Tears and Roebuck
A couple of random notes about the Sears, Roebuck & Co. fall/winter catalog of 1957: Men seem strangely attached to pipe-smoking in their underwear. Page after page of guys lounging around in their long johns, smoking and smiling, with their hands on each others’shoulders. Oh, dear. Also, compared with today’s anaconda-equipped underwear models, male models in the ‘50s don’t appear to have had genitalia.
The women fashion models always seem to be grouped in odd numbers, three or five or seven. These models are inevitably paired off, leaning together, exchanging whispers, while another looks off-camera, the odd gal out. What’s the pictorial narrative here? Is she a Communist?
I don’t know what I was looking for when I went to the library to retrieve a 50-year-old Sears catalog. Perhaps 50-year-old mail-order fruitcake or a nice porkpie hat to go with my lunchbox. Perhaps it was just the farthest reach of a notion: Was Christmas in America a half-century ago any better, any more innocent, any less the ritual of obligation and coercive spending than it is today? Like practically everyone I know, the prospect of another Christmas is as appealing as a bathtub full of electric eels. Did Christmas make the postwar generation happier?
There could be no better source material than the Sears catalog, the mail-order tentacle of what was at the time the largest retailer in the world. Fifty years ago, Sears catalogs--the seasonal editions as well as the Christmas Wish Book--circumscribed the known consumer universe. Sears stopped publishing its catalogs in 1993 but brought back the Wish Book this year for an encore. I suppose that’s what got my attention.
But at the library I was captivated by the general catalog. Once mailed to virtually every household in America, it offered anything that could reasonably be directed at buyers, from burros to band instruments, doilies to drill presses and vitamins to “specialty” vibrators. Curiously, this last item was described in the ’57 book as perfect for “mothers and daughters [who] will welcome pleasant moments of relaxation at the end of an active day.” If anyone has any insight into this entry, please keep it to yourself.
In a consumer society, what we buy is inevitably who we are. So who were we 50 Christmases ago?
A half-century ago, the Bomb hung over yuletide like mistletoe. The Sears catalog catered to all our civil-defense needs: chemical toilets, trash incinerators, Geiger counters--Look, honey, it counts rads and roentgens!
And yet, we were more like our Soviet counterparts than we thought. With its hundreds of pages of practical clothing, sensible shoes and proletarian indulgences (vacuum cleaners, accordions), the catalog seems like the mail-order version of the GUM department store in Red Square.
There were other dangers. Sears’ top-of-the-line chain saw included no chain guard, no kickback lever, no kill switch, just 30 pounds of screaming, self-amputating fury that wouldn’t shut off. There were asbestos shingles, DDT-based household insecticide, lead-containing lipstick. It’s a wonder our forebears got out of the ‘50s alive.
But any sense of superiority evaporates pretty quickly. One of the low-voltage discontents of Christmas 2007 is that, no matter how much money you spend lining the pockets of Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney, most of what you buy is junk. To trip through the 1957 Sears catalog--where you could order seven gorgeous pieces of hand-stitched leather luggage for $79--is to see the shabbiness of modern materialism afresh. I defy anyone to find a better black dress than Sears’ little draped velvet number for $18.50.
These were the days when goods were judged on their worth, and you could give your wife a Sears watch and not feel as if you were filing for divorce. My theory is that we repress our intuition--that designer-label goods are overpriced dreck that we’re blackmailed into buying--and that fury is misdirected at the holiday itself, so that we find ourselves cursing mall Santas and wishing carolers would just drop dead.
The biggest difference between Christmas then and now: Toys were for children. They didn’t sell Roy Rogers gun belts in 40-inch waist sizes or Radio Flyers that could carry a 200-pound man. Adults occupied themselves with purposeful things, such as building their own boats from kits or installing central air conditioning. (Were we ever so self-reliant?) Again, my theory: Christmas provides a psychic embarrassment for adults--or “rejuveniles,” as they’ve been called--who in a season devoted to children remain attached to childish things: “Harry Potter” books, video games, “Spider-Man” movies.
Christmas reminds us that we should have grown up by now. *
