Them There Good Ol’ Days

Imagine my retro shock when I saw a story from the Chicago Tribune that Sears has sold its Craftsman brand to Stanley Black & Decker. Craftsman tools were the tools that could be exchanged if they broke, or replaced if they were lost or stolen. I have a toolbox with Stanley/B&D tools like screwdrivers, and while I’m not a tool collector, I did take that news as a peculiar surprise from the past.

Don’t get me wrong.  It’s not that I’m nostalgic for the Good Old Days. But selling the Craftsman brand to Stanley opened the doors to the past.  We used to get the Sears & Roebuck farm catalog every year. You could get literally anything from Sears & Roebuck – anything – including dogs, cats, ducks, geese, chickens, turkeys, cows, sheep and horses or ponies. You could order a treadle sewing machine, fabric and patterns and sewing supplies, or just buy clothes for school. You could buy a farm tractor from Sears & Roebuck, or a stove and ice box, or a washing machine. If you did the laundry back then, you may remember the roller over the washer drum, a nasty contraption that squeezed the soap and water out of the clean clothes and trawled them into the first rinse tub, and then over to the second rinse tub. I was eight, so I wasn’t allowed to do the thing with the squeeze roller, but my smug, overbearing sister was and she got her hand caught in it. I think I told Ma I would never be that stupid. I was allowed to hang the laundry on the clothesline. That was one way I earned my allowance. Another was setting the table, doing the dishes and vacuuming and dusting. We were supposed to learn the value of work by getting paid to do chores, although I had friends at school whose parents made them do chores but didn’t pay them.

Now Sears (no longer Sears & Roebuck), the used-to-be go-to place to get everything, including canning equipment and chickens, is no longer relevant and is struggling. If Sears goes under, will that have an effect on farm people or anyone else? I don’t think so. Their employees will have to find new jobs. And you can buy canning and preserving stuff at Ace Hardware or Blaine’s Farm & Fleet. Farm folks can shop for everything at Walmart or Blaine’s Farm & Fleet, or if you really want a taste of “Them There Good Ol’ Days”, Lehman’s in Canton, Ohio, now carries Waterford Irish wood cookstoves.

Kitchen equipment used to make sense. It was for cooking. Now it feeds yuppie egos, instead. If you want one of those old stoves your grandma used, where she cooked like a banshee and made everything from scratch, there’s a place in Georgia that restores antique stoves like the Magic Chef 10000 with two ovens, a bread warmer, and a broiler, plus a storage drawer, six burners and a condiment shelf.  When I go online looking for a new stove, the negative reviews of the bells-and-whistles stoves that short circuit, start themselves up, and nearly set the house on fire raise serious red flags. I just want a stove to cook on. I have just about decided put my money into getting mine overhauled and keep it for a while. And I would almost give my eye teeth for my Grandma’s 1932 Roper with a four-burner range top on the left, and the oven on the stovetop to the side of the range, not down near the floor where you can’t clean under it or find those toys the cat threw under there.

More important in this nostalgia trip is some simple thing that we tend to overlook: what happened to my parents’ generation. My parents did not have tons of money. After World War II, my father wandered from one teaching job to another, with some of those schools closing within a few months of his starting to work there. We moved around like gypsies at times, until he finally got a job at a small university downstate, which he kept until he retired  We always had a big garden. He got baby chickens every spring from the Sears & Roebuck Farm catalog, and we raised those chicken for eggs and the dinner table. He rented freezer space at an ice company, which is where the frozen veggies from our garden went, until the chest freezers became available. There were some things you had to buy at the store, like coffee, tea, bread, sugar, flour, bacon, beef and other things used for cooking. For a while in my hometown, there was daily morning delivery of milk, butter and eggs by the local dairy, which is long gone now.

I started cooking at age 6 on the big, black gas-powered cast iron gas range in the kitchen.  I made ice box cookies, gingerbread, spice cake, chocolate cake (with cocoa powder, not baker’s chips) and I’d get one serving out of that while my sister polished off the rest of it. Those things never made it to the dinner table. We got yelled at if we didn’t clean our plates. It was that ‘children in China are starving to death’ theme, which at the time was quite true, thanks to Mao Tse-Tung’s moronic agricultural program that killed some 30 million Chinese people. But the servings my father put on the plates were too big for any 6-year-old’s stomach size, so after a while my mother started a long, long habit of filling the plates in the kitchen. That way, my father, who had no understanding of serving sizes, would not be wasting food that we couldn’t consume.

In junior high school, Home Ec classes were a requirement for girls and Shop classes were a requirement for boys.  They’re still available, but now they are elective choices. The trades now have jobs that were filled by those kids who loved to work on cars, or did woodworking and construction, or learned to run shop machinery. These people became adults who built Terex trucks for mining, or Caterpillar equipment for road construction, or found jobs working in building construction, and building roads and bridges. The skyscrapers in New York City, like the Empire State Building, and bridges like the Brooklyn Bridge, were built by people who knew construction. Many of them had left Europe to make new lives in America, and while they could not speak English very well, they understood the very detailed drafted plans for the Brooklyn Bridge, designed in the 19th century by John Roebling, a German immigrant.

None of those people looked for handouts or freebies. They looked for work.

If you want a job now that offers good pay, you don’t necessarily have to have a college degree but you do have to have skills like those roads and bridge builders and thos auto mechanics that were car-loving teenagers and are now retired or nearing it, but who have worked in every aspect of the auto industry, including racing. Now, you go to trade schools to learn those skills or get a journeyman apprenticeship in the trades. Back then, cooking was a skill that every girl learned, along with sewing. Now, sewing is an elective class aimed at kids who fancy themselves to be future designers. And cooking? If you couldn’t make simple chicken soup from scratch, without a cookbook, you weren’t trying. Now there is this bunch of people who call themselves ‘foodies’ who take cooking classes to impress people they know, a rather pretentious way of saying ‘I know how to boil water’. They could spend less money by getting recipes online or buying a basic Better Homes &Gardens cookbook   We didn’t have toys bought for us. We made our own. I can’t think of a better way to get your kids to be creative than to have them build their own kites to fly from newspapers colored with crayons or tempera paints, and some balsa wood and string.

Since there are jobs listed in the classifieds that are literally going wanting for workers, it’s not that there is no work available. Likewise, if it isn’t obvious that no job is beneath you, you haven’t been hungry or cold or trying to keep the roof over your head, nor have you had to stretch your paycheck to feed three kids. In some states, there is a requirement that if you want to get subsidies, you have to have a job and work XX hours per week or they cut you off. I saw nothing wrong with the ‘welfare to work’ idea. Bill Clinton started that program. It put a lot of people back on their feet until it was canceled by the Obama Administration. Yes, it was. Now there are people left hanging. I hope Trump reinstates that.

I can’t emphasize enough that the financial impact of the Great Depression was devastating to people everywhere. It was worse in Europe than the US, particularly in Germany, because it allowed a crackpot megalomaniac named Adolf Hitler to overthrow the legitimate German government and bring his heinous Nationalist Socialist (NAZI) part into power. WWII followed shortly after that.

However, in the USA, Roosevelt saw the need to put people to work because there was no unemployment compensation at that time, so he started the CCC, WPA and PWA programs which did put people to work. The Civilian Conservation Corps is responsible for the creation of the national parks we have today, like Yellowstone and Yosemite. My mother worked for the WPA for a year in California, and then went back to Chicago and got a private sector job. My father learned the skill of theater sets and props construction while he was in the company of chattaqua traveling tent theaters, the predecessor to movie theaters for small rural towns that didn’t have them yet. There were NO free handouts back then. You stretched every penny in the piggy bank to its limits. And those work programs had begun to close out by the time World War II hit the US of A.

Now we have an entire generation of kids who are either ready to enter the work force with undergrad and graduate degrees in things like systems engineering and mechanical engineering, or they are completely unqualified for anything at all.

By unqualified, I refer to the bunch of kids whose degrees are useless and qualify them for clearing tables at roadside diners or maybe working at McDonald’s. They should be out of Mom and Dad’s house but they can’t find those $50K/year jobs because they are unqualified for them. Anything less is beneath them. And what they expect after college is the ‘basket of safety’ they got from their parental units, who should kick their butts out and tell them ‘Find your own place to live.’ Unfortunately, the cold, cruel reality is that the ‘basket’ is gone for good when you become an adult.

And instead of looking for better jobs, they run destructive protests over a new US President that they don’t like because they think he’s ending the welfare state ASAP. He did not say that.  He siad ‘put Americans back to work.’

No, a job flipping burgers at McDonald’s is not a career position, but if it’s the only thing you can find and the pay isn’t enough to cover the cost of food and rent and utilities, then a subsidy is not out of line until you can get a better job.  You should be looking for a better job all the time. A permanent welfare state is unacceptable, period.

Take Al Lewis’s advice, best ever given: Find something that you love to do, and love what you’re doing. Everything else will follow that.

Category: Economy