Knowing What's Important

There used to be two kinds of people in these parts—those who shopped at Sears and those who employed people who shopped at Sears. My family belonged to the first group. Sears is a dead store walking these days, that is, if you can find one still open; the last one in Illinois closed after business hours yesterday. When Sears mattered, the company operated in excess of 3,000 outlets. My parents were both the children of immigrants, and they were raised to believe it was a sin to waste money. (And it is, yes?) Because Sears offered value, my parents shopped there for the items that helped a blue-collar family feel middle class. It didn’t hurt that Sears also offered a discount to Chicago firefighters like my father. Sears employed a sizeable workforce to staff those 3,000 stores and offered a generous pension plan, if only to keep the unions away. (Yes, in many ways Sears was what Amazon is, except for the generosity shown workers.) As an adult, I never thought to work for Sears or buy my clothes there, but appliances? Where else would you go? Julius Rosenwald was the creative genius behind the company. He captured material dreams to put in the Sears Catalog; what couldn’t be bought out of this paycheck would wait patiently on page 523 for the next. Rosenwald also pioneered the freestanding Sears store. I have memories of going to the first one ever opened, part of a vast network of Sears-owned buildings on west Arthington in Chicago. This was far from our house on the South Side, but my parents would drive anywhere for a good bargain. Rosenwald was also a philanthropist whose support made possible the Museum of Science and Industry; ironically, there’d be no U-505 without Julius Rosenwald. Or those nearly 5,000 “Rosenwald schools” built in the early decades of the 20th century Whatever education African Americans got in the Jim Crow South was in large part made possible by schools that Rosenwald helped finance through a matching-grant system. For Southern states, this no doubt felt like a win-win, having a Northerner—and a Jew, no less—defray the cost of educating Black children. For those children, it was a win-win. For Rosenwald, it was more a matter of duty. If only Jeff Bezos understood. Yesterday, Sunday, the Tribune did a frontpage story on the closing of that last local Sears’ store. It consisted mostly of comments from passersby and reminiscences of the reporter; there was nothing on Sears as an economic engine or on Rosenwald the philanthropist. The Sun-Times didn’t even bother, unless the story was so small I missed it entirely. But the Trib’s sports section was a real revelation, nearly four full pages devoted to the 2001 Bears. That’s right, a 13-3 Bears’ team that did absolutely nothing in the playoffs and reverted to mediocrity (4-12) the next season. Such is the power of the Munsters of the Midway. They can get the news media to confuse the important with the ephemeral. We get what we deserve, I guess.