Before the Internet, there were Sears, Roebuck and Monkey Ward catalogs

It's too soon to say how much of this year's Christmas shopping depended on the Internet. But I'll go way out on a limb here and take a guess: a lot. And the dollars spent on Internet retail continues to grow and grow and grow.

Disclaimer: If there are any small, susceptible, innocent children nearby, please ask them to go outside and play for a while. Do kids still go outside and play? OK. Ask them to take their favorite electronic device to the basement and see if the wifi is working.

The reason for such a precaution is simple. I am about to write a few paragraphs about The World Before Electricity. This means telling unsuspecting youngsters that there once was a time before connectivity. This is something best left for parents to deal with. Sit down with your trusting child and explain the facts. There was a time, dear delicate one, that all we had were Monkey Ward and Sears, Roebuck catalogs.

Really.

Monkey Ward was what we called the Chicago-based retail giant Montgomery Ward. I don't know why. We just did. And another Chicago-based retail giant was Sears, Roebuck and Co. Both were in what we call the mail-order business. "Mail-order" is exactly what it sounds like. You mailed your order to Monkey Ward or Sears, and they shipped whatever you ordered to you. Just like that.

Both mail-order retailers published big, thick catalogs. Monkey Ward's big catalog, issued annually, was called the Wish Book. Sears also published a catalog with hundreds of pages, and it also published a special slimmed-down catalog filled with Christmas gift items. This was the Holiday Wish Book. I can't imagine how many hours were spent leafing through these catalogs, wishing for this and wishing for that.

Wishing was great, because it didn't cost anything. A few weeks after the arrival of the catalogs there would be dog-eared pages throughout -- you know, pages with the corners turned down so you could quickly find your favorite items.

When I was growing up, "mail-order" meant just that. You mailed your order, and the items you ordered were mailed back to you. This meant trying to guess when the order might arrive, because if it was too large to fit into our mailbox, our mailman, Gene Grassham, would leave a note that the package could be picked up at the post office, which meant a nine-mile trip to town, which meant we would probably have to wait until Saturday when we would be going to town anyway.

Unless the order was live chicks.

Remember those? Yes, you could order newly hatched chicks to replenish the chicken coop. Meeting the mailman on the designated day for chick-shipping was serious business. The chicks had to be taken home and put in a box heated by a light bulb until they were big enough to transfer to the hen house.

You could buy just about anything from Sears and Monkey Ward: sewing machines, underwear, automobile, jeans, entire house kits, Sunday school shirts.

While most of our orders came by way of Mr. Grassham's rural-route mail delivery, a few special items were shipped by rail freight to the local depot. I particularly remember when we got electricity and could upgrade from a wood stove to a gas stove complete with a thermostat and blower. We went to the depot to pick it up. Two delivery occasions are burned into my memory. One was the arrival of the gas stove, from Sears, and the other was the arrival of my little brother, from Doctor's Hospital in Poplar Bluff. I still can't tell you exactly which was more exciting.

Buying clothes for a growing family was tricky business. Your mail order, of course, would specify sizes, but not current sizes. You had to allow for shipping time and future growth spurts. So your mother would have to estimate what your size would be in a couple of weeks and in a few months. In order to get the most value from clothing purchases, the new apparel had to last a while.

This meant new blue jeans were worn with the cuffs turned up, maybe several times. It was time to order new jeans when you could see you socks with the cuffs turned all the way down.

Which reminds me of a family at the one-room school I attended. Remember, everyone was poor. My family was poor, and so was every other family. But we didn't know it -- at least we kids had no idea of poverty. But this one family of four boys rarely had new clothes to wear. They wore what many of us wore: hand-me-downs. The oldest brother was in the Army off in Korea, and some of his pay was sent regularly to his family back in the Ozark hills over yonder. So the next oldest son occasionally got "new" jeans or pants from the thrift store. His name was Ivan, and he was a strong as an ox. Everyone at school called him Bull. When Ivan outgrew the pants, they went to the next oldest son, Robert. By then their mother had patched the knees in the pants several times, and everyone at school called him Patches. When Robert grew too big for the pants, they went to the youngest brother, Kenneth. By then the pants were beyond patching, so the mother would cut them off just above the knee, and everyone at school called him Shorts, which is what he wore year-around.

I don't know if Bull or Patches or Shorts ever wore a pair of new blue jeans from Monkey Ward or Sears, Roebuck. But I can say with certainty that they drooled over many of the same pages of the Wish Book as I did. Looking at the catalogs was our connection to the world. It was our video game. It was our radio and TV combined. Every BB air rifle and Erector set pictured on the catalog pages became real to us.

Montgomery Ward published its first catalog in 1872. Sears followed in 1888. Monkey Ward closed its mail-order operations in 1985. Sears shut down its mail-order division in 1993. I quickly found those dates on the Internet. Even though it only took a minute, it took longer to look up that bit of information than it does to place an order on the Internet.

I am one of those former catalog shoppers who scrolls through hundreds of online images to find what I want. I can tell you, gentle readers, that I no longer drool. But just remembering those days sitting at the kitchen table leafing through a Monkey Ward or Sears catalog makes me smile.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.