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This line is curious: > Folders with vertical pockets, called PeeChees (as in, peachy keen), had been around since the 1940s and were sold on the West Coast, b

This line is curious: > Folders with vertical pockets, called PeeChees (as in, peachy keen), had been around since the 1940s and were sold on the West Coast, but they had never made the leap across the Rockies—so Crutchfield was doubtful. “I said, ‘They only sell on the West Coast, and what’s the real benefit of a vertical pocket?’” I know a lot of products are regional, but how can these things stay confined to one side of the country for decades? I had Trapper Keepers in elementary and junior high school. When I started high school, I switched to 3 or 4 PeeChee folders duct taped together as a makeshift binder. It was a cheap way to signal how much "I didn't care."

murgindrag 7y ago
The world was very different before the Internet. It was different before air travel was affordable to the masses. It was different when long-distance phone calls between states were significant expenses, and you tried to keep call length down to a minute or two.
- function_seven 7y ago
  Yeah, I remember all those things (well, I was too young to know the price of a coach ticket, but I do remember no Internet and having to ask permission before making a long-distance call) I just looked up the maker of the PeeChee, and it was originally a company based in Michigan. Maybe the man quoted in the article was being loose with the dividing line? A lot of products had national distribution back then, so I'm inferring from the quoted passage that PeeChee folders were just more popular on the West Coast vs. the rest of the country. But why?
  - wkearney99 7y ago
    Long distance, ugh, if you made a friend while on vacation you knew you weren't going to be able to talk to them much if they didn't live in your town. Dad would give us the 'death stare' if the phone bill came in with long distance charges on it.
  - stan_rogers 7y ago
    Not in the States, but in my neck of the woods, variations on the Duo-Tang filled more or less the same niche in the '60s and '70s. They could be had with inside cover pockets in addition to the three-ring binding fasteners and with three-ring punched "spines" to be added to a more substantial binder. So you had an expandable notebook (that could hold plain, lined and graph paper as appropriate for the page) along with holders for loose scraps - and turning in your notebooks now and again for marking was a thing.
drewcoo 7y ago
The article needs a fact check. Pee-Chees existed in the midwest ages ago. They were first introduced in Michigan. I have no idea about the veracity of the rest, but reader beware.
jonhohle 7y ago
Growing up in the Midwest in the 80s, I was very aware that trends from California took 1 to 3 years to make it to Milwaukee. My wife, a native Arizonan, had several fads sweep through her school years before mine (most recently, we talked about hyper color shirts, she had one in third grade, I never saw one until 5th). We’re on the cusp of Gen X and Millennial and I feel like my attitude and constitution tend to have more Gen X similarities while she tends to show more Millenial attributes (slightly). I’ve often wondered if that cultural delay affects the generation with which people on the borders identify.
bane 7y ago
National distribution in the U.S. is an immense affair. Beyond the expense of advertising in local markets, it took the intensive development of several layers of massive infrastructure projects before we've arrived at today's level of "effortless" distribution. The principle problem is that the United States has no domestic East-West waterway option. No matter how good your rail and road shipping system is (and the U.S. has among the best in the world for freight), you can fit a lot of train's worth of goods into a single big container ship. Rail also only gets you so far, as you need local trucking links, large inter-modal warehouses and so-on. What really happened was the rise of the trucking industry in the late 70s and early 80s coinciding with the rise of big-box stores like Walmart. This built all of the secondary and tertiary infrastructure -- and capacity -- to move whatever stuff you wanted wherever you wanted, pretty cheaply. However, there's also two major East-West barriers in the U.S., the Mississippi river, which has largely been overcome but was a major geographic barrier in an earlier age, and the Rockies, which both involve a large energy cost to get over, but also have unreliable roads in certain areas during large parts of the year. Many many large brands exist only on one side of their respective barriers or the other. Yuengling beers for example, more or less don't go any further than the Mississippi, while Dreyers ice cream more or less go no further than the Western Rockies.
- pests 7y ago
  It's interesting you mention Yuengling beers. I grew up in Michigan and never heard of them. I was visiting a friend in Pennsylvania over the new years and I was introduced to this beer as one of the oldest breweries in Pennsylvania. Everyone was excited that they were were now in more areas. Coming from just a short distance away in Michigan I have never heard of them.

murgindrag 7y ago

The world was very different before the Internet. It was different before air travel was affordable to the masses. It was different when long-distance phone calls between states were significant expenses, and you tried to keep call length down to a minute or two.

function_seven 7y ago
Yeah, I remember all those things (well, I was too young to know the price of a coach ticket, but I do remember no Internet and having to ask permission before making a long-distance call) I just looked up the maker of the PeeChee, and it was originally a company based in Michigan. Maybe the man quoted in the article was being loose with the dividing line? A lot of products had national distribution back then, so I'm inferring from the quoted passage that PeeChee folders were just more popular on the West Coast vs. the rest of the country. But why?
- wkearney99 7y ago
  Long distance, ugh, if you made a friend while on vacation you knew you weren't going to be able to talk to them much if they didn't live in your town. Dad would give us the 'death stare' if the phone bill came in with long distance charges on it.
- stan_rogers 7y ago
  Not in the States, but in my neck of the woods, variations on the Duo-Tang filled more or less the same niche in the '60s and '70s. They could be had with inside cover pockets in addition to the three-ring binding fasteners and with three-ring punched "spines" to be added to a more substantial binder. So you had an expandable notebook (that could hold plain, lined and graph paper as appropriate for the page) along with holders for loose scraps - and turning in your notebooks now and again for marking was a thing.

drewcoo 7y ago

The article needs a fact check. Pee-Chees existed in the midwest ages ago. They were first introduced in Michigan. I have no idea about the veracity of the rest, but reader beware.

jonhohle 7y ago

Growing up in the Midwest in the 80s, I was very aware that trends from California took 1 to 3 years to make it to Milwaukee. My wife, a native Arizonan, had several fads sweep through her school years before mine (most recently, we talked about hyper color shirts, she had one in third grade, I never saw one until 5th). We’re on the cusp of Gen X and Millennial and I feel like my attitude and constitution tend to have more Gen X similarities while she tends to show more Millenial attributes (slightly). I’ve often wondered if that cultural delay affects the generation with which people on the borders identify.

bane 7y ago

National distribution in the U.S. is an immense affair. Beyond the expense of advertising in local markets, it took the intensive development of several layers of massive infrastructure projects before we've arrived at today's level of "effortless" distribution. The principle problem is that the United States has no domestic East-West waterway option. No matter how good your rail and road shipping system is (and the U.S. has among the best in the world for freight), you can fit a lot of train's worth of goods into a single big container ship. Rail also only gets you so far, as you need local trucking links, large inter-modal warehouses and so-on. What really happened was the rise of the trucking industry in the late 70s and early 80s coinciding with the rise of big-box stores like Walmart. This built all of the secondary and tertiary infrastructure -- and capacity -- to move whatever stuff you wanted wherever you wanted, pretty cheaply. However, there's also two major East-West barriers in the U.S., the Mississippi river, which has largely been overcome but was a major geographic barrier in an earlier age, and the Rockies, which both involve a large energy cost to get over, but also have unreliable roads in certain areas during large parts of the year. Many many large brands exist only on one side of their respective barriers or the other. Yuengling beers for example, more or less don't go any further than the Mississippi, while Dreyers ice cream more or less go no further than the Western Rockies.

pests 7y ago
It's interesting you mention Yuengling beers. I grew up in Michigan and never heard of them. I was visiting a friend in Pennsylvania over the new years and I was introduced to this beer as one of the oldest breweries in Pennsylvania. Everyone was excited that they were were now in more areas. Coming from just a short distance away in Michigan I have never heard of them.