Slimy sticky S&H Green Stamps help family get by
by Paula Damon
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Thick gum bands held bunches of our
family’s S&H Green Stamp booklets together. Sometimes the booklets
would stick to one another because we bound them before excess glue oozing
from the pages had dried.
My mother stored the booklets on a lonely shelf in the broom closet of my childhood home. She kept pages of loose Green Stamps and empty booklets in a clear plastic bag plopped on top of the stacks of booklets.
S&H Green Stamps were a very popular form of cash in my growing up years, back in the 50s and 1960s. Green Stamps were part of a rewards program operated by the Sperry and Hutchinson (S&H) company, founded in 1896 by Thomas Sperry and Shelly Hutchinson.
Back then, customers received these stamps at grocery store checkout counters, department stores and even gas stations. Consumers redeemed the stamps for products from an S&H Green Stamp catalog and some at the S&H Green Stamp redemption center.
My mother commonly called us six kids into the kitchen saying, "We’re gluing Green Stamps today." She then instructed us to sit around our large dinner table while she doled out empty and half-empty stamp books and loose stamps that had been piling up from her trips to the grocery store.
Congregated around the oval table, each of us had our own pile of perforated glue-backed stamps, a moistened sponge on a saucer and a stack Green Stamp books.
We placed the stamps, occasionally entire sheets at a time, glue-side down on the sponge and got them good and wet. Then we pasted them into small rectangular collector’s books.
The more books we filled, the more household items Mother redeemed.
Over the years, with completed Green Stamp books, she purchased a new set of Mel Mac dishes, stainless steel dinnerware, a toaster, an iron and so much more from the Green Stamps store on Fluvanna Avenue in Jamestown, N.Y.
No matter how hard we tried to hide the fact that we saved Green Stamps to "purchase" necessities, we could not because, at times, our Kelly green fingertips gave it away. No amount of scrubbing would remove the discoloration the green dye caused. Only time would fade the stains of our unfashionable thriftiness.
I guess we could have worn Playtex gloves keep our skin from staining. But then we would have missed out on that gloriously awful feeling of the slimy sticky coating smeared all over our hands and palms and on up our forearms, which produced in us a deep-seated satisfaction of having done something good for our family.
My mother stored the booklets on a lonely shelf in the broom closet of my childhood home. She kept pages of loose Green Stamps and empty booklets in a clear plastic bag plopped on top of the stacks of booklets.
S&H Green Stamps were a very popular form of cash in my growing up years, back in the 50s and 1960s. Green Stamps were part of a rewards program operated by the Sperry and Hutchinson (S&H) company, founded in 1896 by Thomas Sperry and Shelly Hutchinson.
Back then, customers received these stamps at grocery store checkout counters, department stores and even gas stations. Consumers redeemed the stamps for products from an S&H Green Stamp catalog and some at the S&H Green Stamp redemption center.
My mother commonly called us six kids into the kitchen saying, "We’re gluing Green Stamps today." She then instructed us to sit around our large dinner table while she doled out empty and half-empty stamp books and loose stamps that had been piling up from her trips to the grocery store.
Congregated around the oval table, each of us had our own pile of perforated glue-backed stamps, a moistened sponge on a saucer and a stack Green Stamp books.
We placed the stamps, occasionally entire sheets at a time, glue-side down on the sponge and got them good and wet. Then we pasted them into small rectangular collector’s books.
The more books we filled, the more household items Mother redeemed.
Over the years, with completed Green Stamp books, she purchased a new set of Mel Mac dishes, stainless steel dinnerware, a toaster, an iron and so much more from the Green Stamps store on Fluvanna Avenue in Jamestown, N.Y.
No matter how hard we tried to hide the fact that we saved Green Stamps to "purchase" necessities, we could not because, at times, our Kelly green fingertips gave it away. No amount of scrubbing would remove the discoloration the green dye caused. Only time would fade the stains of our unfashionable thriftiness.
I guess we could have worn Playtex gloves keep our skin from staining. But then we would have missed out on that gloriously awful feeling of the slimy sticky coating smeared all over our hands and palms and on up our forearms, which produced in us a deep-seated satisfaction of having done something good for our family.
SOURCE: Plain Talk