Thursday, June 9, 2011

...Reminiscing with my Grandson

My very first job??? Well, that would probably be helping my father, your great granddad...yep, the one cryogenically frozen with the fishing pole, Great Grandpa Don, with his sample book. What's that? Well, I'm going to tell you if you'll just put that hoverboard down.

Great Grandpa Don worked for the Ameritech Yellow Pages. Ameritech, like "America" where we are now. Fine, silly, you can call it East China if you like, but then it was called America. So, back then there were big yellow books. I told you about paper books...right, each page was separate. Uh huh...from trees, right. So there were big yellow books that had advertisements for local businesses. Yep and you would look them up by service. So, Book store, Travel Agent, TV Repair...and then there would be ads for each of those. Yep, those were real things.

When Great Grandpa Don would go to businesses to sell them advertising, he would pull out the sample book and it would be full of stickers marking the 5, 10, 25 and 50 year anniversaries for advertisers. These stickers were shaped like award ribbons and it must have made them look very exciting to potential advertisers. What was my job? I'm getting to it. I thought you'd like a little context. No? Cut to the chase, well aren't you darling. Come over here and sit down. No, sit. Sit down and listen to me. No, you can't have any candy, because it's illegal. Yes it is because of the high fructose corn syrup which I used to eat by the gallon. Oh yes I did. Yes, I did, it was in everything. Yep, and I'm still alive. Now sit down.

So my job...no I'm not going to tell you more about the candy. No, I'm telling the Sample Book story. A lot of kinds, but really it was in everything. It was in ketchup. It was in peanuts. Yes it was, Planters Peanuts. I mean it. Ok, now the Sample Book..

And there he goes.... into the kitchen.

Well, I'll tell myself. Hello self. Hello, Grandma Molly. When I was a kid, I would put stickers in a book. Match the stickers in my Dad's sample book to someone else's. Hundreds and hundreds of pages and I went through each one. Kinda liked doing it, yeah, it was fun to have a job and I got paid $10. $10 was kind of a rip off? Yeah, Grandma Molly, even then, it kinda was.

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