Today's LDR column:
Straight From The Hart
Joan Rowden Hart
element. It was time for school to start and I was always so excited.
It had nothing to do with new clothes. I remember the first time I
became aware that some kids bought new clothes for the beginning of
school. I was in the Joe Knight drugstore with some of my friends
where we were having a coke after registering for school at the junior
high.
Some other girls came in and were showing off all their new clothes
and shoes. I remember thinking that was rather shallow since it had
nothing to do with my perception of the first day of school.
So it wasn’t about clothes. It was about school supplies, especially
notebooks and paper.
I enjoy Marie Brown’s “Stoutland Tidbits” column which appears in the
Wednesday paper along with mine each week. I don’t know her, but
sometimes I think we must have been twins separated at birth – we seem
to have so much in common!
Last week she wrote about her excitement of getting ready to go back
to school as a teacher and how it was all about “getting the stuff”,
gathering up the pencils and paper,etc. For me, too, getting ready
for the start of school as a student was always about the paper and
other supplies.
Back in those days, there were no printed lists available showing what
the teachers expected us to have. There were no Wal-Mart employees
moving everything in the store around to accommodate stacks and racks
and boxes filled with school supplies, and frustrated parents and
demanding children arguing back and forth about what was needed vs.
what was wanted.
But there was a little variety store on Commercial Street just west of
Medley Drug which mailed out a folded flyer showing 4 pages of what
they had to offer in the way of school supplies and I eagerly
anticipated receiving this flyer from year to year.
I’ve had a little difficulty coming up with the name of this store.
In later years it was O’Neils’s Variety but sometime before that it
was Osborn’s, and I haven’t been able to determine just when the
transition took place so I’m not sure where the flyer came from.
I pretty much wore that flyer to shreds just looking at it and
drooling over the tablets and notebooks and packages of clean white
lined paper (I always thought the narrow lined paper was so pretty)
and pencils, erasers, rulers, and the brownish bottles of “mucilage”
with the rubbery top which you pressed against the paper to make the
glue come out.
There were the little white jars of paste that smelled so good and had
a tiny spatula so you could spread it to keep papers stuck together.
And the lunch pail with the vacuum bottle that was held inside by a
metal clamp tucked in with a can of Vienna sausages and saltine
crackers. Vienna sausages were always a good bet because they
wouldn’t spoil by noon. I’ve often wondered how long it would have
taken them to actually “spoil”, if ever, and how could you tell? (I
never ate another Vienna sausage once I got out of school, but I
still love fried hot dogs with mustard on white bread, which was an
alternative lunch item once in a while, although I prefer a hot dog
bun now.)
And occasionally for a treat the chocolate cupcakes with the chocolate
icing and the white icing lined across the top, and the glob of
marshmallowy stuff in the middle. They were so good then, just don’t
taste nearly as good today to my grown-up palate.
But it always came back to the paper in every form, loose-leaf, Big
Chief tablets, little lined notebooks spiral bound, and those pretty
stacks of about five multi-colored pastel notesheets all bound into
one little 3x5 notepad.
I’ve always loved writing paper. It is a form of security blanket for
me. If you stepped into my office today you would find notebooks of
every size and shape stashed all over the office. Some are beginning
to yellow with age because I don’t use them To use them would mean I
might run out of paper sometime and for me that would be disastrous.
When my grandmother worked at Rice-Stix, the office girls there would
throw away perfectly good printed forms which they no longer needed
and I would beg for them to take home. They had the added bonus of
carbon sheets inserted to make several copies and I thought that was
the neatest stuff ever. I didn’t realize you could actually go to the
store and buy packages of carbon paper.
I never used any of the Rice-Stix paper because I wanted to keep it.
I left it in an upstairs closet when I got married and moved out and I
have no idea what ever became of it. I have a feeling my Grandmother
Nellie Dame threw it out before I was back from the honeymoon!
Today I have the privilege of a large home office completely separate
from the rest of the house and stocked better than Staples and Office
Depot put together. I never dreamed I would ever be so lucky. Filing
cabinets and desks and office equipment galore, paper and notebooks
and telephones and more. And now that I am retired I pretty much live
in my office, just enjoying every minute of it.
But I still get nostalgic when late summer comes around and I see all
the school supplies everywhere. I don’t need any of them so I have to
discipline myself to just stay away from the stores where they are
sold because when it comes to paper and pencils and ball point pens, I
have no defense against the temptation.
©Joan Rowden Hart 2014
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