The Stamp Act of 1978

When I was growing up grocery stores were still giving out Gold Bond stamps to shoppers. The number of stamps you received was equal to the amount of groceries you purchased. My mother kept these stamps loose in a milk glass basket on the top of our hutch. Periodically she would take the basket down from its perch and have me organize the tangled mass of stamps that had accumulated. I would then set to work wetting the stamp backs and sticking them in their little books. My mom made this part easy for me by placing a wet washcloth in a saucer for me to run the stamps across. This setup always made me feel like a very sophisticated secretary and I took my job very seriously.

The coolest part about saving stamps was that once you had a substantial amount of books filled, you could redeem them for items from the Gold Bond store. Normally my mom would let me have the stamps all to myself because I would use them to "buy" Christmas gifts. For example, one year I saved enough books to get my grandmother a set of decorative brass bowls. Another year my mother scored one of those tension rod towel holders that ran from floor to ceiling. Exciting gift huh? Regardless of how mundane some of the things I bought were, I loved the whole concept.

While I mostly used the stamps to get gifts for others, there was one item that I longed for...a tether ball set. I wanted that set so badly but it was valued at over forty books. That was well over a year's worth of saving. In other words, impossible. Or so I thought. Miraculously we had a friend who gave us all of her stamps and suddenly my beloved tether ball set seemed like it might be within reach. Within reach until my mother fell in love with this lamp which was valued at around the same amount. Maybe if I had bought my mom the aluminum cookie press with interchangeable disks for making spritz cookies instead of that towel rack we would be looking at a retro shot of me with my tether ball set. But it didn't quite work out that way. She did promise to buy me a set eventually if I let her get the lamp with my stockpile of stamps. Okay Mom, that was thirty years ago and I'm still waiting...