Memory lane leads to Sears, where else?

Sears Roebuck & Co. isn’t the first chain store I’ve missed, but it’s the one that got the most of my time and money — and almost always for something for the home.

RIP. Sears Holding Corp. filed for bankruptcy last month, and investors face having to pick the bones out of a bunch of loans.

Morningstar Credit Ratings said 28 commercial mortgagebacked securities loans with an allocated property balance of $2.17 billion were exposed to stores that will close.

Sears stores are collateral for 13 of them, with a balance of $707.1 million, and are noncollateral tenants at properties backing the other 15, totaling $1.46 billion.

“Collateral performance,” “pro forma occupancy,” “elevated risk” — not words that usually spark a trip down memory lane.

But it’s Sears. Send in your memories, please.

Mine start with Sears Toughskins jeans — oh, wow, no, wait.

My very first Sears memory, I kid you not, was the catalog hanging by baling wire in the old outhouse at Uncle Buster’s farmhouse in the Moffett bottoms of the Arkansas River in Sequoyah County, circa 1970.

The outhouse was not in use, as far as I know, what with indoor plumbing and all. But there it sat out back, and there the Sears catalog hung (not for reading, but for otherwise “using.” Google it, young people.)

OK, now Toughskins jeans, early 1970s, when Sears had everything. Tough on the skin. They came with reinforced knees. And in colors besides denim blue: kid khaki, red, green even. Mr. Green Jeans must have gotten a cut of the sales.

Next, circa 1979, trip after trip to where America shopped for sack after sack of the roll pins that held the mower assembly onto the Sears riding mower that made my life in charge of a big country yard so much easier.

It ate those pins like candy. Replacing them before, and while, mowing, was just part of mowing. That kind of thing didn’t faze my brother, a machinist. It helped me decide

on college: Go! Go anywhere! Just go!

Next, 1980-1988: Contact lenses. There was more for my life at Sears, but it seemed weird to go to an eye doctor and get lenses from Sears. Still does. They’re not jeans. They’re contact lenses.

Next, 1987: Much, much more for my life. Thanks to the Sears Congressional Internship Program, I spent the spring semester “at” Oklahoma State in Washington, D.C., as a press intern for a Georgia congressman. It changed my life.

Next, 1989: Spoiled by Pong and Atari at home, then the mainframe computer system at The O’Collegian at OSU, then this incredible thing in the congressman’s office called a “FAX machine,” and another mainframe at my first newspaper job, I decided to buy my very own computer.

It was an IBM PC from Sears, with an 8-inch floppy disk drive, I think, dot matrix printer and MS DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System), costing $2,000-plus, on a new Sears Charge Plus account, maybe more; I kind of suppressed the memory.

After six months, I never could figure it out, and Sears, bless its heart, took it back and refunded my money. After six months. I was impressed.

Something happened in the 1990s, but Sears, pushing its softer side, stopped being part of my life.

Next, in 1999, to the Sears at Quail Springs Mall for a washer that lasted until I killed it with a screwdriver left in a pair of jeans, a dryer that we still have, and a sideby-side refrigeratorfreezer that lasted until just last month.

Then, many sets of tires, batteries, some lawn and garden tools and other auto and household staples, including another washing machine, right up until the Quail Springs Sears closed in 2014.

After that I used to drive the 20 miles from Edmond to the old-timey stand-alone Sears at 4400 S Western Ave., which closed earlier this year, for sales but mainly for nostalgia.

Sears. Where else?