I sincerely believe that Wes Hoskins, an eighty-year-old contributor to the monthly magazine Good Old Days, wants to pass along his insights to younger generations. The tone of his essay, “Bits of Life,” published in the February 2004 issue, is earnest and direct. He clearly wants me—a twenty-seven year- old—to absorb everything he has learned. The problem is, I can’t figure out what to do with it.
Take, for example, the third lesson in Hoskins’s piece. “Another bit of information I’d like to convey to young people is that there were two kinds of ranch hands in the history of the West,” he writes. “Understanding how climate, ingenuity and resources shaped Americans’ lives in the past can enhance our appreciation of the importance of water, land and population charting in our nation’s future.”
I’m all for charting a better future for our nation, but Hoskins fails to explain the relevancy of ranch hands to the lesson and leaves the “young people” he addresses with an empty fact. Seems he and most of the other contributors are not so much interested in paving the way for what is to come as they are in preserving what they’ve lost. The tagline for the publication is “The magazine that remembers the best,” and these cozy, safe stories provide a pretty simplistic idea of what “the best” entails. At first glance, Days’s readership seems to be people whose blood pressure might explode upon seeing a hip-hop feature on “CBS Sunday Morning,” and who will then take two Valium pills with a “Hot Toddy” and say, “Wake me when it’s 1924 again.”
Yes, I know this is a ridiculous caricature. Obviously, not everyone who remembers “the old days” is mired in the past. The success of the magazine demonstrates that my hypothesis is overly simplistic. Days is a monthly that has been published since 1964 and, according to editor Ken Tate, has a circulation of almost 200,000. Judging by the letters to the editor and the “Wanted Ads,” this loyal readership spans the nation from Lawndale, California, to Joppa, Alabama, and up to Nova Scotia, Canada. A lot of people like this magazine, and they do not necessarily share the same income bracket, geographic area or gender. These readers simply share a need to be reassured that there was a time when life was simple and good.
Each cover evokes a certain Norman Rockwell feeling. The February 2004 issue shows a boy sharing hot cocoa with someone who is, presumably, his grandfather. The old man, wearing long johns and overalls, looks lovingly down at the young boy and is, no doubt, passing along wise lessons he’s gleaned over the years. The boy is eithertruly enraptured or humoring the old fart.
The February issue has plenty of cozy imagery and a stern defense of the wood stove. In the editor’s note, “Looking Back,” Tate seems to wag his finger at anybody who invested in those new-fangled heat pumps. “These cold days of February make me thankful that Janice and I still heat the old home place with wood,” Tate writes. “Daddy heated with wood until the day he died, and Mama kept the home fire burning with well-seasoned hickory and oak for quite a while after that.” Tate then goes on to explain how chopping wood was so invigorating—the smell and all—and laments that he’s no longer “as sure with the chain saw” as he once was.
A lot of the articles in Days are like this. The goal is comfort, not reform. These writers are not muckraking journalists in search of scandal and news—quite the opposite. Days is an anti-news magazine.
So how has Days managed to stick around for forty years? For starters, it is cheap to produce. With the exception of a few advertisements, the black-and-white layouts are printed on newsprint. Most of the contributions are from readers rather than paid staff. The advertisers in Days understand that this magazine cuts across a varied and, perhaps vulnerable, demographic. Two-page ads like “Golden Greats of Musical Nostalgia” (which, incidentally, feature the only nonwhite faces in the entire magazine via Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong and The Mills Brothers) run a few pages before a full-color advertisement declaring, “Grape Juice is an Artery-Clearing Wonder!” Also included are ads promising to free you from arthritis pain, a pill called Focus Factor and a glossy page for Floyd Cramer’s “Beautiful Songs of Faith.” The ads in Days get at two rather beguiling conceits for the aging consumer—healing and nostalgia.
Finally, and perhaps most important, Days has lasted because it sells escapism very well and most people need to go to a happy place once in a while. But the ads, articles and advice in Days add up to a portrait of a bygone era that never was. A lot of these “good old” stories are, ironically, Depression-era tales. Stories like “Gingerbread Boys,” written by a woman who used gingerbread cookies as an inexpensive Valentine’s gift, or “My Dad’s Living Gift,” about a lost pet who found his way home, are naïve in their conception and selective in what they remember. But they are timeless—wood fires will never cease to be cozy, loyal pets like a German Shepherd named “Jack” will always save the day, and February will always be a time for Valentines and presidents. Meanwhile, these remembrances of “the good old days” overlook two world wars, Jim Crow, Brown vs. Board of Education, McCarthyism, and any hint of murder, divorce or revolution. People rarely “die.” They “pass,” “leave us” or are simply “gone.” All pets are loyal, fathers are “Daddy,” and people may not have had a lot, but they had each other.
I’ll admit, I enjoyed reading Days for the same reason I actually enjoy (though pretend not to) movies like “Finding Nemo,” “Toy Story,” or any other Dreamworks or Disney schmaltz. I want to be reassured that I can rely on friends, community and the silver lining in every bad experience. I want to think of my life as a narrative, with conflict, rising action and a happy ending. Like Hoskins, I hope that if I live eighty years, maybe I will have my own sentimental advice to pass on to younger generations. Who knows if a word of it will be relevant.