Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Polk Bros. and the Thousands and Thousands Stoops of Light



Note:  I’m reviving this seasonal post from last year on no good grounds except that it is one of my favorite pieces of my own writing.  Chalk it up to vanity, but enjoy.
I was thinking about Santa Claus the other day.  Interesting guy.  Interesting story behind how a Fourth Century Bishop from Asia Minor ended up sitting on an elaborate throne in hundreds of American shopping malls posing for pictures with frightened three year olds. But while pondering that mystery, my mind took a left turn down a dusty and forgotten road.  It does that sometimes.
My mind drifted back to dark, cold nights in Chicago in the ‘60’s.  Not to bustling State Street as it was then with the elaborate holiday windows at Marshall Field and Carson Pirie Scott and the throngs of shoppers jostling on the broad side walks as Christmas music played from loudspeakers.  No, my mind drifted to the blue collar neighborhoods—the tidy bungalow belts on the Southwest and Northwest Sides, the blocks and blocks of two and three flats jammed cheek to jowl, even to the crumbling, dangerous ghettos on the West and South Sides.
Up and down those dark streets thousands and thousands of identical illuminated plastic Santas sprang up every year in the days just after Thanksgiving on front porches and stoops, in postage stamp front yards, on balconies and fire escapes, even on garage roofs.  All casting their cheerful, smiling glow onto the soot singed snow.  On a lot of blocks almost every home had one.
From 1964 to 1968 Polk Brothers, a popular local appliance and furniture store chain, gave away the 5” 2’ tall illuminated Jolly Santas with every major purchase.  Offered as an alternative was a smiling, caroling Snowman originally intended for Jewish customers.  Many folks came back and added the Snowman in subsequent years.  In those four years more than 250,000 of the Santas alone were given away.  No wonder they were ubiquitous.
Polk Brothers was the kind of operation that advertised in the Sunday Funnies and on radio and TV.  Their stores were not in the Loop but on artery avenues of the neighborhoods themselves.  In the days before everyone had a Visa or a Master Charge card and when the snooty downtown department stores were stingy on credit for blue collar families, Polk Brothers trusted their customers to take home the merchandise and pay “on time.”  Ladies in babushkas and men in grimy work clothes would climb on busses after every pay day and count out payments of $5 or $10 to service desks at the stores.
That’s how families whose parents lived in cold water flats and boarding houses, got that refrigerator, color TV set, or the whole suite of living room furniture—sofa, love seat, end tables, coffee tables and lamps—for $199.  No wonder they loved Polk Brothers.  And Polk Brothers loved them back with all of those free Santas and Snowmen.
It made for such an utterly American Christmas—crass, commercial, to the sophisticated eye vulgar and tasteless, yet full of love and joy, and perhaps most of all hope.  The very angels could not have sung on high with greater hope and gladder tidings than those goofy stoop Santas.
Driving down those same streets almost 50 years later you can still sometimes spot a survivor glowing in the dark, his red suit faded, his white beard yellowed, perhaps cracked and even mended with tape.  I like to imagine that behind the bungalow door is an old couple who, when their children were babies first put that Santa out.  And that maybe, just maybe, he is a beacon now to draw those long grown children and their children and maybe even their children for one more Merry Christmas home.


3 comments:

  1. I have wonderful memories of Polk Bros...oh the stories I could tell. My not-so-favorite memory was smoking my first cigarette behind the Polk Bros sign on Division street with my brother Jim. Ok, even though it made me puke I guess it is a favorite memory...Thank God I never took up smoking!

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  2. Yes. Polk Brothers where I bought my first real adult bed and dresser. And Polk Brothers Foundation which continues to believe in neighborhoods and the right of communities to have a voice.

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  3. These Jolly Polk Santas were everywhere in the 60s. My brother and I made a game of counting them while riding in the family car at Christmastime. I was lucky enough to find one in good condition a few years back.

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