Teachers back in my school days must have taken into account the fact that most families in our little town couldn’t afford new encyclopedias very often.
We had a set of maroon-colored encyclopedias in a bookcase in the living room all the years I was growing up. My brother and I used the books for homework and school research papers.
My dad flipped through the pages of the 15-volume set of encyclopedias for information on chemistry and other things related to his work in the bleach plant at the paper mill.
He looked up things about botany and horticulture that might help him grow bigger and better tomatoes in his back yard garden. He read up on aquatics and meteorology to help him catch more bream and white perch at the mill ponds.
Mostly, though, he and my uncle used the encyclopedias to help settle their continual arguments about wars, politics, sports, movies and nearly everything else.
I got the encyclopedias out several times a week when school was going on to help with homework projects in history, geography, science, civics and other subjects.
They were especially valuable when our English teachers, Mrs. Stone and Mrs. Branch, assigned us a bunch of themes on a variety of topics for the whole school year.
The teachers obviously collaborated on a plan for students to do writing and research. They gave us a hundred or so titles for essays that had to be turned in by the end of school.
Most of the information for those papers came from our well-worn set of encyclopedias. If we had to write about the invention of automobiles or airplanes, the continents, famous writers or scientists, we went to the encyclopedias.
Teachers apparently overlooked it if some of our information was outdated, because they knew our encyclopedias were outdated. But book companies were always trying to sell my folks new ones.
There were men in suits and ties and shiny cars in our neighborhood all the time selling insurance, vacuum cleaners, pots and pans, house siding, magazine subscriptions and encyclopedias.
I liked the look and smell of the new encyclopedias that the salesmen said were available for small monthly payments. Our encyclopedias were some off-brand, but these sales people had fancy volumes like World Book and Britannica.
We never got any new encyclopedias, but my dad did sign up for a single volume every year that was supposed to be an update to older encyclopedias.
My parents liked to read, so there were always plenty of reading materials around. They got two daily newspapers and a local weekly. They read them cover to cover, and I concentrated on the sports and comic pages.
Magazines came in the mail nearly every day. We all found things we liked in Reader’s Digest, Life, Look, Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post with the great Norman Rockwell illustrations on the covers.
My dad got popular magazines for men like Argosy, True and some of those detective and crime publications. They were off limits to my brother and me, but we managed to read them anyway.
There were never any fancy fashion magazines for women at our house, because my mother was not into the ritzy things featured in those publications. If she wore jewelry, it was the gawdy plastic stuff my brother and I got her for birthdays and Christmases.
She did get magazines like Good Housekeeping, mostly for the recipes. That surprised me since she rarely used a recipe when she cooked.
A boy on a bicycle delivered the Grit newspaper to the house, and my folks bought subscriptions to other magazines from us and other kids who sold them for school projects.
I sold my dad a subscription to Mad Magazine, but he canceled it after the first issue. That offbeat publication died last month.
My parents belonged to some book clubs that were popular then and got books for all of us year-round.
Most of our important reading, though, was in those tattered encyclopedias. They didn’t have a fraction of the information that we get now on the internet, but the books smelled and felt good, and it was always exciting to discover what was on the next page.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES