My father’s “office” for his store in the 1950s and 1960s was a little room, not much more than an alcove, with a small table, a chair and a “filing system” that was actually a pair of cigar boxes.
No big ledgers. No cabinets. Not even a notebook.
I don’t remember them specifically. But they probably were from Harvester, El Producto, White Owl, Phillies or Dutch Masters, the big sellers in our cigar case out in the store.
One box was for income, and the other was for outgo.
Was he just parsimonious?
No, I don’t think so. Lots of people once used cigar boxes (hard to find today) for all sorts of storage purposes. They were durable and easy to leaf through when you needed some vital piece of paper. Shut the lid and nobody else suspected was in there.
Actually, the cigar box was just one popular storage container of times past, when it wasn’t considered necessary to go out to “Giganto Office Supply World” to buy some device marketed as specially designed to hold insurance information or whatever.
In an era when a garment suddenly found to be missing a button was to be repaired rather than hung up and forgotten, where did the new buttons come from? Hint, it wasn’t Woolworth’s.
No, it was a one-time fruitcake or cookie tin into which every button a family ever found had been deposited, for use in the future. Out comes the needle and thread and – presto – the garment is again fit to be worn to school or work or church or whatever.
A culture’s values are generally found less in massive tomes by scholars than by the little daily actions and devices the people consider vital. Very likely our older folks were just better than ourselves at figuring out how to store stuff.
The coffee can was another “must have” for the mid-century American household. Once it held aromatic Maxwell House or Chase & Sanborn. But now, rows of the old cans stood on dad’s work bench down cellar, holding every kind of screw, nail and clamp known since mankind began trying to stick two pieces of wood or metal together.
I was a teenager when I finally noticed that people in the movies drank water, milk or beer out of glasses that had obviously never held jelly and did not have Fred Flintstone’s picture on them.
The economizing possibilities back then were endless. If junior needed a place to store his marbles, hand him a just-emptied cylindrical oatmeal container. Want to pack away winter clothing when April arrives? A few corrugated cardboard boxes from the nearest grocery store with a handful of mothballs thrown in would be ideal.
Hey, here’s one re-allocation that was lots of fun. Save your brown paper bags – at least the ones way too small to hold the leaves that mom and dad had raked up – and you have the tool for a great joke.
Take a small bag, blow it up full of air until it seems ready to burst, then sneak up behind someone and slam it sharply against the palm of your other hand. BANG!
Yes, I’ll bet I wasn’t alone in getting a kick out of a shouted curse word and the waving of arms in panic, thus proving that environmentally conscious container reuse could also be fun.
Here’s my best advice for would-be business people. No store or chain in recent memory that went bankrupt used cigar boxes rather than computers.
Think about that!
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