Nestor Ramos’s column on the 1954 Sears, Roebuck catalog (“Pages from retail’s past,’’ Metro, June 4) brought to mind my Sears-infused 1950s childhood in Maine. My parents had grown up on hardscrabble Depression-era Aroostook County potato farms, and we lived in modest subsidized veterans housing in South Portland. My mother lucked into a job in the business office of the downtown Portland Sears.

The company, in addition to an enlightened profit-sharing stock option, offered a significant employee discount, and thus everything we owned seemed to come from Sears. Kenmore washers, Coldspot refrigerators, Roebuck jeans, J.C. Higgins bikes, Craftsman tools, Allstate tires — the list of products goes on and on. Sears helped make it possible for our family to achieve something like middle-class status and ultimately enabled me to become the first person in the family ever to graduate from college.

We did not have many books in our house, but one prominent publication was always the well-thumbed Sears catalog. It was a commonplace in the 1950s to say that if every citizen in the Soviet Union received a copy of the Sears catalog, communism would immediately collapse.

So I say three cheers for Sears and its big book.

Paul M. Wright

Boston