Today's episode of Stuff You Missed In History Class is brought to you by Tracker. Tracker is finding more than a million misplaced items each day. Order yours and never lose anything again. Listeners to this show get a free Tracker Bravo with any order. Go to the Tracker dot com and inner promo code history. The hardest thing you'll ever have to find is their website. Go to the Tracker dot com right now and in a promo code history for your free Tracker Bravo with any order. Again, that's the Tracker dot Com promo code History. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We recently were invited to appear on a broadcast of Georgia Public Broadcastings All Things Considered, and while we were on the roof of our building, which is pot City Market, doing that appear, we met through the radio staff a historian who knows a whole lot about the history of this building and the Sears company. His name is Jerry. He was gracious enough to come visit Holly in the studio and share some really fun stories about the building where our podcast is headquartered, which started out as a Sears Roebuck building. There's a lot of discussion of Sears as a company through the years, and a little bit of wish book nostalgia for some appropriate holiday nows. Yes, so we'll jump right into my discussion with Jerry Hancock about Sears and the Pont City Market building. Today. We are lucky enough to have in studio historian and history teacher Jerry Hancock. How Terry, just grand I'm so glad you're here. I'm looking forward to it. So first off, so we could kind of talk about who you are. You are a high school history teacher. Pretty cool job. So first off, thank you for being an educator. All the teachers need all of the love in my opinion. But what is that like on a day to day basis. It's um, It's one of those things, you know, so you feel like a cog in the machine. Unfortunately, that's the part of the job that I don't like. I as long as my door is closed and it's just me and my students, I'm happiest. It's the politicians and businessmen and bureaucracy that's out in the hall. That's the part that I don't really have a lot of patients for. Luckily, I'm at a school that performs academically fairly well, and so I have a lot more sort of freedom. I don't have people breathing down my back. You know, I was a Teacher of the Year a couple of years ago, and it's thank you. It's been Uh it's very rewarding job. Obviously not monetarily, but nobody goes into it for that purpose. But yeah, it's rewarding. You know. Everybody always says, well, why do you do it? And it's I say, it's the light bulb. Yeah, that's it. When when the kid gets it, when it snaps and you see that light bulb come on, There's no trophy or metal or anything that could get to you know how rewarding that is. You know, you did something, you brought something to life for this kid and they they appreciate it at that point so well, and you're shaping the future. I mean, that's like a weighty I don't think people always recognize that that's really what teachers are doing. And I and I'm very blunt with my students. I'm very honest with him. I think that's a big part of the rapport that I have with my kids is I shoot him straight. And on that note, I say, you know, you guys will be changing my diapers at some point. That's the kind of dedication we're gonna need here and that reality. You know, yeah, maybe not literally, but figuratively speaking, you are going to be taking care of my generation when we get too old and feeble. At least I hope if I do my job right, you will be there correct. And so yeah, you know, it's the old adage think globally but act locally. I just try and follow that every day when I get out of bed and say, okay, I might not fix the world's problems, but I can this little microcosm that I'm a part of. Is you know, I'm going to have some positive influence on that. And so you know, it's easy to get to work, and I have to get up at five every day. That's part. Thank you. Five am at work by six thirty. Hats off to you from that. So I have to wonder, since we talk about history all the time, what is the biggest challenge for you sort of in the education system, but also just on a one in one basis in terms of getting kids to engage with history, because it does not have a good rap with kids, No, not at all. And you know, luckily these days we don't teach names and dates anymore. It's more it's it's more conceptual learning. And so I've always sort of, you know, been a storyteller, and I always find some sort of creative way. I think the real keys relevance. You've got to make it relevant to their young mind. And do they really are about these crusty old white guys and yellow pieces of paper from the seventeen hundreds. Probably not. But if you can explain that in a way that they understand it's still very impactful in their lives today, then you got something, you know. I mean, I'm teaching the eleventh grade kids. I'm still using Schoolhouse Rock. It's timeless. You can't go wrong with Bob Doro. I mean, the guy who started it was one of Miles Days, Miles Davis's session musicians. He you know, co wrote with Miles Davis, and he was brought in at ABC some executives. Kid was having problems with his multiplication tables, and so Bob Doro coming in. He wrote three is a Magic Numbers, the first one he brought it to also immortalized by De La Soul. I can't go wrong. It's timeless. Kids still like it. I make that joke about De La Soul, but it speaks to the level of engagement that Schoolhouse Rocks had. And I mean I still can singue the verb songs. I love all of those, and they were very soulful. Like the music writing was excellent. I mean ed A James doing you know, suffering until suffrage. For me, it doesn't, which is just wonderful. Not do kids today love it or they like this animation looks weird. They wouldn't admit that they love it, but they love it. I had two students who were chorus students. They were out for some sort of trip and missed a test last week and they came in. And my son comes to work with me every morning, catches the bus at my school to go to his school, and he was in there, and every morning we have cartoons on. And he loves Schoolhouse Rock, you know, as a seven year old, and knows most of the songs. So I had Schoolhouse Rock on while I'm stored of getting my day started and these two students come in to make up their tests. So I had a seven year old and two teenagers all singing Schoolhouse Rock together in unison, and you realize you've had an impact at that point. This is so easy for people to engage. But again, I think making it relevant for kids, and you know, before the economic collapse two thousand and eight, two thousand nine, kids didn't really care about the Great Depression. But let me tell you, now that they've seen their family lose their jobs and their homes, they have a new appreciation for it and so much easier to teach now because it's so real, it's relevant, they get it, they understand why it's important, and so you know, those types of things are easy. This being an election year has been Wow. It's amazing to see it. Kids in eleventh grade be so dedicated to certain ideals. It's it does the heart good. So I'm also just going to run in my head for the next probably two weeks, a mental image of a band of a seven year old and two sixteen year olds doing a cover of InterPlaNet Janet. That's it for me. That's just where we're at. We're gonna switch gears a little and talk about something you're an expert about, which is Sear's history. That's sort of my thing, which is a fascinating thing to be focused on as a historian. How did you first become interested in that subject? UM? When I first went back to college and undergraduate, my first couple of years, I was an English major, and UM had a professor down at Georgia State, Dr John Burris and who's still there, UM, who taught a class on Georgia folk life. It was actually part of the English department, and UM, the historical element of that class just had such an impact on me, and I always joked with him that he was the reason that I switched to history. But Um, in studying English, and then excuse me, going into history, I noticed that there were so many mentions of Seers as this integral part of Southern culture. And the company was based out of Chicago, and it amazed me how Southern culture sort of absorbed sears. It became one of them. And I could not find any sort of regional studies on sears, so I started just sort of dabbling in that. After undergraduate, I went straight into the graduate program in Georgia State, and um, I was trying to come up with an idea for a master's thesis and one of my colleagues said, uh, well, you better make it something you love or you're gonna hate it. And I said, okay, well, and there was I have been a've been collecting Star Wars action figure since ninety eight and after my heart, one of my favorite action figures was the blue Snaggle Tooth that was only available in the Sears Wish book. That was the thing. And I said, well, that's it. You know, it's Sears. It's it's sort of what I like. Maybe I can just do this Sears thing because I had, you know, like I said, had been collecting nuggets through you know, the different English classes and history classes that I've been taken at Georgia State. So I just I had to go that direction, and you know it, Uh, it really blossomed. I came into this building the first time in two thousand five. Um. The interesting about interesting thing about it was is that when the City of Atlanta bought this property in the maintenance team that had worked as property years under Sears came with the building. Oh I did not know. So they had this group of guys gentleman by the name of Jim Ricketts and his crew sort of changed hands with the property and they knew every square inch of this building. And uh, one of his crew members who will remain remain remain nameless. Uh, I promised that I'd never mentioned his name because they were so concerned that, oh my god, it was Sears might take my retirement because they've got such an amazing retirement or or did back in those days through the profit sharing program. And so he took me around the building and up into the tower and all back when the city still owned it. And uh, that sort of became a big part of my intent as this package of regional study. And I ended up going to Hoffmanna, States, to Sears corporate offices up there on two different occasions, just to do research, uh, with an incredible archivist by the name of Arlene May, who is no longer with the company because in their constant downsizing and trimming, I think she she was laid off in two thousand nine. But I went. I did a trip in two thousand five and in oh seven, and basically just sort of took that as a barometer anything to do with Southern culture agriculture and found a wealth of information about the old farmers market here on the back lot, and um, you know some of the different programs that they had in place to help farmers, particularly in the South, because the South was, you know, still struggling in this sort of post reconstruction period where they're trying to economically and industrially catch up with the rest of the nation. And Sears came in at just that right moment um what was known as the Forward Atlantic Campaign the mid twenties, and uh, they had already researched the area, and UH, the third president of the company, General Robert E. Wood, he came in and understood that the automobile was central to this new face that Sears, the old mail order Sears is now turning into this new retail Sears, and he was a big part of that transition. And so I decided to focus on this building and everything that it sort of represented it and it was like peeling an onion. It just got deeper and deeper. Fun and you know, these different industrial investments that Sears made in hundreds of factories in the Southeast so that they could eliminate the transportation cost they were buying from local manufacturers and selling to local customers. They operated in what was called the territorial system. The country was divided into five territories, and each one sort of operated autonomously, so they were much more engaged with the people of the region. They served their wants, their needs, and I think giving them that autonomy really helped Sears sort of reach out to their market in the region, and I think was sort of the reason it became so beloved in the culture. I love it. And you spoke about this building and for our listeners that may not know, the building we are sitting in, which is called Pont City Market now uh is a historical building. It was at one point the the Seer's Robuck Building, and we're going to talk about that and a whole lot more about Sears history and this property's history. But first we are gonna pause and have a word from one of our sponsors. That sponsor is Carnivore Club, which is a cured meat of the month club that delivers right to your door yummy, delicious things. I can tell you from experience, you don't have to be that boring person who gives people gifts that are either last minute or like the gift you just couldn't find the right gift situation. Don't do that. Instead, you could give a gift that people are talking about. That is the gift of cured meats. Carnivore Club is the world's first subscription service dedicated to delivering premium cured eats right to your door. They are handcrafted by local artisans for a one of a kind taste experience, uniting meat lovers everywhere. I certainly loved my box. I joked with producer Nol that it was like getting a parcel of delicious pork candy because it was also yummy. So Carnival Club has both one time gift orders and long term subscriptions available. And if you go to Carnivore Club dot c o now and place your order using promo code history, you're gonna get fifteen percent off. So head to Carnivore Club dot c o to discover the latest and greatest on offer from the only club for true meat lovers. Use promo code history and get fifteen percent off. It is the best Christmas present idea you have ever gotten from a podcast. First, I have to ask you, because we always always always get asked about how we research and what our research tips are. So I'm wondering what or tips might be for people who are interested in corporate history in terms of how they can start digging into a company's past and finding all of the little yummy gym's um. I can't say that it was an easy experience, and I think a large part of that was, you know, not only the corporate aspects of of researching, but the fact that Sears is downsizing rapidly, uh some would say imploding, and so that has made it very difficult, not only in the research aspects, because as I mentioned before, they had an archivists out there at Hoffman Estates and she was the one that maintained the Sears history website. If you've ever been on there, she maintained that kept up with literally hundreds of emails a day from all over the world coming in asking questions about this corporate juggernaut. And she was such a steward of the history of the company. And I don't even know that she came from a history background, but she certainly appreciated that. And then shortly after they hired her was the acquisition between Sears and Kmart. So not only do you have one archivist for this century old company, but now she's the archivist for s R for Kmart as well, and so she's got these two corporate entities that she's trying to curate. I can't even imagine the stress of that job. But she said it's so cool. I mean, you know, she um my first trip up. She really wowed me because I sort of gave her an idea and she ran with it. And I walked into the archives and she's got you know, three roller carts full of boxes, and on top of one of them as a leather bound ledger that Richard Sears and Alva Roebuck used to keep the books in. And as the rumor has it, Richard Sears was a very fly by the seat of your pants kind of guy, and it was certainly apparent in this ledger with you know, mark works and scratches and x is on pages. It was a very chaotic way of business. H Richard Sears was He's been called barnem Esque and his salesmanship sort of the you know, the P. T. Barnum of the retail and mail order world, and he really did it was all about the wow factor. He would, you know, place an add in one of the catalogs for a pair of men's suit pants for a dollar fifty and would take in thousands of orders without even having the product on hand. And then he scrambles around Chicago looking for manufacturers to get this product made as rapidly as possible because he's got thousands of orders on standby waiting for it. That was the kind of business practices that he engaged in. One of the men that he UH started working with was the second president of the company, Julius Rosenwald, who UH was a Jewish merchant in Chicago and was dealing with one of these frantic orders that Richard Sears needed filled. And UM he actually first met with Rosenwald's cousin who invented the pneumatic tube system in factories and plants around the country, and he was trying to get Sears to use this as a way to sort of streamline UH taking in and filling their orders. And Um Rosenwald sort of came in as part investor in this thing as Alva Roebuck was sort of exiting the building, and we'll come back to him. He's got an interesting story as well. But Rosenwald came in and he was sort of the the human element of the company. He took Richard Sears sort of grandiose style and sort of tried to make it um a little more fluid and taking filling orders, but also sort of reaching out to people. This was in early twenties centas the progressive eras first starting to move and UH. Rosenwald was getting on up in years and philanthropy. Like many millionaires at the time, philanthropy became a hobby and it was through his philanthropy that I think Sears really sort of cemented its relationship, particularly with the South. Rosenwald was responsible for starting the Series Agricultural Foundation, which really did a lot of things through Atlanta specifically like the farmers Market that I mentioned earlier. But he also worked directly with book Or T Washington and Tuskegee Institute UH with not only cash donations but merchandise donations for the students at Tuskegee UH, and started working through book Or T Washington UH and establishing funding to start schools for African American children in the Southeast. And it started off as UH an initial investment on the part of Rosenwald and started four schools and within fifteen years bloomed. Almost five thousand schools in the Southeast became known as the Rosenwald schools. And you know, even though it's very hard to track that information, it was very aware of the people they were serving that this man was with Sears. And from some of the stuff that I've read, a lot of people thought it was Mr Sears because he was He's like Santa Claus at this point, Mr Sears, And so I think that Rosenwald was very conscious of this image. And when Sears, Richard Sears leaves the company UH in the nineteen teens, Rosenwald was very careful to keep that quiet. He wanted that persona. He kept his transition of power very quiet. But nonetheless he's coming to the Southeast and starting these schools, and people realize, Okay, this guy is with Sears Roebuck. I'm certain because of the nature of Jim Crow South at the time. This gives African Americans in the Southeast some degree of UH autonomy, UH, some degree of of secrecy. Now they can buy the same thing that anybody else can buy, and all they have to do is order it through this catalog. They don't have to deal with racist merchants in town and those types of things. And I genuinely believe that, Uh, Like I said, even though it's very hard to track, I'm sure African Americans in the Southeast were dedicated Sears customers through most of the twentieth century because of the contributions A part of Julius Rosenwalts I had never thought about how mail order allowed people to sidestep prejudice. That's amazing. So you've got these people, and that was the thing. You know. You hear stories of African Americans dealing with merchants in town and they're only shown the cheapest items, uh, and not no customer service to speak of. Sears has a hundred percent money by guarantee. We'll send it to you. If it doesn't work, send it back and we'll send you something else. You know. Again, it gave them some degree of privacy and what items they were buying for their families. I'm just so connected because it's a really it's an amazing connection I never once would have thought of, which almost maybe supplants the question I was going to ask next, which is what is sort of the most surprising little jim you've encountered in your Sears scholarship really just how much interest Sears had in the South. Again. The third president of the company who came in after Rosenwald, actually Rosenwald hired Robert E. Wood. Robert E. Wood was an acquisitions manager in the Panama Canal project. He was in the military, which is why they called him general And basically that was his job, was seeking out huge quantities of raw materials UH for the purposes of these large construction projects. And so it sort of made him perfect for Sears in acquiring raw materials and manufactured goods at a very budget price so that they could turn a profit. And he came in. He actually worked for Montgomery Ward originally, and the turn of the twentieth century. I think he saw the promise of the automobile and the change in the retail environment and was trying to push Ward to do more retail and Wards said, no, where a mail order company. We're going to dance with the one that brought us, and finally fired Robert Would because he would not back off of this retail thing. And as soon as Rosenwald got word of this, he immediately hired him at Sears and UH right out of the bat set up the territory system in North America with the five territories in this sort of autonomous way of doing business in each of the territories um and started this whole retail craze. Uh. He was a big proponent of what he called ample free parking. And so when Sears would open a store like the one that was started here on constantly on, they would look for an area on the edge of town that was accessible but land was still cheap, and they could have access to this ample free parking because he knew that the automobile was the way of the future and look what happened, so so so far ahead of his time, I think, and sort of understanding the direction of retail and what it was doing at that moment. Well, especially when you think about the regional model, which has been i mean perpetuated throughout all kinds of retail and sales across the country for decades since. And I'm pretty certain he was at least one of the originators of that practice it. Uh. You know, like I said earlier, I think it just gives the management within the company in those regions a little more I mean, they were very engaged in the Chamber of Commerce and Community service and these types of things in Atlanta was certainly no exception. UM. Once they came to Atlanta, obviously, you know they opened this plan. UM. The original structure was seven fifty square feet and the first thing they did for the opening ceremonies was UH Sears had just a couple of years prior, UH acquired a radio station based out of Chicago, WLS, which called Understood for World's Largest Store, and they were sort of on the brink, on the edge cutting edge of of radio technology and started going to smaller UH stations in different regions. In WSB. UH, they WLS actually leased airtime from WSB. WSB brought a transmitter to the tower in this building, and UH not only broadcast live from the tower for the opening ceremonies and the flag raising on the tower and all those things, but continued to maintain a relationship for the next few years UM in radio programming and what ultimately gave birth to country music as we know it today. It's all I mean, it's it's like gym after Jim UH. And you are also in the midst of working on a book about this property, Yes, about the building that we are literally sitting in right now, which again I mentioned the name earlier. It's Pont City Market. Will you talk a little bit about that project, because you and I talked about it a little bit, but it sounds amazing. Well once you know, I did my master's thesis through Georgia State and they still host that. Actually it's available online. UM, we will put it in the show notes. Sure, sure. UM it's uh, it's sort of academic, and it's got some places that are a little stuffy, but the second and third chapters in particular have been very popular with folks who's been thousands of downloads of it. Uh. The second chapters primarily looking at the regional business through this plant, and then the third chapter is more of an oral history element. UM. As I mentioned before, my mentor Georgia State was Cliff Keun, who was responsible for relocating the American um Oral History Association of America. UH there UH archives are at Georgia State. Now. He brought that there and it's one of the great oral historians. UH used to host a number of episodes of This Day and History on Georgia Public Broadcasting and was aware of a lot of these things, just little pieces so he was he was central in helping me sort of get these things together, making connections. UM. And so obviously the oral history part is there not only uh, interviews with with former employees, regional employees and oral histories that I collected in Chicago, but also, uh, one of the big things that I found in Chicago on my first visit was a box full of correspondence from different customers in the Southeast. And it is some of the funniest Literally sitting in the archives cackling, tears running down my face. Uh, some of the things that these people they really did. They all Richard Sears of Santa Claus. They wrote in looking for a wife. Uh. They then he wrote in one man wrote in about his child. He had ordered uh something from the patent medicine section that was apparently marketed as birth control, and ordered two tubes of it. And now he has a seven pound baby girl and he calls it his Sears Sears baby and thanks that Sears owes her at least a blanket or something. Uh, you know, just some of the funniest things. Um. And so that's in the third chapter of the thesis. But that certainly was sort of the nucleus of how this thing started to unravel. Um, the people of Jamestown when they bought the property, had found my research and just dug into it. And coincidentally, um another sort of local neighborhood cheerleader ahead of the old Fourth Ward Association, Kits Sutherland, she lives right across the street. Uh. Kit basically reached out to me and helped get me in contact with Jamestown. And this was in two thousand eleven when they bought the property and they brought me in. Uh. They had the party at Potts which was in the back parking lot with the Induego girls and Shaan Mullins. They brought me in to lead some of the tours, and I just got such a response. People are so interested in the history of this building because it's become such an institution here in Atlanta. You know, all the years that I've driven by this building, we've come to pay our speeding tickets or get our cars out of him pound or whatever the case may be. And so there was such an interest and it just really started to take off. And I continue working with Jamestown sort of as a historical consultant and provided a lot of photography. I was on an elevator coming up here earlier, and there's a picture on the elevator that I found in my research in Chicago. So it's been sort of surreal to watch this whole thing open up. Well, I sort of found uh a partner in crime. Uh local photographer by the name of Blake Burton. Uh. Blake is a graduate from Georgia Tech and architecture and he graduated in two thousand nine, just as the market began to tank, and was to have an architecture degree, and he was somehow he had just moved up the street to an apartment so he could get to classes at Georgia Tech and got hired as an asset manager for the City of Atlanta, and this was the building he worked in, and so he came in in the fall two thousand nine. Uh, just casually on his brakes, taking his camera around the building and taking pictures of what this looked like. So just for um context for listeners that don't know, this building went through a period where it was owned by the city and was like a government building where as you said, you would come and pay your tickets. Uh, it's had a lot of wacky things in it at various points of time, but just for a heads up. That is why he was hired by the government was working here in this building. The interesting thing was is when City Hall East was in this building, they only occupied about the total structure. The other sat like, uh, like a time capsule almost. I remember walking into the maintenance offices down in the basement where the old electrical room used to be, and uh, just find blueprints of the property from the nineteen forties, just randomly laying out on tables. Um. I remember at one point when I was doing the tours for Jamestown in two thousand eleven, walked over into what looked like sort of a storage area behind uh, one of the circuit breakers and found a receipt and a wiring diagram for the old popcorn machine that used to be at the candy counter, just laying on the floor randomly. I mean, it literally was like a time capsule. And it was so awesome to be able to walk through this building in those dark corners that people probably hadn't gone in in years. Um. But Blake starts taking photographs of this and documenting it. And then when Jamestown bought the property, uh, he spoke with the folks at James Down and got permission to come back into the building every two to three months and continue what turned into a sort of a visual documentary of the transition from this sort of you know, junk storage and you know, cheesy nineteen sixties wood paneling from certain places to this mixed use nexus on the east side of Atlanta and documented. In fact, the last photograph that he took was from the top of the bar looking down on the amusement park on the roof. That's the final page of it, and it it's just been amazing. And so he reached out to me. He actually had had um Uh an art exhibit back here where the Auto Center used to be, in one of those spaces next to Dancing Goats Uh and had his stuff on an exhibit there for about a month. And Uh. One day I get this email and he's like, so, I hear you're the history guy. And I was like, well, it's sort of certainly seems that way lately. He said, well, I'm in this book and I would really like to document the history of this property. And so what I did was sort of took you know, the basis of my research for my master's thesis and sort of took out the stuffy academic aspects of it and made it a little more user friendly. Uh, and certainly you know, supplemented areas where I had a lot of people ask questions before and sort of tried to get this, you know, essay. That sort of captured the evolution of this property from before you know, the Sears plant was even here, back when the old positively out amusement park was here, and from that time basically through the Sears transition, through the City Hall East transition, to the time that Jamestown took control of the property and sort of you know, initiates this renaissance of the building. And it's been it's been a great ride. It's really been fun. I can imagine we are going to talk some more about the building and Sears, but first we're gonna pause once again for a little sponsor break. So the holidays are really almost here, and you probably, like us, do not have a lot of time to go to the post office, what with all the traffic and the parking and the walking all the way there. If you're like me, uh, it will be packed with everyone else who's all mailing their holiday gifts and their packages, so you can use stamps dot com instead. With stamps dot com, you can avoid all the hassle of going to the post office during this busy, busy holiday season. Everything you would do at the post office you can instead do right from your desk. You can buy and print official US postage using your own computer and printer. Print postage for any letter or package the instant you need it, and then just hand it off to the person who delivers your mail. It is easy and convenient. Right now, sign up for stamps dot com and use our promo code stuff for this special offer. That's a four week trial plus a one dollar bonus offer including postage and a digital scale. So don't wait. Go to stamps dot com and before you do anything else, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in stuff that stamps dot com and enter stuff. So we are back to our discussion and Uh. One of the things that comes up a lot on our show is pronunciation. So here in Atlanta we say Ponsta Leon. That's not really the way you would have pronounced it if you were him. Uh, And to Atlanta residents though, that is a very common name. A busy road that serves as one of the city's major arteries is called Posta Leon. And UH, what they may not know, although it's it's become more common knowledge because of like your work in part establishing the history of this property, is that this property is a big reason why Post Leon is a big part of Atlanta. It is. UH. In the eighteen sixties, as they were laying what is now the belt line, the rail corridor, UH, that was between this building and the neighboring building across the way, the Ford Factory. UM. When they were building and laying that bed, they found UH, just at the northeast corner of this building there's actually a service drive if you're looking at the front of Pont City Market, all the way to the left, in between the edge of the building and the neighboring rail bed where the belt line is located. UH, they found two freshwater springs that came out of the side of that hill. The spouts, best of my knowledge, were about three ft apart. And they knew for a fact that they came from two separate sources because one side, UH was colder and one side had more of a sulfur smell. A local Atlanta doctor found that the rail workers had been drinking this spring water UH for its health benefits UH and eventually started bottling the water and selling it here in Atlanta. Eventually the property was sold to a local businessman by the name of John Armistead the Atlanta Street Railway Company, and that was a six he sold the property. UH. They were interested in the property because it was at the far eastern end of the eastbound trolley line and they wanted something at the end of the line to encourage writers to go all the way to the end, and this property sat there. UH. So it's the intersection of the airline railway which is now the belt Line and the old trolley line that used to run parallel to Constant Leon all the way out almost to Decatur. And UM they at the time was just pastoral gardens and people would come out, you know, back in the old days of courting. You would take the trolley line out and would court your your lovely lady around the gardens at uh constantly on uh part and eventually, UH in the late eighteen nineties they opened an amusement park UH called Constantly an amusement park. This is around the time UH that, so we should mention that the name was chosen because we thought it. Yeah, they thought it was the Fountain of Youth. Uh. And so the supposedly these these springs had restorative properties to them, and so people would come out on Sundays and walk around the park and would get a sip of this rank sulfur water because supposedly it was good for him and had these healing properties. Well. Uh, in time, they open the amusement park, and more and more people began to come to the area. And this is just prior to you know, obviously the the automobile becoming common. Um. By the early twentieth centuries, the automobile starts to come into play. Certainly by the nineteen twenties, the park is going into disrepair. There was a group of gypsies that lived on the property. Uh, it was sort of becoming an ice or. Although business was still popping up. They opened the old ballpark, uh spiller Field across the street. Uh. The obviously the Ford plant was already here. Um. And at the time Sears was looking for property that, as I mentioned earlier, sort of the edge of town where they could buy property for fairly inexpensive but they wanted that transportation artery, and it really was the perfect fit for Sears because not only do you have the rail line airline railway outside UH to bring in and ship these items, but you also have the trolley line, which was the main means of transportation as the automobile sort of coming about. So Sears starts looking at the property the best of my knowledge in the night about and in December of nine announced officially that they were going to open a Sears Roebuck warehouse and retail store on the property. And so UH January four they broke ground and six months later they opened a three quarter million square foot facility. They were working three shifts a day, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week for six months. They had done constructed another Sears plant in Kansas City that had been completed just a few months prior, and so they really had worked out how to make this thing put it together quickly. It was almost the exact same floor plans, and so they built this. They paved over the springs, diverted it actually under the property UH and used to actually run off underneath North Avenue and was diverted back to what was the parking lot at Masquerade once upon a time. Now its old fourth Ward Park and so that water runs off through there's this underground aquifer. Um. I do know that in two thousand five there was another developer looking at the properties names Emery Morrisburger. Mr. Morrisburger is the one who redeveloped downtown Lawrenceville, and he was looking to buy the property basically turned it into condos. Um. He had a daughter who was disabled, and he wanted to make this the most wheelchair friendly facility in the city. And uh put a healthy sum as a down payment somewhere next as of a million dollars on the property. And as they begin looking, um, right across Glen Iris, Uh, there's some condos there now that used to be a dry cleaners. And in all the years of operation the dry cleaners, some of the chemicals that they used leached down into the soil under the property and polluted the aquifer. And so then it's this environmental issue. And just about that time the market starts to collapse, and of course condos go down the toilet and Morrisburger it was like the hot potato. He couldn't get it out of it yet. Well, because it's really expensive to address those kind of issues. I mean, I I know it happened a lot in Atlanta. That is not the only story I know of someone that was interested in the property and then found out that it had some chemical issue it was going to have to have a lot of expensive cleanup, and then right at that time everything kind of went dry for a bit where there was just no development. So that's not that unusual. We're going to come back to the Seares Buildings and its debut, but before that, I wanted to ask you, and you kind of accidentally got onto it a little bit talking about how the catalog business sort of opened up some avenues for black people to be able to make purchases without having to deal with racism. But there are some moments in this building's past that are problematic, and they are a big part of America's racist history. And I know we have always kind of run into like that. Please don't look when we talk to people that worked on the development about like, can we talk about the fact that that amusement park wouldn't let anyone of color in? Uh, do you run into that problem? I've seen a lot of questions about it. There's one, uh postcard image that is very clear that the swings on the property had a sign that said whites only. Uh. The only others that could use it were black servants. That was obviously a big part of it. I mean, this is the Jim Crow era of the South, and is you know, as liberal as Atlanta can be at times, it's still very much in the heart of the South. Um. And there were a lot of challenging issues over the years. I think with Sears obviously, you know, segregated facilities, restrooms, cafeterias, and things of that nature. All the way up to nineteen seventy one, Jose Williams is protesting you know, racist hiring practices at Sears Roebucks. So yeah, there's a lot of of of a sort of sort of undertone and things that I get a lot of questions about. Uh. There is one particular sort of urban myth that that uh Alva Roebuck was at least part African American, and that's the best of my understanding and my research is not true. Uh. And I think a big part of that is probably because of the role that Rosenwald played with Booker T. Washington. It was very high profile and from some of the interviews that I've read with corporate executives with Sears at the time they opened this plant that um, there was some concern on the part of the white population in the South. Uh, they thought that Sears was a black company. And again I think a lot of that probably came out of this sort of high profile philanthropy that what rosen Walld was doing through black communities throughout the region. And UH, to some degree, Sears was very conscious about bringing and establishing public relations offices in the Atlanta plant to sort of get helped get past that. And so they were always the questions well as one of the men black. Um. And in fact, uh, if you know the story of Alva Roebuck, he left the company in side a bad case of nerves in dealing with Richard Sears sort of fly by to the seat her pants business style. Roebuck had been hired when Richard Sears was just a watch catalog h Richard Sears, you know, had was a railroad agent and had worked in Minnesota and accidentally got a shipment of pocket watches because you know, in the nineteenth century, railroad helped standardized time, and so pocket watches became a necessity, and so it was the shipment of mail order pocket watches that came through the station. No one claimed it, and so Richard Sears says, I'll buy it, and he sells these watches and turns about an eight thousand dollar profit selling these watches up and down the railroads to his buddies who worked in the stations. And so it started as this watch catalog, and Alva Roebuck was a watch repairman, so he brought him in and had, of course, in legendary Richard Sears style, the sort of grandiose guarantee, lifetime guarantee on these watches. The best of my knowledge, they weren't the best watches in the world. But if it broke and you had the patients to send it off for probably months and months to to Chicago, Albert Roebuck would fix your watch and send it back to you. And so he stayed with the company till he leaves because he's just a nervous wreck trying to work with Richard Sears, and eventually takes his portion of the company and uh invested in the typewriter industry. He ends up working for Emerson Typewriters and had basically gone into an early retirement in Florida when the Great Depression kicked in and lost everything, and eventually in the nineteen thirties went to Chicago, had to go back to work and went and stood in an unemployment line at the Sears factory in Chicago, and he goes in for the interview and they asked his name. He says, well, it's on the front of the building. I'm Alva Roebuck. And so they hired him just sort of write letters to customers, sort of a public relations capacity, and eventually started touring him around the Country's sort of a glad hander for special events, and they sent him to the South to multiple locations to show the reach. And he's not black, so that was the capacity that Robut served. Um, you know, I talked to a number of African American employees who worked at Sears during those years of transition during the Civil Rights movement, where the segregated signs were slowly removed and things were integrated without very very much fanfare. They really tried to stay below the radar with that kind of thing, but uh, still a lot of dedication, even the black employees. They genuinely loved Sears. They loved with Sears provided. Uh. There's an old sort of legend that there was an elevator operator, a black elevator operator at the Memphis facility, which is obviously right on the Mississippi River. Uh, and he operated an elevator in that building for thirty plus years. And it is said he retired a millionaire because for every dollar he would invest in his sh Sears profit sharing, they would match that dollar. And UH, they were your story decade. Yeah, stories of employees. This is when you know you could establish yourself in a career with this company and it could really do great things for you. And I know for a fact in speaking with some of these uh former employees who are still very active. In fact, Atlanta has the largest active retiree chapter in the country. They're called the Seers Atlanta Family. I still worked with them occasionally, have interviewed a number of employees that worked in this plant and the stories they tell it's just fascinating and sort of seeing that firsthand account of what it used to be like to work in this giant building and how close people were, you know, stories of snow storms where they would be trapped in the building overnight and the next morning they would open the cafeteria and do like mess hall style breakfast for all the employees. They were really just a tight knit family, and they still are very close today. You've got these people in their eighties and their nineties, and they just just the salt of the earth. You know. They loved the company that they worked for. They're not real happy about the direction it's gone in recent years, but they they're very deadic hated people. Uh And I've seen that in all you know, socio economic classes and races of people who worked here. They they genuinely loved what they did. Uh and what Sears sort of stood for in the region. Uh. So, now we'll backtrack a little bit and talk about the building on the day it opened, because I had read a little factoid that there were thirty thousand people on hand. Is that true? That seems enormous. It was not in line that morning. There are some pictures from that day of the front of the building and the lines and the throngs of people standing outside the front. That was the total number of bodies that came in the building in that first opening day. It's not like there were thirty thousand people, you know, lined up constantly on to get in. But you know they had somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty five thousand items on display in that retail facility down on the first floor. And uh, you know, for folks who've lived in Atlanta very long, the old service merchandise, you would go in, say I want that one. They would give you a ticket, you would go to a counter, and somebody else behind, you know, the curtain would bundle that order and bring it to the counter for you. And that was the way it worked here at Sears. They folks could go in through the retail section, and Sears was known for having three different levels of quality. They had the economic, then they had sort of the middle, and then they had the really nice one. And so they would keep three of most all of these items, particularly things like appliances and tools and things that Sears sort of became known for. People would come in and they would say, Okay, I want this and this. They would take the tickets to a counter and they would literally um. The way this building is set up, there are these huge corkscrew turnstiles. There used to be a couple on the outside of the building, and then they were two within the building itself and they connected all of the floors and it basically was a giant shoot that went down to the shipping room what is today the front facade of Pont City Market with the living roof. That was the shipping room. And they would all of these conveyor belts and shoots and they all the things from the different floors would spiral down and somebody at the bottom and these stalls would collect the items. They would come through the shoot, they would bundle the order and it would either go to the front of the store for the retail or it would go to the loading dock in the back and be put on the train to be shipped out all over the region. And that was sort of the way they filled them. You know. They had operators over in the tower and you could call directly to the tower and say, okay, in your new catalog on this page, you've got this item. I'd like three of these, you know, and then they would send that order to the different floors. They would fill that order and collect it and bundle it in the in the shipping room. So what was the building itself like at the time. Yeah, the bottom floor was a cafeteria. Basement floor is a giant cafeteria, and then the first floor would have been the retail space. The second third, actually the second through ninth floors of the main structure was pretty much just all merchandise. Uh. You had things like kids toys. On the ninth floor, you would have things like appliances and hardware, and heavier items would be obviously a little closer to the bottom floor. And uh, you know, during the first few years of operation the building, uh, the terrace across what is today the front of Pond City Market. Uh, that was the old original rail bed. It's connected via bridge out to the belt line. Now. Uh, they would pull as many as sixteen rail cars across the back of the building and they would literally bundle it and loaded onto the train. Uh. That was the case until the mid sixties. They started a huge wave of development. They knocked down the old original smoke stack, and they constructed the wing that sits right across the street from the Masquerade there on North Avenue. That was the sixty seven wing. And then they were three floors on the far end that weren't there originally. In nineteen seventy, they built those additional three floors to finish that wing out. When they did that, they scrapped the rail line buried in concrete and built a cafeteria new cafeteria that was open to the public, and built that across the back of the building and rerouted all of the trains up the side of the building. And what is the shed on the side of the property today that Pots City Market has developed. That was the second loading dock, and they could pull more train cars up to that and and load those items. But uh, yeah, it was an amazing operation. It was almost like two different companies in one. You would have the mail order aspect of the company and then you would have the retail portion of the company. And and talking to the employees, they've always been very particular about oh well I was retail or, I was mail order, I worked with catalog, is what they'll say. Um, the terminology is interesting. They refer to this building as the plant, the Pots plant. Uh. And it really was just amazing to see it. There's actually a collection of employee It was more of than newslet. It was almost like a magazine, uh, for ploys of this year's plant. Uh. It started nineteen fifty one on the twenty fifth anniversary of the opening of the plant. It was called mail order graph and it was like, you know, pictures of kids in their cub Scouts again, that whole family thing was there. It was pictures of the cafeteria staff, the ladies that ran the cafeteria at the time, or the laundry. Uh. They would do these different write ups, Uh so and So's moving away, and they would have going away parties and just a lot of very personal pictures. I found an entire collection that went from nineteen fifty one through about nineteen seventy eight, I believe it was. They have it on uh hand at University of Georgia and their Special Collections facility out there, and I've gone out there multiple times collecting information, images and stuff for Jamestown, uh to use in various capacities. And it's just so fun to look through those because you really see what this building was in its prior life. You know, I didn't move to the city till n and obviously that would the year Sears sort of shuttered everything and sold it to the city. But it, uh, it really gives sort of a pulse to the previous life of the building and the people that worked in and how close they were what Atlanta meant to or you know, what Sears mit meant to the Atlanta market. I will ask you a question. I'm going off track a little bit because I remember finding in uh when I was doing a little bit of prep a note from the nine internal little mailer paper, a note about Sears being aware that their catalogs would one day be looked at by historians as the you know, sort of the record of American life at the time. It is absolutely I have never heard of a company that was quite that self aware from historical perspective. I don't know that Richard Sears himself was quite that aware. Again, he was a huckster, you know, he was a Eke oil salesman. But I do think that Julius Rosenwald and certainly Robert Wood were conscious of sort of nurturing this is before image corporate image was a thing they sort of I think helped to create and nurture that in this this image of the catalog and how it reached out to to rural farmers in particular. But you know, even here in in the urban areas where they're reaching out to a more urban market. But Uh, but yeah, I think I think from at least by the mid twentieth century, they were certainly aware that this was sort of a historical you know, repository of things of stuff, and and that's one thing about our culture, you know, is we love stuff in this country. We define ourselves by stuff. And they were I think really aware of how people define themselves with the things that they bought. And uh, you know, even in utilitarian things like cream separators and sewing machines and these you know things that again, you know, I had mentioned to you at the Georgia Public Broadcasting broadcasts that we uh we're talking about how the catalog and the items in it, uh, what it represented to people having those items. Um, you know, I I teach that in my classes. Now we actually do It's pretty fun activity I do with my students where I give them a list of drugs because there's one thing teenagers are interested in, its drugs and what they potential side effects are, what they might be used for. And we would take I give the kids old copies. Uh. This is before the pure food and drug adveras looking at patent medicines because that was the thing about patent medicines. It could have secret ingredients and it was usually illicit drugs, and you had farmers getting addicted to cocaine in the nineteen teens. And so my kids go through and scour these ads and read the claims and then they have to sort of guess what illicit drug might be the key ingredients and those items. So it's amazing, you know, it really is sort of a history of us from from that that period, that sort of huckster selling it out of the back of the wagon too. You know what we talked about. You would ask about the the Wish book. You know. Um, one of my favorite writers that I became familiar with both and when I was at Georgia State, actually Cliff Kean really turned him onto him, was Harry Cruz Love Harry Crews. Uh. You know, he's somewhere between uh Faulkner and Hunter S. Thompson. He is just amazing. But he grew up in Bacon County, Georgia, dirt poor, uh sharecropper's son, and uh he tells the stories his family never hoped to be able to buy the items in those books, but you could wish about it. And the thing he did he had a black neighbor named will It Lee book at and they would basically sit on the porch with the catalog and would make up stories about these so called perfect people. Oh my good, because he grew up in an area where you know, folks said were missing an eye or missing a two, threw finger and have yeah. And then he looks at this catalog of all these perfect people, and he and this other kid would make up stories. And he said, that's how he learned to tell story, was just making up stories about people in the Sears catalog. So, you know, even beyond you know, consumer goods, this thing became so much larger for people, particularly in the South, that didn't have a whole lot wish for, you know, they wish was all they could do, and I think it became symbolic of that. So it was called wish book for years and years. Um. The Christmas Catalog I think really took off in the nineteen thirties. Uh. And it was a fairly small catalog, but it had the toys. I think most of us that are in our age group have such distinct memories of that. Eventually, grimy and dog eared wish book every year. Santa Claus shopped at Sears clearly, I mean I vaguely recall asking a question along those lines of like, if I circle it in the catalog, how does Santa find out? And my parents did say something like, oh, he has a deal with Series, you know, the way that parents will just make something up exactly. Yes, so they they I mean Santa. You know, I could see him having some retail reach out. Some of those elves have connections there on the switchboard. I did a presentation for the Retirees Group a couple of years ago, and before I even started, I looked out and smiled at the audience of these, you know, seventy nine year old people, and I said, I've just met Santa Claus. You were Santa Claus because I lived in a rural area, a little tiny town South Georgia. Moultrie, Georgia was where I grew up and lived out in a very rural area. The nearest kids were a couple of miles away, and being an only child, that's Sears wish book, I spent a lot of hours with it. Facts absolutely and school close every fall, school clothes came from Sears, and then of course you would get the wish book and about October and start dog ear in the pages and circling things. I want this two of these. And yes, somehow Santa always found out, thank goodness. I mean, I think I told you when we first first met to talk about this about the year that Santa did me wrong and he did not honor my request for the Strawberry shortcake snail cart, and I may have had a very unattractive fit. And then I scraped my money together and told my dad we have to go to Sears. Like I was scared there were there was gonna be a run on snail carts. We absolutely had to go immediately, if not sooner, and get my snail carts. It was it was everything, I mean a lot of my you know, I talked about my Star Wars toys. That was it. It was the you know, getting that package, just oh my god. Oh. There was one year that my brother tore out the Star Wars pages for him to just take for himself. I'll be honest, I'm sorry, sir. No. I um. When I did my research the first time, I was in the catalog room of the archives and they had basically every catalog they had ever published. They had a pristine copy on this wall, and I pulled out the seventy seventy smelled the pages still smell the same flip to those that I had perused a hundred times as a kid. And remember not just the toys, but that advertisement, you know that display, because I always had the coolest displays of toys. It's it's sort of interesting. Um. I mentioned earlier about the farmers market that was established here on the back lot of the property, that operated from nineteen thirty till about ninety seven. Uh In forty seven, when they shut down the Farmer's market, they turned that building which is no longer there. It's right where Dancing Goats is located today. There was the Farmer's market on that corner of Glenn Iris and North Avenue. And um, they shut down the Farmer's market turning into a farm store. But every year for Christmas they would take a portion of the farm store and would have this huge Christmas display. And there's some great photos of the Georgia State Special Collections Archives of this creepy clown on a on a slide out in front of that store and these kids playing on like the playground. I'm sure it was probably something they sold in the catalog of swing set or something. But yeah, they were always very conscious of that. You know, that Christmas thing. It always reminds me of the scene from a Christmas story where they're sort of glued to the window looking at all the wares for that year's Christmas season. So yeah, I mean it's I still think about those wish books a lot, especially this time a year. It's just exactly it's like, it's good, we have good timing to do, and now I am going to think about the elliott ness level rate that I staged to get those pages out of my brother's room. He was a lot older than me. It was not okay, it was a very very brave act on my place. You can't take those I need to look at size noodles. There's something it's pretty sagrinned about the whole situation. Cherry, Thank you so much, very welcome. Oh my gosh, you're just amazing app. Where can people find you? Well, I, like I said, I'm at Duluth High School. You can reach me there. Yeah, just send me, send me an email. You can find me on Facebook. Jerry Hancock. Uh, if you need to email me. Jerry Underscore Hancock at yahoo dot com. I'm pretty accessible. Uh, shoot me a line, um, and hopefully this book thing will materialize where right now it's being reviewed by Princeton Press, Princeton Architectural Press, and uh, I do know that the executives of Jamestown are pretty excited about it as well, So I'm certain that it's gonna come along at some point with pretty a yeah and it's yeah, this is the whole business aspect of it, and this is the part I'm not real fond of. But you know, we've we've done a few edits here and there and trying to get copyrights on pages. You've mentioned earlier about how hard it is to do corporate research and it it's very difficult to find anybody as serious to give you a concrete answer on anything, if you can even get them to answer a phone, because there's so many of those officers are empty now and so we're really struggling with trying to reach out to sears and get permission to use certain images and things. But we've got a great collection of historical images in this essay, and then of course Blake's photography is just astounding, so beautiful to to watch the transition of the building and the pages it will be. I believe it's going to be more of an architectural book, sort of coffee table style book. But yeah, we've uh, we've got a lot of a lot of optimism for it. So I'm excited to keep us posted. We can share that info, uh, and then we will uh will reach back out to you and get the whole scoop when it all comes to sounds good. Thank you so much. You're very welcome. Thanks for having Okay, So, I am still sort of reeling from the revelation that catalog shopping was so impactful to people who were often discriminated against. And I actually feel a little bit foolish for never having thought of that before. Yeah, you and I try really hard to broaden our perspectives, uh, and to to listen to people whose experiences are different from ours. Um, But at the same time, like we're always going to be limited by our own experiences, and so I, like you, I had not thought of that before. No, it's so blew my mind and and really kind of opened my eyes to a whole reason that catalogs had a benefit to people that I just had never considered, which I really do feel foolish for not considering because I'm like that person that likes to shop online because I don't like going into stores. So you would think I could have put two and two together, but I didn't. Uh. So we wanted to say many many thanks to Jerry Hancock for spending time with us and sharing his impressive breadth of knowledge. Little did I know you could be a Sears scholar, but also that Sears had like its own archive and their own sort of sense of scholarship around their history. And we will, as promised in the episode, keep listeners posted on his book project as it progresses. So I have his contact info. Hopefully we'll see more of him and we will keep you in the loop. Do you also have some listener mail for us? I do. It's a follow up to a previous listener mail, so as our listeners may recall, I had a delighted freak out not so long ago when we got this amazing parcel from a listener who I could not make out their name, but it was original copies of Lemo del from France, uh from the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, and I was just wowed and we got an email shortly after that episode aired where the gifter revealed themselves her name is Emmanuel, and then she said she had to follow up parcel coming. Oh my goodness. So, uh it's basically our early Christmas gift and care package and it was really amazing. So she said that the first one had been a spur of the moment thing, so then she, uh, she was so delighted with our enthusiastic reception that she did a much more organized approach to the next one, and it was amazing. She found in a second hand bookshop a bunch of mod illustrates to sort through, and so what we ended up with, uh is one issue from every year ranging from nineteen o nine. They're a couple of years missing that just she couldn't find um. But they're in amazing shape. And one of the really really beautiful things that we got is that some of them are printed using the push war method, like their special editions, that have actual gold that highlights some of the illustrations in them. They're incredible. Uh yeah, yeah, yes, so so uh here's the other cool thing. There are four issues that she sent that has what she says is a surprise for me, which is great. They have original sewing patterns um and she wrote, She's very cute because she gets me clearly. She's like, you read that right, breathe, please don't cry. So yeah, they're basically like pieces that you have to put together. Luckily, I have done this many many times, and I have the skills. I have to figure out a way to copy them because I don't want to take them apart. And then there is a really interesting one, the nineteen fifteen issue that she sent really evidences that the war is happening and that dresses are getting simpler and shorter, and they're really really amazing. So it was just it's the most amazing parcel from an incredible I mean, what a generous and lovely and thoughtful person. Emmanuel. We like you heaps. They absolutely did put a huge smile on my face. I actually haven't gotten to go through them carefully. It's been kind of a busy time of travel and holidays and and work being a little bit busy, and us trying to get ready for more holidays and having more episodes ready than we usually would on a given week, so it's been a little bit maddening. It may be the beginning of the year before I really get to like go through them and and enjoy them fully. But thank you what an amazing, delightful, kind, thoughtful I can't use enough adjectives to describe how much I just really appreciate the care and love that went into such a gorgeous parcel. So thank you a million times over. Uh. If you would like to write to us and talk about how much you are over me blathering about exciting fashion illustrations, that's fine. You can do that at History podcast, to house, to works dot com. You can find us across the spectrum of social media as missed in History. That means Facebook dot com, slash missed in History, on Twitter, as at missed in History, Instagram, We're at missed in History, missed in History, dot Tumbler dot com, pinterest dot com slash missed in History. If you would like to uh, come to our parents site, which is how stuff works dot com. 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