Janice Williams Loves Austin

It was announced this week that J.C. Penney will no longer produce their catalog. Like me, your first thought may have been, “They were still printing a catalog?” I haven’t seen one in years and years and I know that I’ve never received a catalog from Penneys, Sears, or Wards since I’ve been out on my own.

[By the way, I want to write the word "catalog" as catalogue, but spell check is disagreeing with me. A quick search shows that both are probably acceptable and most of the news stories, in fact, go with catalogue, but since I've got it written with the new-fashioned version, I'll just stay with it]

But, boy, were they staples in our house when I was a little girl. They were not like “junk” mail that got tossed. They found their permanent place on the bookshelf in the breakfast nook and remained until they were replaced.

I did grow up in the country, but it wasn’t like we didn’t shop at the malls in town. We had a Penney’s and Sears and “Monkey Wards” (as Daddy always said) just 20 or 30 minutes from the house, so it wasn’t like we were in the boonies. But we did like the catalog. I vividly recall getting to order 2 dresses from a catalog one summer and eagerly waiting for that package to arrive. One was a blue and red small plaid with a collar and a bow at the throat that had really long ribbon “tails.”

Our mother always talked about making paper dolls from the catalogs that they got as children. In her family of 4 girls, if there were 4 women on the page of the catalog, they each got to have a paper doll. If there were only 2 models, only the 2 oldest sisters got paper dolls. Mom was #3. At least she got more paper dolls than #4. Mackie and I made our fair share of paper dolls from the catalog, but I think we were also lucky enough to get store-bought paper dolls from time-to-time and I always got the Betsy McCall paper doll out of McCall’s magazine each month, too. Betsy and the catalog dolls both were awfully limp and hard to pretend with. But I remember Betsy and this one especially. See the dress she is wearing? Just like the dress I had from the catalog!

Of course, the catalog that was the best one came when Santa would soon be on his way. We would comb through it, page after page after page. I am quite sure that my first cassette recorder came from the Montgomery Ward catalog in 1970 … and they were expensive! They cost more then than they do now even without figuring in the inflation. I’m sure if we were to look at a letter to Santa from those days, it might have included page numbers and product codes and certainly the full brand name of the toys we wanted.

We spent lots of time with the catalog. Just like we might click around the Internet with no real purpose today, the catalog was great for just dreaming. I furnished many a full house in my mind with the pages of the catalog. I was an architect wanna-be and I would design a house and then furnish it and buy curtains and worry over color choices. Harvest Gold and Avocado were THE colors for kitchens in the time that I remember, and we had the most modern Harvest Gold appliances in our house for a decade, but I loved the less popular Paprika color of the time and also the more old-fashioned, traditional copper. I had a whole bedroom picked out with a canopy bed and dressing table and rugs and bedding. I can still see it in my mind.

When I read the news, I went looking through the Internet where you can find many examples of catalogs from that era. Looking at them, they looked as dated and as quaint as the original Sears catalog that we had as a novelty when I was in high school. It was a reproduction of the 1896  Sears catalog where you could order a house or a wagon or a cast iron stove. The catalogs I saw had guns for sale by mail, automobile parts, and one amazing 1978 catalog had a real video game! It was the home version of Pong. Anyone that bought that had to have been really cool. We only got to play Pong at the roller skating rink.

It only makes sense that the Penney’s catalog goes the way of film and records and roller skates with four wheels that weren’t in a line, but it is one more thing to make me mark the passage of time. There is definitely a dividing line between those that respond to the news with “Oh, no!” and “What’s a catalog?”

When Mark and I made our little road trip on the New Year’s Day weekend, we went through Eastland, Texas, and I got to gaze upon my grandparents’ house at 108 N. Walnut. There were so many happy memories there! Going for a summer visit (the swimming pool and Lake Leon, making ice cream on the back steps) or at Christmastime (approaching in the night and seeing Mamma’s red electric candles in the living room window). The house doesn’t look like it did in so many of my memories because somewhere along in the late 70s they remodeled and added a bathroom, which eliminated the bulk of the front porch. I don’t know what the inside looks like now and I don’t think I want to see it. I wish I had more picture of the interior of their house, but considering we usually shot photos in natural light, our pictures at their house are mostly outside. I know we have home movies of the interior — shot with those bright-as-runway-light spotlights. Someday I will do something with those movies so I can see them again.

I did find this picture of the interior of their house when I began my scanning last week. This is my sweet grandmother on their 50th wedding anniversary in 1972. She’s standing in the dining room, which was in the center of the house. Behind her is a buffet and a mirror with two wall pockets with fake flowers in them. I loved that mirror with the beveled edges.

What I really loved, though, was that kitchen door behind her. It was a swinging door so you could go through in either direction. Having never had one of my own, we made the circuit around the house over and over delightedly pushing our way through that door. Mostly the door was propped open and wasn’t used, but in the mornings when Mackie and I were still asleep on the pull out sofa bed in the living room, they would close that door while my grandparents and parents sat in the kitchen and talked and Mamma cooked breakfast. I love the memory of their muffled voices and laughs and the sound and smell of bacon.

The dining room was also Papa’s office — this was a very small house. Over here to the left of this photographer would have been Papa’s desk with his shelves above it holding notebook after notebook of his poems. Papa wrote poetry and, at some point in his retirement, vowed to write a poem a day. He did that and often multiple poems in a day. I wish I could duplicate one of his poems here, but I don’t have one handy. They were almost always short 4-line poems where the second and fourth line rhymed (quatrains! I looked it up). They were usually very religious or commentary on the current state of religion and,  most specifically, the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, who Papa listened to on the radio. I wish I could even attempt to write one, but I don’t have the huge vocabulary that Papa had.

Mackie and I made some good money indexing Papa’s poems for him. Each month he would mail us his poems. He typed them as he wrote them on sheets of lined notebook paper, maybe 8 to a page in a column down the middle. He didn’t waste room putting a title on them, he would just underline or print in the red the words of the first line that were the title. Mackie and I would write the name of each poem on a separate index card and note the page number it was on. Then we indexed the pack of cards and then typed the index on another sheet of lined notebook paper to go in Papa’s shelves of blue cloth notebooks. It was probably a pointless effort because I doubt that even Papa ever said, “I want to look up my poem “The Great I Am” and went to an index to find it. He wrote many more than one a day and it was always interesting to see how many poems arrived from Papa each month. I know it was just his sweet way of keeping up a relationship with us and giving us money. We made maybe $20 every time we indexed the poems and that was high cotton in the 60s and 70s.

Papa’s desk was my favorite part of their house. There were always plenty of very sharp pencils and there were index cards and Papa never had a problem with us using any of his office supplies. It was probably his nice supply that has led to my office supply addiction that I still enjoy today.

Where the photographer in the picture was standing was in the archway between the living room and dining room and on top of a floor furnace that kept things toasty. I remember the arch decorated with Christmas tinsel or garland and with Christmas cards.

Happy memories. I’m going to go looking for more pictures of the interior of Mamma and Papa’s house.

How appropriate to post this one as I get “back in the saddle” after all my website troubles:

That’s sure evidence of a bygone era where men with ponies would come around and take pictures of the kids, right by the house. That’s next to our house on King Street in Amarillo. Mackie seems to be more in the spirit of riding the range than I was. There is suspicion all over my face. I love Mackie’s little t-shirt with something about Texaco on it and my shorts with anchors. We both appear to have head scarves around our necks. I wonder if they were added as bandannas for the experience?

This is one of the products of my new little Flip Scan scanner and a box of photos from my grandmother. This has always been a family favorite and Mother still has it on a shelf in her living room.

More photos, more stories to come. Today I came close to not having one of my jobs interfere with my writing, but things changed and I am still more than fully employed for another day or two.