forget them, I want to recognize some of these bygone (or altered) things, products, services, and brands I’ll tag “relics.” Like so much in human history, they’ve been relegated to the landfill of cultural history by advancing and emerging technologies, fluctuating economic conditions, and fickle popular tastes.
I’m going to focus on things that were an accepted part of everyday life for many years, such as full-service gas stations, not fads or failures. They illuminate my past and evoke memories of a time and world that might seem as alien to a person born in 1990, or even 1980, as my dad’s adventures with animal-powered transportation were to me.
In honor of the beleaguered United States Postal Service, I’ll start with the one-color, non-sticky postage stamp. The last time I bought these that I can remember was when 55 cents would send up to two ounces. I still had hopes that some publication somewhere would accept my short story “Justice,” which in the 1990s was too disturbing for the editors of the even the edgiest publications I contacted, but today seems tame. These stamps, the workhorse of USPS for many years, were printed in one color on uncoated paper with no backing; they weren’t self-adhesive like today’s stamps. To affix one to an envelope, you wet it with a sponge moistener that office supply stores used to sell, handy for invitations and other large mailings, or you licked it. Either way, if you got the stamp too damp, it would crumple or stick to your fingers, or both. If you tried to peel it off, possible with today’s crop of sturdier, coated, self-adhesive stamps, it would tear or even disintegrate. Collectors could try to get them off envelopes by softening the glue using steam, a process I’ve never tried. You’d use a similar technique if you were nosy and just had to know what was in an envelope.
I assume it’s just as cheap, if more wasteful, to print self-adhesive stamps in color on backing, such as the one-cent American kestrel stamp, making the one-color glue stamp obsolete.
For the record, the 55-cent stamp I used to mail “Justice” was issued on July 11, 1995 in Boston, Massachusetts and featured Alice Hamilton, MD, social reformer, in green. The other day I found some in a pencil box. Mystic Stamp was selling a single mint stamp for $2 and a mint sheet for $220 — both of which are more than “Justice” has earned.
If you have a stash of old postcards, check out the one-color stamps. Most likely you will never see their like again.
At times separated by an ocean or by hundreds of miles, John and Abigail Adams wrote thousands of letters to each other, covering personal matters such as their farm, family, health, and hopes, as well as their views of freedom, the American Revolution and government, and its participants. Despite the distance, quite possibly their correspondence benefited from postal efficiencies introduced by fellow revolutionary and occasional nemesis Benjamin Franklin, who was appointed Joint Postmaster General of the colonies for the Crown in 1753 and Postmaster for the United Colonies in 1775.
Adams wrote prodigious numbers of letters throughout his adult life, to Abigail, children and grandchildren, and friends on both sides of the Atlantic. Through letters, he and Thomas Jefferson, past their primes and their ambitions, rekindled their friendship and their dialogue about the rights of man and the role of government. Adams finally quit writing in extreme old age, when his eyes were nearly sightless and his hands shook too much to manage a pen. Only physical infirmity deterred him.
As revolutionaries, then as president and president’s wife, John and Abigail had a great deal to say. Like Benjamin Franklin, they were keenly aware that what they wrote would become part of U.S. history.
I happened to be reading John Adams by David McCullough when I saw the Washington Post story about vanishing blue U.S. mailboxes that had become a fixture on city street corners and in the downtown area of many a burg. With e-mail, texting, social media like Facebook and Twitter, 24/7 mobile phone access, and other instant, on-the-go ways to communicate, who today takes the time and effort to write letters? Many seem to be able to communicate what we have to say in Twitter’s 140 characters (even John Quincy Adams), except when we’re texting cryptic messages back and forth: “whr ru?” “*bcks.” “b thr sn.” If you feel you need to communicate at greater length, you might start a blog, which, without a theme of general interest to the world or of particular interest to a special niche, will probably quickly fizzle out from lack of participation on both ends, readers’ and writer’s. Of course, you might not want to say to the world what you would to family, or to family what you would say to friends.
Although she did not have much to say, my mother wrote letters to sisters and brothers spread out across the country — Pennsylvania, Arizona, California. She didn’t like writing letters. I don’t think any of them did, because letters she wrote and received invariably began with an apology that the writer had not written sooner, followed by numerous apologies for having nothing to say, descriptions of the local weather, a bit of news if there were any, e.g., “Diane starts school in two weeks, Where did summer go?” Why write when there was so little to say and it was such a disliked chore? The answer — long distance was relatively expensive and reserved for truly important and immediate news, like deaths. Usually only one aunt, more affluent and urbanized than the others, called once in a while just to chat — and possibly to avoid writing a letter.
My mother also kept a diary, one of those old-fashioned small books with psychedelic covers popular in the 1960s. Five years of entries for, say, April 8, fit on a page, with perhaps three to five lines on which you could summarize the day for posterity. “A.M. Sunny but snowed in P.M. Insurance man called.” Writing didn’t come naturally to my mother, and she seemed painfully aware of it. She told us that, when she died. she wanted her diaries burned — clearly not for their lurid content or insights into her thoughts, but, I suspect, because she didn’t want anyone to see how mundane they were. I complied, although of course now I wish I hadn’t. I did keep my own two equally dull diaries from my childhood, although I rarely look into them — there is that little of interest in my colorful childish scrawls.
As someone who is paid to write, I’ve found that most people, even those with advanced degrees, are not comfortable expressing themselves in writing. Ostensibly, they worry about such things as grammar, flow, and polish. Could I make them sound better, more intelligent, more interesting, please?
I don’t think people are afraid of their technical shortcomings as writers, whether of professional communications, day-to-day diaries, or letters to family and friends. I suspect there’s a deep-seated fear of revealing our thoughts and how we think to those who know us personally. Unlike John and Abigail, my mother didn’t have congressional congresses, wars, courts, diplomacy, or politics to write about from a firsthand viewpoint. That left her feeling like most people, who think they have nothing worthwhile to say or are afraid to say anything worthwhile from fear of offending or causing an argument or a break (something that troubled Adams less than Jefferson). So they talk about TV shows and tweet about the weather, what they’re listening to or watching, where they’re eating, perhaps what they’re reading. We’re afraid to write, or are unable to write, paralyzed by our lack of material or the unwillingness to be ourselves. We’re afraid to be judged by what we say and how we say it.
I write letters — lots of letters. For all I know, they bore the recipients. But I love the sensory experience of writing, the glide of pen across paper and the appearance of writing, which is almost magical. I may start out on one mundane topic, which leads to another, and another, and, on occasion, sometimes a broader topic of more general interest. A comment about a Victorian novel may lead to a different perspective about some aspect of contemporary life. Writing — not typing — helps me to think questions through and to remember details. Knowing that I am going to write letters keeps me on the lookout for things to write about — the lack of fireflies this summer, neighborhood news, overheard conversations, interesting perspectives on the news and the world, quirks of human behavior, including my own. Sometimes a seemingly ingenuous observation launches me into what I hope is a worthwhile digression, making me perceive a topic or problem differently. Letters allow me to think out loud in a way that a journal, with its audience of one, can’t. Even without a dialogue, I can imagine my audience’s reaction, just as perhaps John, Abigail, and the other assorted family members thought of each other centuries ago as they sat at their desks, dipped their quills, and looked out over the bleak fields of winter and the ripening fields of summer.
Communication doesn’t have to be instantaneous or uninterrupted for the emotional connection to remain strong. To remember this, read some of the most poignant letters from any war — or the letters of John and Abigail Adams. When Abigail reminded John that he was sixty years old, he replied, “If I were near I would soon convince you that I am not above forty.” Could John Adams have conveyed his feelings and the implicit compliment to Abigail so eloquently in a text message? One can only imagine how Abigail’s heart rose as she held the paper and read of his love and lust for her in John’s own handwriting.
My heart still rises in the same way when I receive a handwritten letter, no matter who it is from or what it proves to be about. It’s an old habit that dies hard — and I’m not the one to fight it. Long live the blue U.S. mailboxes.
My first full-time job was as the proofreader in a then Big 8 accounting/consulting firm’s word processing department, proofing benefit plan documents, actuary’s reports, responses to RFPs, etc. The word processors (people) used primitive stand-alone machines called Vydecs; enormous, flimsy floppy disks (the origin of “floppy,” no doubt); and a printer that utilized daisywheels. This wasn’t state of the art, even for 1983.
The professional staff, as they were known, used a mainframe computer with workstations in a central computer room to perform calculations, manage databases, and so forth. They also maintained hard copy workpapers as a paper trail. To revise or create new documents, they photocopied previous or similar ones and marked them up. The word processors would store the new document on one of the flimsy, oversized floppies, which I think could hold up to 30 pages per side. They were prone to failure, as were the machines. The Vydec repairman was a frequent guest in our office.
At some point in the 1980s, perhaps about the same time we moved to another building, we changed over to personal computers and WordPerfect (DOS). The word processors spent many hours converting Vydec disks. Later, because of a client relationship, we switched to the indescribably awful AmiPro, then to Microsoft Word.
As time passed, more individuals were given their own PCs at their desks (rather than sharing those in the computer room). For the most part, staff still marked up documents, and the relative ease and speed with which they could be produced and sent (via FedEx overnight) contributed to an increase in volume for the word processing center, which expanded.
With more new hires who were comfortable with computers, typing, and editing, slowly most people started writing their own documents on their own computers, coming to word processing only to have them “cleaned up” and finalized. The business of the word processing center waned, and a once-indispensable service became almost superfluous within a matter of a year or two. The proofreader who had replaced me spent half or more of each day reading books.
Someone had the questionable idea of transforming the word processors into graphic designers, as though access to QuarkXPress and graphics software was all it took, as though this weren’t a specialized skill, like a dental hygienist becoming an orthodontist on the job and on the fly. At about the same time, someone came in to manage document processing as though it were a combination of graphic design and word processing. I have the impression that people were unhappy with the results, that there were personnel, workflow, and quality issues (all problems you want in a high-priced business consultant).
My understanding is that ultimately all of the department-specific word processing groups were centralized. If that still exists, I wouldn’t be surprised if more attempts had been made to outsource the function, just as many organizations outsource mail and supply centers, copying, scanning, and so forth. With Microsoft Word templates, e-mail, and notebook computers, along with BlackBerrys and the like, it’s even likely that there’s no longer a need for any word processing function.
I remember the times that I went to work on Saturdays, even Sundays, to spend hours marking up documents in red pen, then verifying that the necessary changes had been made with the word processor and the project lead, while partners and managers continued to refine the scope, offering, verbiage, and numbers. Today I would mostly likely receive documents at home via e-mail or through connecting to a company intranet. I would redline them and e-mail them back or upload them for the next person to review. That person would accept or reject changes and make additional substantive edits — possibly from his or her home, too. What was once a painful, frustrating, laborious process is, I would hope, now more streamlined, efficient, and nonintrusive on personal time.
This was only nine or ten years ago. Much about how we work has changed. Everything is “teamwork” and “collaboration,” even though it often isn’t. There are no more secretaries who type and file; there are administrative and executive assistants who often have the inside track for operations positions. I wonder how many word processors are left — perhaps in law firms? But I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that it had become an anachronistic profession, like that of the chimney sweep. The irony is that the technology that created the profession has led to its demise.
On the other hand, 23 years ago very few people could write and spell well, and that has not changed. Even if the need for proofreaders and copyeditors is not admitted or acknowledged, it still exists. More documents, more pages, more words — more errors.
After reading some of the work produced in the new era, however, I wonder if anyone cares. Maybe proofreading and copyediting are anachronistic as well.
Vintage Sears, Roebuck and Co. Maid of Honor timer
One of my favourite possessions is my mother’s Sears Maid of Honor kitchen timer. It’s a wheel that rotates on a pedestal. The numbers are in a Delft-like blue along the sides. The brand name is on the top (and includes Roebuck). You turn the wheel on the pedestal to align the time desired to the pointer. It’s fairly heavy for its size because it has a real bell. If you wind it to 60, it will ring long enough that you can’t miss it. I don’t know how old it is, but I would guess it dates from the 1950s.
I love it because of the vintage design and look. In the 1950s, it may have looked ultramodern, but today it looks classic. I love the color of the numbers and hash marks. I love the fluted rim of the top. Mostly, though, I love it because it was my mother’s, because I remember it perched in the front row of our glass-fronted west kitchen cabinet, until she took it out to time a cake or cookies or perhaps while she was making “Daisy’s fudge” for which she was admired among her friends and family.
Lately it is also a reminder of something my mother always told me — that I don’t take care of my things. One day after I moved to The Flamingo, I left my sacred Sears Maid of Honor timer on the kitchen counter, on top of a coffee can, thinking I would put it away in a few minutes. Then I fell sound asleep. Sure enough, a short time later, I was awakened by a loud crash; my young, inquisitive, and strong cat had knocked the timer to the floor, breaking some pieces off the pedestal. I glued the larger pieces I could find back on, and it works, but it’s not the same. My mother would not have allowed it to be broken through laziness.
For awhile, I looked online for information about the Sears Maid of Honor timer, but couldn’t find any. I gave up and didn’t look again for months. Then one day, probably while tired and bored, I looked again through google.com — and found one in excellent condition for sale. So I bought it. It came complete with the box! It’s brown with built-up dirt, but here’s the copy from the top and sides:
Maid of Honor portable household TIMER
60 minute interval
Alarm clock ring
Winds when you set it
Handsome plastic case
Color: White [stamped]
No. 4658
Sears, Roebuck and Co. and Simpsons-Sears Ltd. Made in U.S.A.
ACCURATE TIMING FOR: * Cooking and baking * Baby formulae * Sun lamp treatments * Home permanents * Telephone Calls * Bleaching
[Cartoon of woman in bikini under sun lamp]
Long alarm rings to remind you that time’s up. Sturdy, heat-resistant plastic case with rubber feet to protect polished surfaces. Modern design . . . fluted rim for firm grip . . . large numerals and extra wide minute intervals for accurate setting.
To set timer
Turn the top clockwise, passing stationary pointer on base. Rotate beyond 6 to activate the timing mechanism. Then timer may be set at any minute interval. The alarm ring gradually increases as you turn the top. It rings for 2 seconds when turned just past 6 minutes, for 14 seconds when moved to 60 minutes. For the longest possible ring, turn to 60 before setting. Timer may be reset forward or back during operation. Never turn past 0 as this damages the movement.
I have other timers that I use for baking and for waking me after one-hour naps. I even have an electronic digital timer I used at work for timing client-related jobs. While they are as functional as the Sears Maid of Honor timer (both of which are now safely and permanently stowed away), especially the multi-function electronic one, none is as interesting. They look like something you could get anywhere — because you could. The Sears Maid of Honor timer is unique.
At one time it wasn’t, of course. It appears that Sears Maid of Honor was once a popular line of modestly priced (knowing my parents) household gadgets, presumably designed for young brides.
Like most people, my parents had a lot of mass-produced items, some of which I saved because they hold some special memories or reminders of the security of my home. For example, I have a small, iridescence-coated glass, part of a set, that I used for cut roses from the wild rosebush that my dad salvaged from a low-lying area and planted against a trellis. No large, fancy, overbred rose will ever be as beautiful to me as those small, scented, wild blooms floating in the rainbow glass on my dresser. It’s not the object that matters, but the feelings associated with it. It’s good to have both.
Some of this attachment to objects may come from having grown up in a lower income bracket and having parents who grew up poor during the Great Depression. Our financial situation (or at least my dad’s perception of it) seems to have improved by the time I was a teenager, when he was working more hours at the Ford stamping plant to save for retirement. Until then, however, we did not buy a lot of durable goods unless necessary, nor would my dad throw out anything that could be useful. I suppose that’s part of why my mother used the same old Sears Maid of Honor timer for the duration of her married life (and life).
I sometimes wonder if today’s kids will feel the same way about the things they grew up with. Some women may feel an attachment to a favourite doll or stuffed animal, while men may hang onto and even add to their Hot Wheels collections. But do affluent kids who have so much love their things? It’s hard for me to imagine a lifelong emotional attachment to a mass-produced plastic toy or a modern kitchen timer. Will it someday look vintage? Will it evoke memories of a mother laboring for hours over fudge she wants to be perfect because it’s the one thing for which she is renowned in her small circle, for which she has received countless compliments and comments like, “Mine never turns out as well as yours, Daisy!”?
A couple of weeks ago, I was at the annual Christkindlmarket at Daley Plaza in downtown Chicago. There’s a booth featuring carved wooden frogs and other toys. The frogs have ridged backs and come with a wooden stick. When you run the stick down the ridges, it produces frog-like croaking. The larger the frog, the deeper the croak. They’re charming toys — the kind I see as a precious keepsake in 20 or 30 years. I noticed the little boy next to me found them uninteresting — probably a child used to electronic beeps and flashing lights. His father, however, was sampling the sounds of all the frog sizes nearly obsessively and desperately trying to interest the boy in them. When I turned to look at him, I was surprised to find he was a young man — not the 40-something like myself I expected. He was enchanted with the frogs and hoping his son would be, too.
Twenty years from now, will the son remember that trip to the Christkindlmarket? Will he remember the brisk air, the flushed faces, the buzz of the crowd, the booths with their handmade wares, and the quaint croaking frogs?
My parents were in their 40s when I was born in 1961, so they were of a different generation than the parents of most of my friends. In addition, my mother came from a small town, my father from a farm, so they had not grown up in our urban/suburban wastelands. My father especially did not have much as a child — newspapers, but no radio and no luxuries. His days were spent working on the farm and driving the two mules; I think he told me he went to school through eighth grade, but his sisters said that he often didn’t go at all so he did not have a steady education although I know he would have wanted one. My mother left school in 11th grade. I don’t know what all she did, but I do know she spent some time working as a maid for people who treated the dog better than they did her.
It’s interesting to think how the world changed in such a short time for people of my parents’ generation. By my friends’ standards, we were poor; by my parents’s standards, my dad’s job at Ford Motor Company had made them more affluent than they had ever been, even living in a mobile home as they did. By 1961, when I was born, they could even afford to buy a new, bigger mobile home. They had things they could never have imagined — refrigerator, camera (a $3 black-and-white Kodak), black-and-white television, radio (kept on the kitchen counter and often listened to during storms and blackouts), vacuum cleaner, and so forth. The day we got a telephone was exciting — my mother was so amazed that I memorized the number immediately — but not nearly as much as the day the color television arrived. (As an aside, I was heartbroken over getting rid of the black-and-white TV, and to be honest I never warmed up to the colour one. To this day, I don’t like colour movies or television nearly as much as black and white, and the overexposed sunniness of an Ingmar Bergman black-and-white film or the surreal black-and-white Mrs. Peel Avengers episodes still evoke a kind of joy in me that I can’t explain — perhaps it does have to do with them feeling like they take place in a different world that I feel closer to.)
My parents (and, I think, their generation) loved gadgets and all the newfangled time-saving devices. My mother in particular always wanted to go shopping (something she normally didn’t like) if she thought she was going to end up with, say, an electric can opener.
It’s hard to say about her because she passed away relatively young (64), but at some point technology outstripped my dad’s ability to understand it. I tried to explain computers to him and even showed him my notebook, but he could never quite understand how the words got to the screen or how they got on paper, or how my brother and I could send messages back and forth instantly, or how I could get the news online. It confused him since he didn’t witness it every day, although I think that he, like many older people today, would have embraced it given the opportunity. At a certain point, though, he did learn some of the capabilities, and he would occasionally say, “Can you email your brother such and such?” His younger sister has a better grasp since her son got a computer and she sees him and his wife working on it.
I could talk about how the country has changed since my dad was born (1913), including the population explosion. But what this was all really leading up to is . . . the caboose. Isn’t that a wonderful word? Ca-boose. Say it. Savour it. Listen to its improbability as a word.
I grew up with cabooses. When at a railway crossing, you always tried to count the cars, and you always tried to be the first to spot the caboose. I think there were even some caboose games with rules, although I no longer remember what they are. I remember most cabooses I saw in New York and Pennsylvania being brick red or a green. Sometimes you could see a man or two hanging out the windows and wave to them.
The caboose is now long gone, having been replaced by safer (it is claimed, anyway) technology. The railroaders protested, the old-timers protested, but it was, like the demise of my black-and-white television, inevitable. It occurred to me one day that I wasn’t seeing as many cabooses and that more and more trains looked “naked” without an end in sight. This was going to be a battle that the railroaders wouldn’t win. I later read in the news it was the end of the line for the caboose.
I was thinking about cabooses the other day for some reason, and then I realised that this is the kind of thing that makes one feel “old” or at least out of place. People 15 years younger than I may never have seen a caboose, except perhaps mentioned in a book or at a museum. People my own age may remember them but not feel the emotional appeal that a memory from youth can have. And, as with my parents, people my age may be the first to wish to discard the old and embrace the new. I doubt there are any 10-year-olds now collecting train sets who insist on a caboose.
Savour that word. In my 40th year of life, it — and I — are anachronisms.
