Before the internet existed, the best way for a company to promote and sell their products was with printed catalogs sent in the mail. A few companies still do this, but the days of catalogs for everything are long gone.
Once you purchased something from a company like this, or so much as showed interest via some other correspondence, you were likely to get added to a mailing list and would start getting catalogs from them perpetually forever. You see, even if you didn't want anything from it, chances are you'd leave it lying around and someone else would pick it up to look at in a waiting room, or bathroom, or just bored at work, because.... no internet. And certainly, no smartphones. Back when I was a kid, at breakfast we would read cereal boxes. The backs were covered with cartoons or puzzles or some nonsense to hold your attention (and upsell the product), but it didn't take long to get through that, so you'd read the sides. The ingredients. Where it was packaged. Everything. In the bathroom, if your present task required a long sit and there were no copies of Reader's Digest handy, you might even stoop to reading shampoo bottles and stuff. Maybe you guys also did such things before you got your smartphones?
Anyway, that was a big tangent, sorry. Catalogs.
Also when I was an older kid, say 13+, I already knew I wanted to be a firefighter. Aunt Karen briefly had a subscription to the trade magazine Firehouse, before I took it over. Every advertisement in there, for everything from work gloves to radios to hoses to actual fire engines and ladder trucks, had a Reader Service Card number on it. Magazines always had those paperboard postcards you could tear out of an issue and fill out if you saw it wherever and wanted to get your own subscription to it. Firehouse also had those, but in addition had the aforementioned Reader Service Cards, with numbers on it from like 100 to 250 on the back. You'd fill out the postcard with your name and address, circle the numbers of things you wanted to know more about, send the postcard back in, and they would forward your info to the various companies to respond as they saw fit.
Now, these companies don't know anyone from anyone. So when I started filling out a few Reader Service Cards, they started sending me stuff like crazy with no idea that I was not yet even in high school. I got a VHS cassette of a demo for an airport crash truck once. Tons of marketing trinkets, many posters of fire trucks in the style of posters you'd see at a car dealership. And catalogs. So many catalogs!!
One of those catalogs was an emergency services staple: Galls. You could buy nearly everything to equip your police department or fire department with this thing. You could not buy actual police cars or fire engines, and you could not buy firearms, but everything else was here. Uniforms, and genuine custom engraved badges. Protective gear. Batons and handcuffs. Holsters. EMS equipment of all varieties. Hoses and nozzles. Axes and Pike Poles. Everything! In particular, I remember the body armor suit designed for use when training police dogs, it was orange and bulky so the dogs could practice subduing real people - almost certainly whoever had lowest seniority on training day and got to dress up and look like a sumo wrestler all day!
Among all the other things, Galls always had pages and pages of emergency lights. For a middle school fire geek like me who was still so very far removed from the actual job, I admit spending too much time on these pages dreaming of how I would equip a truck myself if given the chance.
Now Dad was working for Tacoma City Light at the time, and their substation operator vans had these lame original style light bars on them, with two wimpy little amber strobes attached. Understand that the term "light bar" originated from early in emergency services when police cars and fire trucks transitioned from a simple bubble gum light in the middle of the roof, to multiple lights. But roofs were curved, and the lights need to be horizontal on all planes to be effective, so the solution was to mount a literal bar on the roof, and attach a couple of lights and maybe a siren speaker to it, like in this pic. It was about 1985, and the City Light vans still had these lame original light bars with these two dinky strobes that had been getting transplanted from one van to the next as the fleet replaced them. I was disappointed. I showed him what I thought they ought to have, especially because I knew that sometimes the substation operators ended up first to arrive at wires down or other things simply because they were closest, and felt they definitely needed more.
About six months later, Dad came to stop by the house to visit while working, but instead of calmly driving up and putting on his hazard flashers while parked in the street, he came flying up the street, and screeched to a slightly crooked halt in the middle of the road like a SWAT team rig making a surprise entrance, in a shiny new TCL van that was sporting a glorious full-width Federal StreetHawk lightbar, flashing ambers in all directions like THIS STREET IS NOW CLOSED!
I'm sure it was a big scene. Unfortunately, I wasn't home. He intended to surprise me, but didn't actually make sure I was there to appreciate the full effect. No matter, this little shenanigan impressed the hell out of ALL the kids on the block. So, while Mom had told me what happened later and what I had missed (although she had no idea what kind of lightbar it was or why that mattered), I then heard all about it from the neighborhood kids, but was still missing full context, not knowing the full story.
Later it came out. Dad had asked Mom for one of those Galls catalogs I had told him about and left lying around. New ones showed up like quarterly, so it isn't as if they were hard to come by at the house. He took it to the fleet guy for TCL, because of course he did, and convinced him to equip the new van about to come in with a StreetHawk (the current coolest lightbar at that time according to me), and made it all happen. It was unsurprisingly well received by all the guys, and became the standard for I don't know how long.
The payoff didn't quite go as he planned, but that didn't matter to me, I was still deeply impressed to see my wish come true for him and his other guys in that silly way. Even after he retired from TCL, I would see those fleet vans driving around, eight years on before moving to Nebraska the first time, still sporting those StreetHawk lightbars, and I knew my small part in how that had gone down, and how Dad made it actually happen. Good times.
You can just barely see the lightbar on the van in the photo of Dad below, hidden behind the upper edge of the open door.
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