Matching Heirloom One

Every child is born into a new family. The family that I was born into had no other children. I was gonna turn out to be either an only child or a big brother.

I was born into a house on Parsells Avenue which my parents had bought from my grandparents who moved to Holcomb. Our house on Parsells had an upstairs a downstairs an attic and a basement. For some reason, I was afraid of the attic but loved the cellar. The cellar even had a coal bin within which I enjoyed playing and making a mess.

My father had a workroom which fascinated me in its organization but never interested me as much as his bookshelves. I opened every book on that shelf and over the years I have read many of them including Walden, In Dubious Battle, Arrowsmith, Tom Sawyer, Animal Farm and many others. My favorite was Pinocchio which had awesome pictures.

None of those original books have made it into my library although Pinocchio came close.

I do have one heirloom from that library and it is a curious one. The survivor is a catalogue and price list for the Match Corporation of America out of Chicago published in 1949. It is one of my most prized possessions.

I had to be at least four years old the first time that I saw it. It didn't look like other books. The cover was embossed leather, black red and white. Whenever I opened it for the first time, I immediately became obsessed. The book was filled with sample match packs of different quality, style and expense. Every match pack was xesigned to catch the eye of a potential customer as well as to feature certain specific lines of business.

According to the text on pager 10.

Colors have great advertising value. Skillfully employed, they are a powerful stimulus. The right color treatment can make a picture of a fireplace look hotte.....a summer lake or an iced drink cooler.

The stimulus  and color treatments started working on me. My father was a fireman so from my earliest days, I had a respect for fire and would never play with matches. Perhaps I subsituted that taboo with a passion for looking at matchbook covers rather than lighting matches.

I'm figuring that the late forties and early fifties were the golden days of matchbook advertising, an advertising angle that was based upon good will and let's face it; smoking.

Watch movies from this era. Everybody is smoking. Watch the seductive method in which femme fatales accept a light from their victims; the touch of the fingertips to steady the match, the look into the eyes. and then the blow.Yeah, ya know.

So everybody liked to carry matches around just in case somebody wanted to strike up a conversation with that suggestive question, "Hey there, gotta match."

Book matches were an excellent way for businesspeople to give their customers and prospects an item that will be in continual use because it serves a daily necessity.

"Book matches are always on the job rendering essential service every hour of the day and night. As they serve, they repeat your advertising message constantly, insistently but inoffensively. Book matches are never refused when offered and are rarely if ever thrown away until the last match in the book has done its job."

Today, I took the book off the shelf once again. I remembered even more secrets about the book and its influence on my life

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