Busy, busy?

Sat., February 22, 1936 - Lovely day.  warm and thawing a little.
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Mon., March 16, 1936 - Rheumatism is worse today.  Mom and Ray came out to Nieman's about 6:00.  Mom can't find her Chicago Mail Order catalog.
Tues., March 17, 1936 - Had to use a stick to walk home tonite because of the pesky rheumatism.  Irene and Raymond came after supper to take me to Lewis at Wayne for adjustments.  Howard was here while I was gone.

Well, Grandma must have been busy with something important to uncharacteristically miss so many days of her diary.

I had never heard of the Chicago Mail Order catalog before, but here's a page from 1935.  I know now why Grandma Anna was interested.  Look at those prices!

You learn something new every day, right?  I did not know that mail order came before some big brick-and-mortar stores.  From encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org:

"Mail-order retailing became a big business in Chicago. During the half century that followed the establishment of a mail-order company by Aaron Montgomery Ward in 1872, Chicago companies dominated the business of selling directly to consumers across the country by using catalogs and deliveries through the mail. Montgomery Ward and Sears, both based in Chicago, were the leaders of the early mail-order industry and became giant enterprises through catalog sales long before they began to open retail stores. Even after the 1920s, when the growth of the mail-order business slowed, Chicago companies continued to stand among its leaders. By the end of the twentieth century, when Wards went out of business entirely and Sears no longer issued giant catalogs, the city's mail-order industry was no longer the precocious adolescent it had been in 1900. Nevertheless, Chicago remained home to several leading companies in an evolving but still important sector of the economy.

By the early part of the twentieth century, the mail-order retailing business—led by the Chicago giants—had become a major sector of the American economy, through which millions of rural consumers purchased a variety of goods. This development, which was part of a general trend in which commodity consumption by individuals and households was taking on greater economic and cultural significance, was both embraced and resisted. By 1919, Americans were buying over $500 million worth of goods a year from mail-order companies (roughly half of this business went to Wards and Sears alone). The millions of bulky mail-order catalogs sent from Chicago to points around the country had become important cultural documents, with significance that went beyond the purely economic. Particularly in rural areas, which were still home to half of the American population as late as 1920, the catalogs served not only as a marketing tool, but also as school readers, almanacs, symbols of abundance and progress, and objects of fantasy and desire. For many consumers, the kind of mail-order retailing pioneered by Wards and Sears offered a wider variety of goods (which ranged from the smallest items to entire houses), more generous credit terms, and lower prices than they could get from local merchants. Farmers' groups, which tended to favor the bypassing of economic intermediaries, were supporters of the mail-order business from the beginning. Local merchants, on the other hand, fought the national mail-order houses in both the economic and political arenas. Between the 1890s and the 1910s, U.S. postal policy became a battleground for retailers. The adoption of rural free delivery in 1898 and parcel post in 1913, both of which were enacted by Congress over the objections of local retailers and their allies, represented victories for the mail-order business and for Chicago."

There's more, but I'll stop at those two paragraphs.