Wallets

Whatever happened to wallets. I went wallet shopping recently and really couldn't find anything that I wanted to carry. They were either half the size of a small handbag, or they were the handbag.

When I was growing up every girl had a wallet, and that wallet contained a passel of pictures of friends, TV stars, etc., and each picture had some sort of saying pasted over it, which would say what the person thought the person in the picture was thinking when that particular picture was taken, or if it was a picture of a TV star (such as Spin or Marty from the Mickey Mouse Club series of the same name), then words would say things such as "so cute", "look at those eyelashes", etc.

I carried a really bad school picture (aren't all school pictures really bad?) of my brother in my wallet, and the look on his face was, well, he looked perplexed and sad, so I labeled it "sad sack." I still have that photo in one of my albums with the "sad sack" sticker on it.

It was also a status symbol -- your personal wallet was. It had to be THICK -- loaded with pictures. The more pictures, the more popular (in theory) you were. However, I knew unpopular kids who "loaded" their wallets with TV star pictures, not pictures of their friends.

My wallet was a dark blue Buxton. So that you didn't have to buy a new wallet, they sold picture-adding sections to place in your wallets, thus making your wallet even thicker. All good wallets had a separate place for change, and then, of course, a place for paper money, not that I ever had much of that variety.

I always called a dime -- the cost of a phone call -- in case I needed it for an emergency.

Of course, there was the time someone stole my wallet -- I felt naked without it and I was out the dime for a phone call.

One always carried a wallet, if one was over 13 years old. I mean always. Pockets got ripped, we still carried a wallet. We just sewed them up again. I always had safety pins hidden in my hems so I could fast-fix any ripped pockets. Those were the days before velcro or double sided tape.

So, I've included pictures of a wallets -- I actually had one exactly like the tooled-leather one. But that was too big for any pocket, and didn't really have much place for pictures, and I couldn't get the picture-addendum thing to work in that particular wallet. But it was very pretty.

I also had one similar to the red ladies wallet in the advertisement, except as I mentioned, mine was navy blue, leather.