So, first, is this right? Are there East Coasters out there who know about and used Pee-Chees?
And if not, then please let me back up. Pee-Chees were, on one level, ordinary school supplies. They were yellow-orange folio folders with pockets on the inside that would fit no more than 20 or so pages each of letter-sized paper. The inner pockets had all kinds of helpful stuff, like metric conversion tables and weights and measures (which prevented me from ever learning how to convert cups to pints to quarts to gallons). They were cheap -- either 39 or 69 cents, if I remember correctly -- though they didn't last long, particularly in rain or sweaty palms.
On another level, Pee-Chees were basically the canvas on which adolescence was writ. The cover scenes of wholesome midwestern 50s vigor (a tennis player, two football players, and three relay runners) were so impossibly square that they begged revision, and the low-grade paper stock obliged. Pee-Chees, unlike vinyl binders, took and held pencil and ink, and you could actually erase the pictures by rubbing them with a pencil eraser or a moistened finger. If your Pee-Chees didn't instantly sprout thought or speech bubbles; if the tennis player didn't grow tentacles and an afro; if the runners didn't find themselves sprinting from monsters or flames or social outcasts; if the football players didn't settle into unfurtive intimacy -- there was something wrong with you. Pee-Chees became transitory displays of artistry and temporary records of hormonal tides, a frothy accumulation of names and phone numbers and visual puns and scrawled pre-smartphone flirtation quickly washed away by the next crisp, unfraying PeeChee.
I'm sure that places where Pee-Chees were not ubiquitous must have evolved some way to vent the teenaged energy that Pee-Chees conducted. But until I know what that was, it's hard for me to believe that you non-Pee-Chee people haven't been deprived of an essential part of American adolescence.
