I’m dreaming of a Wishbook Christmas
BURTON W. COLE, EDITOR
By Burton W. Cole
My favorite book when I was a kid wasn’t “Treasure Island,” “Black Beauty,” “Huckleberry Finn” or any of the other volumes regarded as children’s classics.
The pages I pored over the most were in the Sears Christmas Wishbook.
The JCPenney Christmas Book and the Montgomery Ward Christmas Book were classics as well.
As I recall, the Wishbook came in the mail in October. This was long before the days of Google and Amazon.
We didn’t scroll through screens. We drooled over real, live paper pages in actual thick magazines that the mail lady jammed into our mailbox.
We knew that somewhere past the dress shirts, pajamas and socks (Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots, yes, but PLEASE, no more stupid socks!) were dozens of pages filled with the most wonderful selection of toys.
We boys studied the Wishbook in a way we never did our social studies or history textbooks. Not only would we circle the items we most wanted Mom and Dad to notice, we took detailed notes with names, descriptions, options and page numbers.
We knew better than to include the prices on the list. That would be the only column Mom and Dad would see, and our dreams immediately would be dashed: “They want $4.99 for THAT? They must be crazy. You boys must be crazy if you think I’m spending $4.99 on a hunk of plastic that’ll snap apart if you sneeze in its direction. Do you know how many times I can fill the car’s gas tank on $4.99?”
Back in those days, $4.99 bought a LOT of gasoline.
Last week, as I perused online deals for Cyber Monday, I wished I could hold those old-fashioned Wishbooks again. I’d heard that sometimes, if you close your eyes tightly enough and say it enough times, wishes can come true...
Then it happened. An actual mailman delivered a package from my buddy Tom. Inside, I found a book titled “Boys’ Toys of the fifties and Sixties.” Edited by Thomas W. Holland, it’s pages from the Sears Christmas Wishbooks from 1950 through 1969.
I don’t know what happened the rest of the day because I was busy flipping through the pages and the years.
Did you know that in 1952, you could order a chemistry set with “real uranium ore” and “radioactive screen.”
That’s right, back in the old days, we kids were encouraged to play with danger.
One of the pages showed a basic woodburning set for $1.82 or the 52-piece giant edition for $6.98. I remember when I received a woodburning kit for Christmas. This is a pen that, when you plug it in, becomes so hot that it scorches wood. You were supposed to burn pictures into chucks of wood, but you could also give yourself unintended tattoos or burn down the house. Toys back then were awesome!
The 1969 pages featured Incredible Edibles for $7.79 (bake your gummies). But back then, I remember being fixated on G.I. Joe’s sea sled ($5.99, plus two packs of D batteries for 36 cents each), or his lunar module for $9.49.
Both were deemed way too expensive. I was lucky that I already had a G.I. Joe. The Wishbook advertised them for $2.32 in 1964. The frogman outfit was $3.99 and the sea rescue outfit, including inflatable raft, cost $2.59.
In 1965, a kid could get the complete James Bond adventure set for $9.99. It came with 10 3.25-inch figures from all four of the Bond films, plus things like M’s office, Dr. No’s lab and Goldfinger’s laser machine.
Please return me to those thrilling days of yesteryear when I could whine for a Lone Ranger cap gun with mask and holster, or—folks, it wasn’t just a goofy thing invented for a movie — a Daisy Red Ryder 1,000 BB repeater rifle with 2X scope for $6.95 in 1950.
And no, as far as I know, no one ever put someone’s eye out with a BB gun. A cousin pinged me in the back with a cork gun once (naturally, I tattled to his mom, but she took the cork gun away instead of giving it to me to pop him back), but we lost no eyes.
What we lost was our youth, which I visited again in these marvelous pages of the Sears Christmas Wishbooks.
Dream with the geezer at burton.w.cole@gmail.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.