Today, meet Montgomery Ward. The University of Houston's
College of Engineering presents this series about the
machines that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
Aaron Montgomery Ward, unlike Sears
and Roebuck, was only one person. He was born in New
Jersey in 1844 and moved to Michigan as a boy. He went to
school up to the age of fourteen, then apprenticed to
learn barrel-stave-making. He also worked as a laborer
and as a shoemaker. When he finally found work as a store
clerk, he became the store's manager only three years
later.
In 1872, he and a partner began selling merchandise by
mail order. The first catalog of the new
Montgomery Ward & Company was a one-page list
of 162 items. Three years later the company coined the
phrase, "Satisfaction or your money back." Eleven years
later the catalog had grown to 240 pages with ten
thousand items.
In 1886, Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck created a
competing mail-order company, but it wouldn't be a
serious challenger until the twentieth century. Ward's
made mail order into a primary shopping source for our
spread-out rural country. It didn't open a retail store
until 1926, thirteen years after Mr. Ward had died.
After WW-II, in an urbanized America, the company began
its long slow trek toward extinction. Ward's merged with
other companies, and, in 1985, it discontinued its
catalog. As a pure retail outlet, it faded and finally
went bankrupt in December of 2000.
But I hold in my hand an 1895 Montgomery Ward catalog,
and it is a glorious thing -- over six hundred pages --
tens of thousands of items, each illustrated by a
woodcut. Six kinds of bicycle-bells range in price
from thirty cents to a dollar-ten. A cello costs twelve dollars, and a
piano, two hundred. A
buggy harness goes
for four dollars, and a buggy for sixty. (Ward was, by
then, manufacturing his own buggies.)
We have to be powerfully struck by the infusion of
amenities, functional and frivolous, into our mostly
rural America. Treadle sewing machines, iron
beds and bathtubs, thousands of book
titles, chairs and commodes. We find millinery, watches, and
pages of jewelry. A solid-gold eighteen-karat
wedding band costs
five dollars.
Last year's catalog may've been sent off to serve the
privy out in back. But each new cheap-paper emporium was
an engine of transformation in my parents' world, and it
was still working its magic when I was young. The big
department stores would come later, and, as they did, an
American epoch ended. Ward's tried to resurrect its
catalog in 1991. But, of course, it was too late.
So we sift this magical book: Madam Foy's improved
corset, Windsor wood and
coal stoves, a
Waltham railway watch or
a Seth Thomas clock,
Colt six-shooters and
Blanchard butter
molds, a toy iron
cannon for twenty cents, or a Noah's ark filled with animals.
Monkey Wards, as we all called it, was never meant
to be a store. It was a cornucopia of dreams reaching
into remote corners of a raw land. Ward's picked up where
itinerant peddlers had left off. And a primal piece of
America ended with those old catalogs.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where
we're interested in the way inventive minds work.
(Theme music)
