Terms of Credit

Yesterday Mary said that it was strange that she did not know what it was like when I was growing up. And we had a bit of a discussion about scars. Since Bill was there the discussion veered over to his experience with ant wars when he was a kid. He and I wrestled with the little bit of time we had to see who got to define how it was when they were growing up. His observations, more important to him than mine. And, vise versa. So, our pasts remain obscured to Mary, whom we raised, and we still have no clue as to how it was when she was growing up.

Last night I was talking to Nita about the new appliances they have just bought for their new easier to maintain home. She and Don have been married 52 years. One year longer than Bill and I. She said, "Do you remember when we started out. It was just after the war, and people were still trying to make up after the years of doing without new cars and appliances. Eisenhower had instituted the something or another policy that stated that in order to buy an appliance or car on time, a family had to have half the money to put down"

"Oh," I said. "That does sound familiar, sort of." We never bought anything on time when we started out. One week we bought a mattress and they lent us the frame, because we promised to come back the next week and buy a bed. The week after we bought the bed, we bought a pair of night stands. The next week a dresser. Never anything on time.

There were no credit cards then. As far as I know the credit card came into being along about 1962. We were living in Fullerton at the time. I belonged to the Home Demonstration Club, a group associated with the California Department of Agriculture. Mary was a tiny baby and Sandy was four. I hired a woman from a babysitting agency to come and stay with them when I went to the meeting once a month. You can bet Sandy didn’t like that.

The purpose of the group was to keep the members up to date on matters of domestic science. Since Fullerton was an urban area, the focus wasn’t so much on preventing botulism in the canning of beans as it was in matters of feeding kids balanced diets. Most of the women who belonged to the group were wives of Instructors from the Junior College much inclined to wearing matching sweater sets and Highland plaid walking shorts. They were informed and always up in arms about something - like the fact that the County Fair featured elephant rides for children. Elephants were not such domesticated animals that they were beyond startling at some disturbance. County Fairs are rife with sudden loud noises. The elephants were likely to step on children with disastrous results.

When Bank of America came up with the idea of a credit card, it caused quite a stir with the Fullerton Home Demonstration Club. And, rightly so. Over gingerbread and coffee we went over the pamphlet someone had gotten from the Bank. There were two problems here: One was that the unwary that would sign up for a credit card would be sucked down into an endless cycle of debt. The other was that everything anyone bought, credit card or cash, would reflect a two percent increase in price to cover the cost of the banks handling the credit card transactions. We, of course, were never going to fall into the ranks of the unwary but we would still have to pay.

It was, in fact, not until 1972, when we lived in Ellicott City, that we gave in and signed up for a card card. I can’t think what brought on that lapse. I think perhaps that Bill needed it in order to rent cars when he was on a company trip. I do recall that very soon after we got the credit card we were hounded by a very obnoxious bill collector who insisted that we had bought a set of tires in Vicksburg, West Virginia where we had never been.