The Catalogs

When I was growing up in rural Wyoming, we did not have a mall or any large department stores. The closest mall was in Idaho Falls, Idaho, more than an hour away.

In Star Valley, we had a store called Gepharts in Afton that sold clothing. Each year during the week after the county fair in August, we would go school shopping at Gepharts. Sometime around 1978 or 1979, Gepharts closed and went out of business. Roberts Market, the grocery store next door, eventually expanded into the space.

There was also a small Montgomery Ward catalog store in Afton. You could go inside, look through the catalogs, place an order, and then return a few weeks later to pick it up after it arrived. For some reason, Dad always called Montgomery Ward "Monkey Ward." I have no idea why, but he said it often enough that the name stuck with me. Even today, when I think about Montgomery Ward, I think of Monkey Ward.

All of that meant department store catalogs were a bigger part of our lives than they probably are for most people today.

Mom and Dad received the big Sears and JCPenney catalogs in the mail. New catalogs generally came in the spring and fall, along with special Christmas catalogs. Mom would also pick up the Montgomery Ward catalog from the store in Afton.

These were not the little advertising catalogs that occasionally show up in the mail today. They were enormous books, probably two inches thick, with hundreds and sometimes well over a thousand pages. They were roughly the size of a sheet of paper and heavy enough that, as a boy, I could not comfortably hold one in my lap. I either lay on the floor with the catalog open in front of me or sat at the table with the catalog spread out on the table.

The pages were filled with color pictures of almost anything you could imagine buying. There were sections for women's, men's, and children's clothing, along with household goods, appliances, toys, tools, lawnmowers, and all kinds of other things. It was basically an entire department store contained in one enormous book.

One of my favorite things to do was look through those catalogs.

When a new catalog arrived, it usually stayed in the kitchen or living room for the first few days. Whoever had been looking at it would leave it somewhere, and someone else would eventually pick it up and start looking through it. After the newness wore off a little, Mom would put it in the magazine rack in the living room with the other catalogs and magazines.

I especially liked looking through the boys' clothing section. Mom taught us that if we found something we liked, we could fold over the page so she would know. We folded the page diagonally so that the  corner point stuck up above the top of the catalog like a little tab. After several of us had been through a catalog, there could be quite a few pages sticking up from the top.

The Christmas catalogs were even better.

We did not have a television when I was growing up, so we did not see commercials advertising all the newest toys. The Christmas catalogs were how I discovered what cool new toys even existed. I would spend hours going through the toy section, folding down pages, and returning again and again to look at the things I thought were especially cool. The catalog became a kind of Christmas wish list.

Looking at the pictures was only part of the fun. Each item pictured on the page had a small letter beside it. Somewhere else on the page, you would find the matching letter, almost like looking something up in an index. There, you could learn the toy's name and read a short paragraph describing what it did and the options available. I spent plenty of time reading those descriptions and imagining what it would be like to actually have the toy.

Most of those things were not necessarily items I expected Mom and Dad to buy. There were always far more things in the catalog that looked interesting than we could ever own. But that was part of the fun. I could sit in our house in Star Valley and look through pages and pages of things I had never seen before and sometimes did not even know existed.

If we decided to buy something, Mom would usually fill out the order form and mail it along with a check. Mom and Dad did not have a credit card when I was young, so we paid for things with cash or checks. With Montgomery Ward, Mom could also take the order directly to the catalog store in Afton.

Then we waited.

We had no idea exactly when an order would arrive. There were no emails or text messages telling us that our package had shipped, where it was, or what day it would be delivered. One day, it would simply show up.

If a package was too large for our mailbox, the mail carrier would leave a little note that said, "Please call for a package." Then we had to drive the three miles into town to the post office to pick it up.

I remember Mom or Dad sometimes sending me into the post office while they waited in the car. Most of the time, I did not have to tell the people working there anything because they knew our family personally and knew why I had come in. If it were someone I did not know, I would say, "Package for Carolyn Jasperson, please."

Those catalogs had another practical use in our house. When we were little, they sometimes became booster seats. If one of us was not quite tall enough sitting on a stool, high chair, or chair at the kitchen table, a thick department store catalog underneath us could add another couple of inches. I remember sitting on a stool with a catalog so I was tall enough to comfortably reach the table.

I do not remember any particular clothes, toys, or other things that we actually bought from those catalogs. What I remember is the catalogs themselves. I remember their size and weight, lying on the floor, turning through page after page, the folded corners sticking out of the top, reading the descriptions of toys, and discovering things I did not even know existed.

Mostly, I remember how much fun it was just to look and wish.