![]() I started taking iPhone pictures and pointing the red truck out to my daughter. Maxx - a store I prefer to avoid, but I needed to buy socks - and was greeted with a red tide of Christmas pickups on hand towels, pajamas, planters, wreaths, microfleece blankets, shower curtains. The truck is painted Coke-label red and has a quaint curved hood, sometimes a chrome grille. ![]() Once you’ve noticed the vintage red pickup, you will see it absolutely everywhere. That was my first encounter with the mysterious vintage red pickup truck that has spread like a virus all over modern manufacturing, appearing on literally millions of seasonal winter goods made around the globe, from China to Columbus, Ohio. On the front was a snowy scene featuring a vintage red pickup truck emerging from evergreen woods with a fluffy Christmas tree in the back. There would be a gadget to help a lonesome senior scratch his own back, a birdfeeder that fit into your window so you could fill it with seed from inside the house, and wall calendars illustrated with images - nosegays of violets, deer grazing amidst fall foliage, cheerful snowmen - that harked back to the era of Loretta Young and Doris Day: The aesthetic of the decorative items was frozen sometime between 1940 to 1955, and that was what piqued my interest.Įvery now and then I still sneak a look at the Walter Drake catalog, and it is from Walter Drake that, about six years ago, I bought a set of customized holiday cards bearing warmest wishes from the Rattray Family. Because of this demographic, its wares seemed to come from a distant time. ![]() Walter Drake sold - then, and still sells - inexpensive decorative housewares, easy-on-off slippers, garden whirligigs, stationery sets, and unusual utilitarian doodads targeted toward a “senior” customer aged 70 and above. I would examine it carefully when left alone in the house after school, which was basically every day in autumn, as the days grew short. Back in the days when we shopped for Christmas presents from a stack of mail-order catalogs that started arriving at Box E, East Hampton, in October and grew taller and taller on my parents’ bedside table as December approached, in addition to the Sears-Roebuck Wish Book (heavy as three bricks) that gave us kids endless hours of pleasant dreaming, I secretly took a somewhat perverse interest in an old-person’s catalog from a company called Walter Drake.
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