01-Aug-2008
Maybe it’s all just about permanence.
The recent purchase of Anheuser-Busch Brewing Company of St. Louis by the Belgium firm (run by Brazilians) InBev got me thinking about this business of brands and brand names.
St. Louis, as might be expected, was in as much of a dither over the prospects of this purchase as Chicago was when Macy’s bought Marshall Field’s. It seems odd that any municipality can tie itself in so closely to a private company, but it does happen. I remember in my own case how shocked I was when the DeKalb Agricultural Association (you’ve seen their flying ear of corn logo) was bought out by Monsanto. DeKalb, in northern Illinois, is my home town.
I tend to think that the real heart of the dismay is not so much loss as it is permanence. Communities survive these losses, but life is short and we like to think that a few things will be with us from beginning to end.
When I was a kid I had a friend from a family who was very poor. The mother stayed home with the four kids and the father drove a truck and delivered coal to homes. Each year, though, near the end of summer, several large packages would arrive in the mail and it seemed like it was always on a day when I was over at their house playing. The packages, opened with great excitement, were school clothes for the coming year, and they were from the Sears, Roebuck catalog. That catalog for decades was read as zealously in millions of households in America as any dog-eared copy of the Bible.
It also seemed as permanent, until it wasn’t.
Those clothes could as easily, of course, have come from Montgomery Ward which also published a huge catalog with an array of goods similar to that of Sears, but those stores were icons of my youth – pillars of granite in the world of business.
Really, while it didn’t seem unusual to see new businesses pop up from time to time (in my high school years the new kid on the block was McDonald’s), the idea that certain of those entities might someday disappear was simply inconceivable.
Of course there are “big” disappearances and “small” or local ones. How about Milk Consumers (to whom I owe my strong bones) or Hey Bros. Ice Cream? Gene’s Produce and The Glass & Key Shop? I owe numerous moments of courtship to the DeKalb-Ogle Telephone Company which eventually became General Telephone which eventually became Verizon. Losing Henderson’s Department Store wasn’t as big a shock as seeing it become my town’s city hall. Not only is Jon & Jen’s Restaurant gone, but so are Jon and Jen, taking with them the recipe for an absolutely marvelous Italian hamburger.
Of the “big” disappearances there have been many, all of them shocking: Standard Oil which became Amoco (odd enough) which became BP (odder still); then Pan American Airways, Trans-World Airlines (TWA), and Eastern Airlines. Antioch College biting the dust? Poof, just like that. Woolworth’s taught me how to be a consumer. It teaches no more but the lessons were learned. Kresge’s taught me, too, but then they became K-Mart and then a part of Sears, which itself is barely a pimple above flatline.
Land’s End, long an independent icon of quality (and the employer of one of Cold Iron’s loyal readers), found itself folded into the Sears/K-Mart brand and now faces the prospect of being unfolded into who-knows-what. Eddie Bauer has disappeared from my radar, but if I hear that L. L. Bean is on the market then I’ll know the prospects are good for Maine becoming once again a part of Massachusetts.
My intellect was sharpened by the Saturday Review and entertained by the Saturday Evening Post. When it needed images there were always Life and Look magazines. They not only populated my mind; they also taught me how to be a photographer. The first car I learned to drive was a Studebaker, which my parents eventually traded in for a Hudson. Though I’ve never been much of a sports nut, I had a fondness for the Minneapolis Lakers, the Milwaukee Braves, and the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Perhaps, rather than lament the loss of these iconic markers in our lives, it’s better to use them for what they are – signposts, perhaps beacons that light our way down memory lane, and not some bit of changelessness that must always disappoint.
Or maybe I’m just saying all of that because the goddamn Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field are about to be sold.
G. K. Wuori © 2008
Photoillustration by the author
