when the door to door encyclopedia sales man knocked on my door childcraft

Fri Jul 20, 2018

i'm going to talk about something that i believe is extinct

the door to door salesman, specifically, the the door to door salesman encyclopedia sales man

sometime in the late 70s or early 80s,

the door bell on my home rang. my parents answered it. it was a salesman, who was going door to door throughout the neighborhood

he spoke to my parents about interesting them in the sales of an encyclopedia set.

at some point he observed my parents had children, so he interested them in a sales of a set of books specifically geared for young children and reading

child craft

the text size was large and was written to get children of school age interested in reading.

my parents agreed.

we got the first set.

what i don't remember clearly is if he had them on hand or if they came in the mail, but i got this set



and that's exactly what they looked at. and they covered a lot of material that my school didn't cover.

one of the books was a book of fairytale and talked about the troll under the bridge eating passersby
#2 stories and fables

#6 the green kingdom
i liked the plant book and it talked about the venus fly trap, then at the grocery store they sold venus fly traps.

#5 about animals
the animal book talked about all the common animals and birds

#14 about me, talked about my body bones and muscles. stuff i couldn't see.

world and space book had a picture of venus and mars and the planets and the sun. it even had a section on the end of the world, and it looked like a dead whale with a small draft star as an eye of this whale

the purple book was for parents and talked about common childhood diseases. i read it and it talked about puberty which my parents never told me. it also talked about menstruation, but i didn't ask about it. it was the first time i learned of such topics

the holidays and customs #9 and #3 children everywhere talked about holidays not only in the usa but all over the world in south america africa china japan as well as children in other places

here i am living my life in the states, and there were other children in other parts of the world

#11 make and do had actual instructions on how to make stuff out of paper like a collage and diorama. i remember learning that word from that book.

several years later when i was like in third and fourth grades
in the mail box i got additional books, one was on insects, the other on american indians where i learned about chief joseph of the nez perce, story of the sea where i learned about the bermuda triangle

all this from the books.

i actually read the books my parents bought

one, there was no internet no facebook iphones ipads in the 70s, two no computers no pc's three tv was kinda crappy and frequently the tv shows were not interesting or re-runs. same episodes i've already seen.

also during winter there's not a whole lot to do.

i'm not sure they were a good investment in today's world since kids have so many distractions with iphones and ipads and youtube

but as a kid from the 70s, those books were the only source of written information of the world outside my home and school, and they covered a lot of topics, like factories in how things are made, that my school didn't cover.

some topics those books didn't cover, was religion and homosexuality.

i'm not sure those are good topics for young children and their families.

the topics they do cover takes a lot of reading over a long time.

sadly when i moved, in order to save on weight, and i was entering high school, we threw them away. so all i have left are my memories.

they have newer version of these books but i'm not sure if the content is the same.

this is exactly what they looked like



so sometime in the 1970s a door to door encyclopedia sales man knocked on my door and every door in the neighborhood.

i don't know how much they costed as i was a young child and my parents paid for it, but i did end up reading them as i was learning how to read starting in kindergarten.

i've not seen them since childhood but i still have memories. my childhood would be very different if they hadn't bought those books.

i actually read those books and frequently i used my imagination, remember there was no internet in those days, to try to make sense of it. i guess that got me more receptive to dungeons and dragons

for me the most important lesson from these books is that if you read books, esp nonfiction books, you can acquire knowledge

i ended up in the blue birds elite reading in elementary school but my reading comprehension is unbalanced as Snoke would say of Kylo Ren. i can read factual based material like on the SAT/ACT/GRE reading sections, and answer questions and score high, but i really struggle with classic literature like Shakespeare. and the actual stories of classic literature don't interest me, i prefer comic books, and star wars.

of course the idea of reading to gather information seems alien to RDI

for example, i am NOT a cpu engineer though sometimes i wish i was. but i built my own computers via newegg and ebay, and i've read about the ryzen and intel core and about topics like superpipelining, superscalar, multithreading, cache, out of order execution, in order execution, trace cache, uops, risc vs cisc, memory hiearchy, latency, bandwidth, alu's, etc, on anandtech tomshardware etc. i also read debates in operating system between monolithic and microkernal, and various programming languages pros and cons, compilers, etc. i also read about ebola and wow scary stuff.

i've read books on time travel and learned for example, about mctaggart's famous discussion that time is not real, and his division of time into a-series and b-series.

the fiction i like to read are star wars comics jedi vs sith.

i promise you no rdi, not tricia griffth, not delmar england or cynic or superdave has ever read



i was going to zap superdave over and over again with force lighting, bringing up topics scientific principles and material these books cover, how they apply to Jonbenet, and ask superdave over and over how can he be so ignorant.

i was going to ask superdave how actual forensic trace examiner and what theories they use to reconstruct a crime scene from trace evidence. since superdave has never studied these textbooks and i have, i was going to zing him with some sith lightening. my favorite power.


instead superdave went sith and sithed me in my sleep. it's ironic. i can read other books but not save myself.

It’s interesting that you feel like you did not save yourself from SD/FotD. He is not interested in finding the truth and you are. Which is why, I presume, you refer to books like Crime Reconstruction. At the moment I am awaiting a reply from him in which I anticipate him trying to ream me a new one over parroting back to him something he said about IDI. This was in response to me asking a RDI why they are so resentful of IDI? And he said something like he was sick of IDI helping notorius criminals get away with murder. So I asked him why he was helping a notorious crimal get away with murder.

My guess is He’s going to get all righteous about his point of view. He will question my morals. He thinks Boulder is full of corruption. His logic is hard to follow. And if you point that out to him, he gets all insulted. Lately, he keeps referring to proof of said corruption which for legal reasons he can’t say. What bullshit!

yeah but if u like star wars as much as i do, he's awesome lol. i always wanted a sith apprentice and sure enough he killed me

Are you defeated? Because you don't sound "dead" to me. And the warrior language falls within the community of suspects I sense may have committed the crime of murdering Jonbenet Ramsey. Lets talk about how ninjas are like the Star Wars characters.

I will never forget, I got to Boulder a month after Star Wars was released in 1977. The Pearl Street Mall was nearing completion, and I got a job in a storefront office. I had only been there a few weeks. I looked out the window and saw Darth Vader cruising down the bricks like he was flying. I hadn't seen the movie yet. I had no idea. It was one of those strange things that used to go on in Boulder.

wow that's a long time ago LOL.

i was an infant then lol

Sometimes I think getting older is getting wiser. So, I think I'll go watch some Star Wars. I have access to my stepdaughter's movie collection. It appears she has them all. And she's a POP Artist. She made me a cup I drink coffee from in the morning. It's Vader. Maybe it means something. IDK