Valentine bags: A lesson in broken hearts
For most of the school year, the paper bags were the size you would get in a candy store as you selected the items you wanted from the case.
On the run-up to Valentine’s Day, they became “mailboxes.”
In the late 1940s, Valentine’s Day was a big deal in the early grades at Noell Elementary School on College Avenue, just east of Queen Street.
It was especially important at that time of the year – about half-way through the school schedule – to refill the small, flat glass containers you brought in from your home in September (usually one of your mother’s old cream deodorant jars she had saved over the summer) with a fresh supply of white paste your teacher dished out in the classroom from a large container with a wooden paddle.
All that paste would be necessary to create the Valentine’s Day cards you would create from construction paper and paper doilies. Those were the “cards” you took home for your parents and grandparents.
The paper bags, however, were hung at the front of the school room for a very specific purpose. Each bag had a student’s name on it. You were to bring in valentines over the course of a week or so and place them in the bags of your friends or the kids you wanted to be friendly with. Back then, store-bought valentines were about a penny each; maybe less than that if purchased in a packet.
Consider it the forerunner of “Likes” on a Facebook page.
Every day, after depositing your coat in the “cloak room” next to the classroom (and none of us knew why it was called a “cloak room,” but that is how the teachers referred to it), you could place your cards in the bags of your choice. You also had to pass that line of bags on your way to your desk. You surreptitiously glanced at the bag with your name on it to see if anyone had placed a valentine card in it.
That walk to your desk was a boulevard of broken dreams if there were no cards tucked into the bag. Today I sometimes think the creator of the “Peanuts” character Charlie Brown must have received few – if any – cards in his valentine bag. Charlie knew what anguish those bags could cause.
On the other hand, the more popular kids had valentines spewing out of their bags. It was not difficult to determine who would go on to become class president in junior high and senior high school. Those bags were the popularity contests of their day.
On Valentine’s Day, you could retrieve the bag with your name on it and see who had put cards in your bag – for better or worse.
That was a more politically incorrect time. Heck, we actually celebrated Lincoln’s Birthday on Feb. 12 and Washington’s Birthday on Feb. 22, instead of the homogenous “Presidents’ Day” that will be observed tomorrow, Feb. 15.
I don’t imagine valentines are distributed that way today. In order to avoid any hurt feelings, that may be out of the question.
But back then, schools were concerned with basic education, not emotional distress brought on by the number of valentines you did or did not receive. Although, counting your valentines and glancing over at another student’s stack of cards could be considered a real-life math situation.
I can tell you, those of us who received fewer cards than our neighbors coined the words “Stupid Cupid” long before that became the title of a popular Connie Francis song in the late 1950s.
Then again, maybe Connie Francis did not receive too many valentines when she was in grade school.
Gordon Freireich is a former editor of the York Sunday News. Read his blog atyorkblog.com/lawn. E-mail: email@example.com.