Sears also sold a cut-rate version of Converse All Stars called Jeepers. They didn’t fool anyone, even if they did have something called “action-traction soles.”
We were suckers for these copywriter coinages. Certs with Retsyn (“It’s two mints in one!”). SSP Racers with “the howl of power from sonic sound!”
Still, so powerful was Sears’s hold on American mothers that the company, at the dawn of the ’70s, was the largest retailer in the world, a title it claimed for half a century. In 1924, the company founded a 50,000-watt radio station in Chicago, WLS, whose call letters stood for “World’s Largest Store.” In 1970, Sears began to build a headquarters suitable to its place in the firmament: the Sears Tower in Chicago was to be the tallest building on earth, an edifice honoring all the Spyder 500s and Winner shoes it was then selling to frugal moms, which was just about all of them, as far as I knew.
The lives of American children were full of these name-brand knockoffs. We got the Old Dutch Twin Pack of “Rip-L” potato chips in a cardboard box instead of stackable Pringles, which were vacuum-packed into something like a tennis ball can and made the same satisfying whoosh when you opened it.
Mom, not entirely oblivious to the social status at stake with every shoe purchase, didn’t buy The Winner but something slightly less objectionable: Jox by Thom McAn. These looked enough like the Onitsuka Tigers I coveted but were just dissimilar enough to avoid legal action. Target—“Tar-zhay,” as Dad called it—carried another brand, with two stripes, when all any of us ever wanted were the three-striped Adidas or the Onitsuka Tigers or the blindingly white Nike Cortezes.
Tennis shoes had nothing to do with tennis. There were only two kinds of shoes for Catholic grade-schoolers: tennis shoes (sometimes called “gym shoes”) and good shoes (sometimes called “church shoes”). Tennis shoes were what our cousins in Cincinnati called “sneakers,” one of many exotic words they had for everyday objects: Our “pop” they called “soda.” Our “suckers” they called “lollipops.” Our “burnouts,” “freaks,” or “dirtballs”—the phrases applied to any kids who smoked—they called “wubs.”
We played Duck, Duck, Gray Duck; they played Duck, Duck, Goose. What we called “ketchup” they called—hilariously and inexplicably—“catsup.”
Tennis shoes were the primary way to distinguish ourselves at Catholic school, where there was a uniform but no real uniformity. To the outsider—to a public-school kid at Hillcrest Elementary—we all looked the same in our navy-blue pants and light blue shirts. But on the inside, on our exercise yard of a playground (bordered by a twenty-foot noise-barrier wall that protected us from the cars speeding by on I-35W, and also protected the cars from us) our uniforms encoded all manner of social signifiers.
Long-sleeve or short-sleeve shirt? Button-down or not? Oxford cloth or polyester? Some shirts had a small loop of fabric sewn between the shoulder blades that was (and remains) of mysterious utility. It was barely noticeable, really, until it one day became known as a Fag Tag or a Fruit Loop, after which nobody wanted one. Which was fine, since they were usually torn off at recess during games of Smear the Queer.
According to Nativity legend, Sister Mariella had once hung Jay Campbell on a hook in the broom closet of the fifth-grade classroom and left him there in the dark for over an hour, dangling from his Fruit Loop.
Nobody doubted the veracity of this story. Sister Mariella was the only nun at Nativity still teaching in the full-penguin habit. Her face, squeezed by her wimple, gave her the look—and the disposition—of a woman perpetually caught between elevator doors.
For reasons known only to her, Sister Mariella kept a ceramic mug on her desk in which she hoarded a small collection of walnuts and acorns as well as paper clips and rubber bands. She called this receptacle her “nut cup,” and she appeared not to notice the stifled laughter and ten-year-old embarrassment whenever she announced, as she frequently had cause to, “Mr. Matthews, please place your Juicy Fruit in my nut cup this instant.”
If Ned Zupke failed to stow his galoshes in the cloakroom, where they belonged, she would say, “Has someone forgotten his rubbers?”
She called rubber bands “rubber binders.”
When Sister Mariella wrote on the blackboard with her back turned to the class, the more brazen among us would attempt to shoot spitballs into her nut cup. This was done by removing the little blue plug from one end of a BIC Cristal pen and removing the little blue cap from the other end. Pushing the ink stem out turned the BIC’s empty barrel into a cannon. A corner of notebook paper, steeped in saliva and rolled into an angry pellet, was loaded into the BIC and—with a sharp intake of breath—blown like a poison dart toward the nut cup. If that dart missed its target, it would land—with a moist splat—on Sister Mariella’s desk. It was not uncommon for her to return from the blackboard to find a dozen or more of these spitballs, adhered to—and hardening on—her weathered work surface.
Anyone caught red-handed might hang in the broom closet from his Fruit Loop, as far as we knew, or be exiled to the cloakroom to stare for half an hour at Ned Zupke’s soiled rubbers. But nobody ever got caught. Of the thirty suspects in class, all thirty were packing BIC Cristals. Indeed, for the entirety of the 1970s, every child in the school—every child in every school—had a BIC Cristal with a pointed blue cap poised on his or her lips. This is hardly an exaggeration. By the end of the decade, BIC was selling three million of these pens every day, and the name of the pen’s inventor—Marcel Bich—was literally on the tips of all our tongues.
Bich was born in Turin in 1914 but emigrated to Paris at an early age. By the time he was making pen and pencil cases in a leaky shed in suburban Clichy, he had become a French national. This was after World War II, at the same time Al Fritz began working on the floor of the Schwinn factory in Chicago. The two men, an ocean apart, were already conceiving a ’70s American childhood long before any of us American children were actually conceived.