It’s spring and life is cheerful though one must accept certain grim realities like mortality, paper cuts and the demise of our local Sears store. I will miss our Sears which had come to be like a friend to me that brought back memories of the old Sears-Roebuck & Co store I knew when I was a boy.
That store had creaky wooden floors and was filled with toys, sporting goods, sewing machines and appliances. The Sale clerks were middle class working people who knew my parents by name and everyone agreed that Eisenhower should nuke Russia into a flat piece of glass. It was there my father purchased my first bicycle and the clerk took me out back and helped me learn to stay upright on a moving two wheeled object. A wonder, like the Trinity, suddenly made clear by kindness. You don’t get that type of instruction on the internet.
Imagine America in the 1880’s. There were only 38 states and about 65 percent of the people lived in rural areas. Only a dozen or so cities had 200,000 or more residents. One day a Chicago jewelry company accidently shipped some watches to a jeweler in a Minnesota hamlet who did not want them.
Richard Sears was an agent of the Minneapolis and St. Louis railway station in North Redwood, Minnesota. When he received a shipment of watches - unwanted by the Redwood Falls jeweler--- Sears purchased them himself, sold the watches at a profit and ordered more for resale.
In 1886 Sears began the R.W. Sears Watch Company in Minneapolis which expanded into other merchandise and became one of the first mail order houses in America supplying catalogues that contained about the only view of the world many people ever saw outside their own community. Old catalogues were carried to the outhouse where they doubled as reading material and a torn page crinkled and held just right was the foundation of American hygiene.
As a child I lived for the Sears & Roebuck Christmas catalogues. The catalogue’s arrival announced the holiday season and my mother would place the new catalogue on my bed so I would see it first thing when I came home from school. You were allowed to choose three items from it for Christmas but one item had to be clothing. Bummer. I would lie across the bed propped on my elbows and slowly turn each page and marvel at the new wonders of the year. The book was a holy document and each picture was a prophecy of the coming of Santa Claus. Today’s internet pictures have no holiness or wonder. They’re just pixels. And you can’t use them for hygiene.
The Sears company was founded by a romantic who dreamed of quality goods and service but in the early 1980’s it fell into the hands of rapacious bandits that tore it’s heart out, refused to update the stores, streamlined the name to “Sears” and treated employees like outhouse catalogues.
And so I mourn the loss of my childhood and with it the loss of an icon of the American economy. Closing Sears makes me sad and I want to grab an old beat up guitar, sit on the front porch while wearing dark sun glasses and strum some old blues chords and sing:
“I wanted to buy some things today.
So I went down to Sears with my pay.
But the door was locked, a sign was in my way. I heard it on the evening news.
She’s now lost to me and to you.
And that’s why I got these Sears closed-up-and-shutdown blues.”
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