Oh dear. The NY Times has an article that Sears is about to disappear for the second time. I suppose Montgomery Wards also disappeared years ago and with the two of them there go the dreams of my childhood. How my sister and I would wait for the postman’s car to drive up the dirt road for the new catalog to arrive. It was generally winter when we would peer down the road hoping to catch a glimpse of his rather beatup car. eagerly awaiting his arrival. The road would have been freshly plowed with the snow still pristine lined up on either side. By the end of the day it would have taken on a yellow tinge, sort of as if the dog had peed on it. We were the last house on the road and the mailman would drive up, dropping off his catalogs and a smattering of letters and ads, opening the window of his car and plopping the mail into our mailbox, a metal cylinder with a red flag at one side that would be raised when there was something to collect. It might go the other way around too, and when we had to send a letter, we would leave the necessary postage together with the letter to be picked up.
On school days of course the mail would already have been delivered when we got home in the afternoon. If it had snowed hard, there might not even have been school. The mailman always came, bringing what our parents had ordered from Sears or Montgomery Ward. a new sweater, or Kelly green cloth cloth to sew into a new dress on my mother’s pedal sewing machine. Or it might be long johns, flannel with a split down the back. We would sometimes wear them at night since it did get cold and we didn’t have much in the way of heat except for a small small petroleum stove where if you forgot to fill them up, the wick was likely to burn and coat the whole room with a layer of soot. There was also a pot-bellied wood stove in one of the rooms which we stuffed with wood before going to bed so we could watch the flames flickering for a while as we hunkered down with a hot-water bottle. Mornings we sometimes couldn’t see out the windows at all when they were frosted in lacy designs .
What we eagerly waited for though were the mail-order catalogs. We would spend hours perusing the new catalogs, wishing we could buy that frothy blue taffeta evening dress, although we would have no place to wear it. It was a dream world. Aside from being a place to wander through at our leisure, sitting on the floor in the kitchen floor where the coal stove kept us warm, the rare times we went to the neighboring town to eat in the Chinese restaurant, we also discovered a more practical use. My sister was still too small to reach the table, and would be propped up on a Sears catalog to bring her high enough. Come to think of it, might have been a telephone directory for I doubt the Chinese had a Sears catalog available for that purpose.
As girls, the farm equipment, John Deere tractors or hay rakes, never interested us much.
We could spend hours though poring over this catalog or that living in a fantasy world of pretty clothing. I’m not sure why we had both Montgomery Ward and Sears. Seems to me now that the former firm lasted longer. And then of course we couldn’t wait to open the packages when they finally arrived!
As a new catalog replaced the old, we would always have plenty of material for our doll clothes and could paper their houses anew. That was something though we did outside on the porch in the summer.
Now in 2026 I do a little research and discover that an enterprising gentleman named Aaron Montgomery Ward had founded the first mail-order business in the 1800s and was challenged in 1896 by Sears Roebuck. When I was a child these retail stores were part of our lives. Even now Sears brings to mind blue jeans, long underwear, and red and black checked flannel lumberjack shirts. Both retail stores even sold refrigerators and bedding. Seems you could buy anything and everything from Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, which became household names. While our town also had its department stores with dresses you could try on and nylon or rayon stockings (I’m not sure what they were in 1908 or 1910) and lipsticks, which I later had to buy on the sly since my father didn’t approve. When I got to junior college it turned out to be a battle between my father, the biology professor, and the history professor, who didn’t like to see all those pale faces in her class as she taught us about Europe and Cavour.
So Montgomery Ward and Sears now belongs to the past. How many things have given way to others and probably Wal-Mart and Home Depot will also be part of the memories of our grandchildren.
Erika Bizzarri 