When I was a kid there were often commercials (shown, I think, in the morning hours when I was watching cartoons) informing people they could get information on a number of things from the U.S. government by writing to an address in Pueblo, Colorado. I haven’t seen one of those in years (maybe I should start watching Saturday morning cartoons again), and the only reference I hear nowadays is in The Dead Milkmen’s song Stuart.
A quick search turned up this page, which appears to be the site for the government pamphlets. Have any of you gotten a pamphlet from Pueblo, Colorado, either back when the TV spots were on or later? Is the site being promoted as the mail-in address was promoted in the '70s?
There still is a Government Printing Office in Pueblo which produces the Consumer Information Catalogue. They’ve just been actively pushing people away from print to on-line for quite a few years. I’d be curious to know how many requests they still get for printed materials.
I never actually wrote in requesting any of that information.
Maybe I should have been more clear. If I recall correctly, the commercial included voiceovers of various people asking random questions. The last question asked (during a break in in the script) was “Do I need a visa to travel to Bogota?”, asked in a nasally voice. I’m not sure why that has stuck with me through the years, but it has.
Does anyone know if they have any Consumer Information Catalogue t-shirts? If they do it would be sort of a cool retro-geek think to wear. I stopped in Pueblo once to look for just generic cheesy “Pueblo Colorado” t-shirts which would almost be close enough but I couldn’t even find those (the shoppes were all antiquing or boutiques.) (No, I didnt go out of my way, I happened to be passing by Pueblo on my way to Estes Park.)
Sweet! Thanks for the link. I wrote to them way back when I was a kid, back in the days before the interweb gave everyone access to infromation on everything. Don’t even remember what it was, How to become a scuba diver or something similar I’m sure, but the information was great I remember. I will be wasting a lot of time here.
I am so glad that I’m not the only one who has restored useless info from my youth that comes back to haunt me in the form of an OCD event. I’m so glad that I can easily go online and find others, just like me who have already put forth all the effort to make available the information that my nagging mind is requesting.
Next up… “I’m Louis the lifeguard and happy to say, I rescued a drowning potatoe today…”:rolleyes:
(our general term for revived old threads; in case Sue checks back)
Actually I can remember my Dad sending away for a few over the years; memory says late 1960s. But what the subjects were is lost in the fog of not really caring much about it back then.
It’s just a distribution center, and at one time, when most requests came through the mail, I suppose it made sense to have those requests go to the actual shipping center.
Now, if a government agency uses that distribution center (not all do), most likely your request will be directly online with whatever agency authored the materials, and you won’t even know if the materials are actually coming from the Pueblo distribution center or not.
In other words, the address of the center is no longer relevant, so it’s no longer necessary to mention the center itself, and that’s why you don’t hear about it anymore, even if it is the origin of the materials you order.
Waaay back when, a guy with an amazing meteorite collection* came to our school. I was one of the helpers for the day doing setup, explaining stuff, packing up.
He was handing out forms for the GPO. Fill it out, send it in, get free docs. Okay, so I did. Oops.
And for years afterwards I got regular mailings listing new publications that were available. An amazing amount of basically unwanted stuff.