Six Weeks from Everywhere

I grew up in the little town of Keene, Texas. I watched this water tower being built and for several years operated a day care center with the tower practically in my backyard. I grew up in Keene during the late 50s and finished college there in 1976. I got a special medallion with my graduation cap to celebrate my class being bicentennial graduates.

A lot of my peers like to get on Facebook and wail about how their childhoods in Keene were so terrible. Most of them do it because they are fighting feelings of guilt for leaving the Adventist Church. They didn't want the inconvenience of Sabbath observance or to have their worldly lifestyles cramped. It's pretty much a typical teenage rebellion and it starts when hormones start running wild and kids want to do things their parents would prefer that they wait before doing.

Keene is (or was) a Seventh-day Adventist town. It's grown and because it's such a nice little town, a lot of non-Adventists have moved into town and set up shop. Adventists are fundamentalist Bible Christian church. My great great grandfather, Elder Horatio B. French signed the church charter and helped establish the original Keene Industrial Academy that became the heart of the town. Elder French baptized better than half the newly minted Texas Adventists of the early 20th century. He was the traveling/baptizing pastor serving churches that didn't have a pastor yet. My family's history is deeply embedded in the town's history. The first hospital/sanitarium in Johnson County was in what became my grandparents' cow pasture. The roadbed of the Old Betsy Railway cut off a corner of their property next to the stock tank. I went to school from first grade to a BA degree right there in town. My great grandfather taught in the original Keene Public School. I did my student teaching in the elementary church school. My great grandfather's students became my teachers. 

The town stood on the highest spot in Johnson County which isn't saying much. Tornadoes for some reason (something to do with angels) avoid the town. For years we had no police department. When we finally did there were only two officers, Jake Howard, our neighbor, and my stepdad Ralph DeLaune who stuck lights on the family Rambler and patrolled on weekends. Mom turned us out on summer mornings, we ran loose in the town and surrounding woods, and we came home when the sun went down, often with a jar full of fireflies to light out way. There were no streetlights in town in those days and the streets themselves were all gravel with grader ditches. 

The secret to having a happy childhood in Keene back in my day, I am convinced, was to not care about being one of the popular kids. If you didn't care about them, they had no power over you. Me, I had no chance to join that august assemblage. I was a nerd, skinny with thick glasses and most of the time had white tape across the broken bridge of my specs.  Teachers set all the honor roll students on the front rows. We acted as a human shield for the teacher, protecting her from the barbarians at the back of the room. In my public school days, most of my class of 35-40 kids in 2 grades were either too poor for church school or had been kicked out or were the few isolated Baptists in the public school district. Meaner than second skimmings some of them. They liked to knock me around for their collective amusement.

Early in my life I discovered two important things.  One, you can get a job throwing papers when you are in 6th grade like I did. The route was five miles long, up hill and down, rain, snow, sleet or hail. I made $5 a week which I collected on Sunday (that's when Adventists and agnostics were all home in Keene). The Cleburne Times-Review didn't publish a Saturday edition. That's so they could take off on Sunday. It worked out perfectly for me because I couldn't throw papers on Saturday. All the businesses in town at that time closed up from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday and Seventh-day Adventists don't do business on Saturday. Not even delivering papers. So the local newspaper business had a kind of symbiotic relationship with their Adventist neighbors.

The second important thing I discovered was the miracle of mail order. I picked up the newspapers I delivered on the loading dock at the post office where we had a PO Box for years. As my reading for pleasure expanded, I discovered the classified ads in the back of Boy's Life and various comic books and such. For a few dollars I could get all sorts of things through the mail - flying airplanes, toy soldiers, catapults, and a subscription to the science fiction book club. I built a sci-fi library to rival the Carnegie Library's in Cleburne.  I pedaled my bike to on weekends, dodging big toothy farm dogs and climbing hilly gravel roads all 10 miles there and back.

Back in those days, we were apparently more tolerant of delay. Virtually everything I ordered from the back of Popular Mechanics, Popular Science and other such magazines, carried a warning label.  

PLEASE ALLOW SIX WEEKS FOR DELIVERY.

When you are 12 years old, six weeks is an eternity. I'm not sure whether it was because they had no robots to pull stuff from the warehouses, or because they just weren't in all that much of a hurry. One thing it did was teach me patience. As a kid with galloping ADD, patience was a skill I very much needed.

Anyway, though Keene seemed to be six weeks from everywhere in the world, I became addicted to buying stuff by mail. I took up slot cars and found a whole company that sold slot cars, track, tires, motors, frames, decals and everything you could imagine. I learned how to buy a money order, fill out an order blank and send off for stuff. I bought model rockets, models of things the local five and dime didn't stock. The mail-orders arrived through the pokey old post office kept me supplied with bits and bobs to support the 47 hobbies I practiced in my bedroom workshop. 

As an adult, Sears, Montgomery Wards, and various mail order houses scratched my itch to send myself gifts in the mail. As a grownup, I still liked getting those packages in the mail.

AND THEN CAME AMAZON!  What a wonderful idea. I was already a fanatic reader and they started out with books, sucked me in and then expanded the range of things they sell astronomically. Then I discovered eBay  and debit cards and it was off to the races. I have Amazon Prime and no car, so there is always a steady stream of stuff rolling up the driveway that I got shipped to me free. Walmart's even bringing me some groceries. It's Christmas every day. I even send stuff to my family straight from Amazon. It's cheaper if it qualifies for Prime shipping and it gets there faster than if I went to the post office, picked up a money order, sent my order in, waited six weeks and then reshipped it to Mom for her birthday. 

Thanks to Fedex, Amazon delivery, UPS and other competitors, even the US Post Office has gotten faster and more efficient.  

So now, I'm down to three days from everywhere on average. I get cranky if I have to wait a week. I even run a little mail order website and print the shipping on my computer. People talk about the good old days and the good old days definitely had merit. We had lots more horned toads, fireflies, and trees you could climb that weren't forbidden by insurance companies. But if I'd had three day Prime shipping and streaming video, who knows if I would have ever worked up the enthusiasm to get out of the house and become an adult.

I think I became an old man during a crucial social, political and cultural upheaval. Not a bad time to be alive. Anyway, the Schwann's guy just delivered two frozen pizzas, I've got Amazon coming this afternoon with a package of guard rails for my Carrerra Go Slot car set, and tomorrow a guy on eBay is sending me a usb fan to cool my 3 tb hard drive that has all my movies on it. And Sheila's got a bottle of vinyl floor polish that will be here Thursday, same day her prescription refill will arrive.

We've come a long way from the days of six weeks from everywhere. We've even got our five year old grandson hooked on receiving packages from Grammy and Poppy (mostly Grammy). Grammy just outfitted him with Batman outfit complete with mask and cape - all ordered from my desktop and delivered in 3 days.

I really like living "3 days from everywhere." We don't have a car. We're old and arthritic and don't get around very well. We're kind of back to where we were as kids. Thank heaven for those wonderful packages. They don't take nearly as long. And icing on the cake? My town just got an Amazon Warehouse that opened up just a couple of miles from our house. Some stuff comes the same day or the next from there. 

Is this a great country or what?

 © 2022 by Tom King