Christmas 1962...My Father, noting my interest in old cars at age 14, gave me a basic Sears Craftsman 1/2" drive socket set in a Craftsman box. Before that my tool kit was the set that Ford had put in the trunk of my '48 Ford when it was made...so I had one screwdriver, 4 wrenches, no hammer...but I could figure out a way to get to nearly every fastener on the '48. I still have car and all the tools I mentioned!
That Craftsman set was my standby for 3 decades of thrashing on old Fords, with only a few sockets and extensions added. I lost and replaced the 3/4...
It has survived normal use and violently insane use...I once put a 6 foot water pipe over the breaker and undid a big bolt in the junkyard that was tight enough that I lifted myself off the ground. NOTHING from the set has broken, and ratchet is entirely original except for the grease in it.
Up into the 1980's, Sears was my toy store...and as with toy stores of my youth, I looked a LOT more than I bought, because of family, house, kids, and stinking salary.
Then Sears began to slowly ROT. The Popcorn mentioned above was one of the few things in the store I could always afford...and Saturday after Saturday the bin was EMPTY. Not sold out..."Oh, no one made any today!"...thenceforth, it was empty more often than not...and Sears neither fixed that problem nor used the space for any useful activity. Downstairs, if I wanted a 9/16 deep socket, that row in the rack would be empty...for 3 weeks! Why worry about being out of 9/16ths? After all, there were dozens of other shiny sockets in the other rows...
Then the tools began to molt, looked cheaper, China brands started in...
I think it's been close to 10 years since I went into a Sears. I buy tools mostly from the want ads here, since I only like elderly tools anyway now.
Sears is someone else's, or maybe no one's, toy store now, maybe downscale from Walmart. It has somehow unwoven itself from the fabric of American life and become just another, usually badly managed, store.
