Sears Roebuck and Co. and the Stony Brook U. Sch. Of Med.: A Reminisce

"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, August, 2018)

Sears Roebuck & Co. letterhead, 1907. (Sorry. Could not find an image of one of the catalog covers.)
(Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: Sears, Roebuck & Co.)   Details   Source   DMCA

Note to the reader: As regular readers of mine know, for OpEdNews.com I write a (most)-weekly column on politics, from a left-wing perspective. For the past eight years, I have focused most closely on Trump and what I call the "Republo-Fascist Party." In fact, I recently published on Kindle (thank you, Kindle[!]) a six-volume collection of the 219(!) columns that I wrote on Trump alone between 2015 and the first three months of 2021.

But I had an experience the other day that had nothing to do with politics, but had to do with a company that one might call "The-Amazon-of-Another-Era," Sears Roebuck and Company, and the academic institution where I spent the bulk of my professional life, the Stony Brook University School of Medicine (now named the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University). And so, taking a break from the currently intensifying horror of U.S. politics --- ranging from Trump-on-Trial-while-running-for-President[!], to Govs. Abbott and DeSantis, to the Bobbsey-Twins in Congress, Reps. Taylor-Greene and Boebert [who have had such an unfortunate falling-out]) --- I am going to share with you some thoughts about what both Sears Roebuck and the RSMSBU have meant in my life. Of course, the impact of the latter was much greater than that of the former, but they are inter-linked in certain ways, as well shall see.

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I arrived at what was then called the Stony Brook University School of Medicine, before the medical school actually opened for its first entering class, as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Medicine in June, 1971. (Over the years, among others, the name changed, first to the Department of Preventive and Community Medicine and eventually to its current identity as the Department of Family, Population & Preventive Medicine. I was with the Department until Jan. 4, 2014, when I retired as Professor Emeritus of Preventive Medicine and Public Health.) And so where, you might ask, does Sears-Roebuck fit into all of this?

Beginnings

When I arrived at the University medical school in June, 1971, the Stony Brook area was still in the early phases of the growth that had been foreordained when the University was established there in the mid-1960s. Large parts of the University were built, and being built, on land that had been donated New York State by Ward Melville, a co-founder of the Thom McCan shoe company, who a) owned a very significant amount of property in the Stony Brook area and b) was a close friend of the then Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller. And as the area was growing on the academic side, as more students and faculty came it, it was also growing on the commercial side.

When I arrived at Stony Brook in April, the first major collection of retail stores was just two years old. Before what came to be known as the "Smith Haven Mall" was opened, to get to a major concertation of retail enterprises one had to drive 15 miles west, to Huntington, NY. But it wasn't this development that held special meaning for me. It was that the "anchor store" for the Mall, and a very large one at that, was a Sears Roebucks. And as a child I had known "Sears Roebuck" very well. Not through a store, but through their catalog. Sears Roebuck, did have stores, all across the country (and I would come across one some years later, in Boston, MA, when I was a student at the Harvard Medical School, 1958-62). But what I knew of Sears, when I was a pre-teen after World War II, was the catalog.

As it happened, I was primarily a city-boy, growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in New York City. But my parents had divorced just after the end of the War and my Dad, returning from his military service (which concluded with a stint in the Office of Strategic Services [OSS], not parachuting behind enemy lines, but driving in to an office in Washington, DC from Arlington, VA every day), married the lady who wold be my stop-Mom, and with her moved to a pleasant village in Dutchess County, N.Y., Pawling. I visited them on a regular basis. And one of the features of those visits was the regular appearance of the new issue of the "Sears Roebuck" catalog.

In the first half of the 20th century Sears had developed department stores all over the country. But what was unique about it was the catalog. They did have at least one competitor --- the Montgomery Ward catalog. But it never reached as far into, particularly rural America, as the Sears catalog did. Indeed, Sears could be considered to be the Amazon of its day. And they sold certain items that Amazon does not (at least yet). Such as a car, that you could order from the catalog, and have delivered to your front door. It was the Crosley. (Sort of like Carvana, et al, today.)

One could buy a Crosley from the company directly, but as noted one could also buy it from the Sears catalog (at least when I was perusing it on a regular basis in the post-War era). In case you're wondering, the Mr. Crosley for whom the car was his namesake, was also for some time the owner of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team (which was, during the McCarthy Era, re-named the "Redlegs"), which played in --- you guessed it --- Crosley Field.) You could also buy a pre-fab house, in a variety of designs, from the Sears catalog. And of course, they also sold clothing, entertainment items, farm goods, appliances from small to large, and etc. Among others, they had their own brands, such as Kenmore (which brand, as it happens, is still sold at Lowe's).

On to Boston

My Dad and step-Mom left Pawling in the late 40s and moved back to the village of my Dad's birth, Goshen, N.Y. Sometime around that time, they stopped getting the Sears catalog, and I lost my connection to Sears. But not for too long. For in 1958, I went to medical school at Harvard, in Boston. As it happened, there was a major Sears department store not too far away, opposite the famous park, the Boston Fens. I would shop at that store on occasion. And there was also an occasion on which I made a visit to the famous Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, which was just down the street from that Sears.

On a warm June afternoon in 1960, I decided to go to Fenway Park to see the greatest Boston Red Sox player ever, Ted Williams, play in what had already been announced as his last season. As it happened, the Red Sox were playing the Chicago White Sox. One of the other greats of the game, the long-forgotten Early Wynn, was pitching for the White Sox. (Wynn got to a number of wins that very few other pitchers have ever reached, 299. [Only 24 reached 300 wins or more.] But unfortunately for him, he never could notch the magical 300th.)

Wynn was pitching very well that day, and Ted could do nothing against him. But when Ted came up in the 8th inning (and yes, I really do remember this), Early was out of the game. The Red Sox were down 5 to 3. They had two men on base. The crowd was imploring Ted to hit one. And --- I still get goose-bumps as I tell this story --- he did: a classic Ted Williams homer into the right-field bleachers. The crowd went wild (as did I). The Red Sox went on to win the game.

I have been fortunate enough to have seen some other live some magical moments in sports, such as when the great point guard for the New York Knickerbockers basketball team, Walt "Clyde" Frazier, became the only man in the history of the National Basketball Association to score four points in one second. How did he do that, you might ask? Well, he scored a basket with his team on offense. And then when the other team in-bounded the ball, Clyde intercepted that in-bounds pass in the air, shot it towards the basket and hit the bucket, without his foot having touched the floor. The clock did not move. So on paper, Clyde scored four points in one second. Also, in basketball, I saw, live, the great Julius Erving (THE Dr. J. --- I have adopted as my moniker "the other Dr. J."), 6'7", of the Long Island Nets, score a basket over the 7'2" center, Artis Gilmore, of the Kentucky Colonels to win a championship game, in the old American Basketball Association.

But still, for me that Ted Williams homer, at the end of his career, was the greatest single play I have seen, live. And I should also say, for me Ted was the greatest hitter who ever played the game. Well, what about Ty Cobb or Barry Bonds (forgetting about the steroids)? Ted had a .344 career batting average (to Cobb's .366), 521 home runs (to Bonds' 762). But, and it's a big BUT, Ted achieved what he did while in his prime spending six years in military service, primarily as a fighter pilot[!], in World War II and the Korean War. He was also the last batter to hit .400 for a season (.406 in 1941). Nobody has ever come close, and nobody ever will. One more Ted Williams story. The great umpire of the Ted Williams era, Bill Klem, was once asked how he called balls and strikes on Ted. "If Ted doesn't swing," Bill said, "it's a ball."

Coming back to Sears and coming down to the present with it, at my 60th Harvard Medical School reunion in 2022, one of the events for our class was held at that old Sears building across the street from the Fens. Now an office/meeting-rooms building it held a special thrill for me, because along several walls of several wide corridors, there were display cases of various items that Sears sold, in their stores and through their catalogs, that I recognized.

And back to Stony Brook

And then, finally, an event that took place on the Monday, June 19th, 2023, of the week in which I published this column (on the 23rd). The Sears (the Roebuck having been dropped in a corporate takeover in 2004) at the Smith Haven Mall, having been closed in the spring of 2020, the building was taken over by Stony Brook Medicine for the provision of a wide variety of ambulatory services. As it happened, on Monday, June 19. I had a routine, six-monthly check-up visit with my Stony Brook internist, whose office had been moved from the former location of many Stony Brook Medicine ambulatory services on Belle Meade Rd., Stony Brook, to the old "Sears Building."

And wouldn't you know it, there was something that I found significant attached to that date (that is, June 19): it was the first day that my wonderful physician was seeing patients in her new location. I have always liked firsts, and have been fortunate enough throughout my professional career to have had more than a few of them. This one happened to be a truly minor event. Just a date on a calendar. But still, it was a first. And so, as the great New York Yankees sports-broadcaster from the mid-20th century, Mel Allen, would have said, "How about that?"