Paper Sales

Some things have gone by the wayside over the years, such as manual typewriters with the throw carriage, reel to reel tape recorders, and even paper sales. Some things are moving towards extinction such as televisions with rabbit ears, VCR players, and answering machines. You will only find a wind up alarm clock in an antique store or flea market. Why even a clock with hands and numbers is not as prevalent. There was a time when all clocks had hands. I actually met someone several months ago, a grown woman in her 20s, who said she had never learned to tell time with the hands on a clock. Often folks have never heard of a slide rule as well.

Maybe some of this is good. Certainly my laptop is far easier to type on than the manual Remington's I learned to type on in 1958. At least, the keyboard is still the same, and I can type with the touch system. I can't really say I miss the paper sales though I really wonder why we spend money to run recycling trucks through the city when the old paper sales brought in money for the schools. Why if every school had a recycling center for the neighborhood, can you imagine how much that would cut the city budget for sanitation. I never minded taking my recycling to the big bins at the grocery store or to the school paper sales.

The way the paper sales worked was this. You'd save up your papers, and every so often the school would have a paper sale on a Saturday where everyone brought their newspapers, sort of like what is done for Christmas trees at various stores. The school would get the profit for the newspaper recycling. I personally liked that better than schools selling expensive gift wrap paper as some do now.

I do, however, have a funny story about the paper sales. One particular year I had a hard time getting to the paper sales. Either I would forget or I had conflicts with getting there. Needless to say, the newspapers stacked up in the garage till it was just overwhelming. I kept meaning to get to the next paper sale for sure. This went on for well over a year, maybe even two years. Finally, I couldn't take it any more. I wasn't waiting for the next school paper sale that I might miss again. One of my workmen was here doing some repairs. He had a pickup truck so I asked him to take all the papers to one of the recycling bins that were at various locations around the city.

To my chagrin, the newspapers literally filled up his pick-up truck. I could not imagine how I had accumulated so many papers in my garage. At that time I did have the newspaper delivered seven days a week, and I even read some of it. My intentions were good in saving them for the school paper sales, but I had ended up with a garage full of papers.

I guess the same thing can happen these days when the city recycling misses a few pickups, especially with them only picking up every other week. I'm all for recycling, but I fail to see how gasoline for the 1000s of recycling trucks is saving money or the natural resources. I prefer the old fashioned recycling, I mean even before paper sales, before returning soda and milk bottles, back in the day of my grandmother.

Nothing was wasted on the farm. My grandmother bought flour, meal, and sugar all in cloth bags. She used the cloth to make dresses, dish towels, table cloths,or quilts. All the food scraps either went to the dogs and cats or the pigs. Any bread bags were used to store leftovers. Leftovers were always eaten at the next meal; some times a whole meal might even be left on the counter. To this day, I don't know how no one ever got food poisoning. It was a totally different era, and I'm grateful for my experience in rural America with my grandparents back in the late 40s, 50s and 60s. As long as grandmother could stand on her feet, she always hung the laundry on the clothesline on sunny days even after she had a drier. She still made her own clothes, quilts, and bread. As long as the farm had cows, she made her own butter, cottage cheese, and buttermilk. She grew all her own vegetables in a huge garden, and we picked blackberries and grapes off the fence and gathered pecans and plums from the trees.

They say change is good. Let's think about that for a minute. Have we thrown out the baby with the bathwater? There does seem to be an increase in interest in people having their own gardens, eating more at home, walking more, and bringing their own grocery bag to the store. So why not bring back the paper sales for education and use the money we use for recycling trucks to hire more teachers. Three cheers for paper sales.