Let Me Tell Y’all A Story is a weekly column that’s usually not focused on sports. It’s brought to you by our partners at Chuck Owens, Alfa Insurance.

Y’all remember Christmas catalogs?

Amazon sends out a little flimsy piece of propaganda now that it calls a catalog, but it’s a pale shadow of the all-time goat, the Sears Wish Book.

Pre-internet, the catalog was a lifeline to the greater outside world. It showed you stuff that you might not even know about if you’d never left Southwest Mississippi.

Family bibles, phonebooks, encyclopedia sets, and catalogs – those were the sacred texts of every family home in the 1980s.

We’d take to it with a pen and circle all the things we’d hope for Santa to bring on Christmas Day.

The toys were in the back, right around the same spot where the gospels are located in a bible.

There might be clothing in front of those pages and agricultural equipment afterwards, but as kids, we could always flip right to the toys in the Sears catalog.

Do you have an item that you can remember wanting and knowing it would never happen?

Maybe because it was too big or maybe because it was too expensive.

Or maybe, because of both.

As a child, I was a consumer of all things G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero. I watched cartoons, I read the comic books, and I played with the toys.

I didn’t just own them, I played with them. Down by a pond overflow that ran behind our house, I’d float their plastic boats on water missions.

In the side yard, there was a spot that was perpetually free of grass. None could grow there thanks to the amount of diesel, oil, and grease leaking of my dad’s work truck each day.

That was where I would take my action figures and recreate battles held on the sands of a desert.

I took an M-80 once and even blew a Joe apart. RIP Dusty.

I had the good guys, The Joes, and I had the bad guys, members of Cobra. And I had all their accessories and a few vehicles and planes.

What we all wanted, and no one ever got, was the greatest G.I. Joe toy of all time.

It was the one you circled in the Wish Book, but assumed that only kids in the top 1% of the nice list actually received it.

The G.I. Joe USS Flagg Aircraft Carier.

It was 7.5 feet long and 2.5 feet across.

Thanks to the internet, I just looked up what it retailed for back in the 1980s. and was shocked to see it would only set you back $89.

Adjusted for inflation, that would be around $350 today.

So maybe it wasn’t just that my parents and the others couldn’t afford it. Maybe it was just about the fact that a whole addition would have had to been built on the house to store it.

I’ve got a couple of those old G.I. Joe figures that I’ve picked up over the years. I was actually gifted an old Joe lunchbox for my birthday a couple week ago. Just a few days later, I was watching Stranger Things and a really annoying ginger in the new episodes was prominently carrying the same box.

What I won’t be owning anytime soon is the USS Flagg. They’re still out there, being listed on Ebay, waiting for some 40-year-old with cash and an unfulfilled childhood to pull the trigger.

In 2024, an unopened USS Flagg sold for over $40,000. Most listed online for sale begin around $2,000 and are incomplete in their parts.

So, until Barstool buys Y’all Sports and drops a bag, I’ll just keep wishing for the USS Flagg like I have for the past 35 years.