Childhood and Product Symbols

"‘Sometimes,’ he sighed, ‘I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.’" (Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha)

I borrowed that from a blog I was reading, because I was happy recently to have something verified from childhood. This nondescript warehouse once stood at the corner of Sixth and Main Streets in my hometown, Vandalia, IL, just south of the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks. My hometown is small, with Sixth Street the western edge of the main commercial buildings downtown, and Gallatin St. rather than Main is the primary thoroughfare. When my parents and I went downtown, we often took Sixth Street. I remember being a tiny child when I saw the cursive C of Coca-Cola on the north side of this warehouse, but the billboard covered the rest of that soda’s name. For some reason that fascinated me; something old had become hidden by something new.

I had always wondered if the memory was correct. Then a good friend posted some 1960s and 1970s snapshots of our hometown on the “Vandalia Memories” page of Facebook. One was the warehouse, and when I zoomed in on the picture, I could see the faint C to the side of the billboard.

I feel a little guilty by how enduring to my thoughts of home are product symbols. Trademark symbols for Pet Milk and Ked’s shoes, Buster Browns and Hush Puppies, Kiwi shoe polish, Gold Medal flour, Sherwin-Williams paint (“Cover the Earth”), Firestone tires, the Standard Oil Company’s flaming torch, Shell Oil’s shell, the Socony-Vacuum Pegasus, Zenith with its lightning bolt Z, General Electric's fancy, cursive “GE”---all these symbols stir recollections of going to downtown Vandalia, holding tightly to my parents’ hands, not having a care in the world.

Even beer ads--–this would have horrified my non-drinking parents--–caught my juvenile attention. One purchased the brands, after all, in “package stores”–--there were an abundance of package stores and saloons following the late-Thirties oil boom in the county--–and “package” was a sweet-sounding word, a word we used at Christmas. Beer signs hung from the old facades and flashed in dark tavern windows. I liked the ads for Falstaff best. They looked like the six-pointed U.S. highway shields that I also liked, except the Falstaff shields were misshapen, as if left on a hot car seat on a summer’s day. I also liked the Miller High Life signs, with their muted colors of red, green and gold, like an old gift in an old home.

Perhaps it is not merely the triumph of marketing which makes me remember such things, but also the fact that one’s childhood memories are a complex of rich associations both banal and sublime. The sight of anything–a business marquee, an architectural relic, a highway sign–--triggers a litany of memories that have collapsed into a common experience of being at home, being in place.