Catalogs

Sears and Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, J C Penney, Spiegel: in order of preference, those catalogs were our school clothing source in the mid 1900s.

Our home town (Perham, MN) was small, 1800 population.  It had one clothing store which catered mostly to adults.  The annual catalog order was an established tradition long before I came along, the last of 8 kids.  It never even occurred to me that we could have driven to a larger town like Detroit Lakes to shop for clothing.  Even if it had occurred to me, I knew darn well that asking Dad to drive the extra 20 minutes would get the same reaction as asking to be excused from milking the cows for a week.

I once had a sweater like the one on the bottom, 4th from right. 

Was I cool or what?

Getting the new catalogs each year was a big deal.  We'd spend hours paging through them, selecting just the right stuff.  When I got a little older I became attracted to the pages showing women's lingerie, bras in particular.  Fancy that!

Thanks to Sears, I thought breasts were perfectly cone-shaped,

 like those flimsy little dispenser Dixie cups.

 However, I wasn't disappointed to find out otherwise

when first I fondled the real deal.

Mom thought jeans were bad for you, said they inhibited circulation, was a great fan of bib overalls.  Dad always wore coveralls and now I wonder: was it by choice or in deference to Mom?  Most of the boys at our 2-room country grade school wore jeans, so we were oddballs.  Being oddballs in grade school is, to say the least, not a good thing.  After several years of heavy lobbying we finally got Mom to agree to jeans.  The day we first wore them to school we were ecstatic.  Oddballs no more!

We waited with great anticipation for the catalog orders to arrive, and when they finally did, we ripped into those packages like a starving man rips into his first decent meal in several weeks.  Ah, the smell of new clothes!  The finest perfume ever!  We immediately tried everything on, even the denims, which were stiff as a board.  No pre-wash back then.

Catalogs had other uses, of course.  I don't know if toilet paper was hard to come by in the 50s or was viewed as a frivolous, needless expense.  Regardless, many outhouses were stocked with catalogs instead of TP.  The ripped-out pages didn't do the job very well, though.  Corncobs, another item commonly found in outhouses back in the day, worked better - although, depending on the cob, you often came away with a classic case of chaff-butt.