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Continuing a look at bygone items, picssent by Steve M, comments by myself.
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Popeye was the cartoon of the day when we were kids..
The character began as a strip in 1933 and eventually featured in comic books, television cartoons, video games, hundreds of advertisements and peripheral products ranging from spinach to candy cigarettes.
I loved the 1980 Robin Williams’ movie version of Popeye:
Popeye was based on a real life person, Frank "Rocky" Fiegel.
He was born in 1868, in Poland and, as a child, immigrated to the United States with his parents.
As a young man, Rocky went to sea. After a 20-year career as a sailor in the Merchant Marines, Fiegel retired and was later hired by Wiebusch's Tavern in the city of Chester, Illinois as a ‘Bouncer’ to maintain order in the rowdy bar. He quickly developed a reputation for always being involved in fighting (and usually winning). As a result, he had a deformed eye ("Pop-eye"). He also ‘always’ smoked his pipe, so he always spoke out of one side of his mouth.
In his spare time as a bouncer, Rocky would entertain the customers by regaling them with exciting stories of adventures he claimed to have had over his career as a sailor crossing the ‘Seven Seas.’
The creator of Popeye, Elzie Segar, grew up in Chester and, as a young man, met Rocky at the tavern and would sit for hours listening to the old sailor’s amazing ‘sea stories.’ Years later, Segar became a cartoonist and asked Fiegel if he could model his new comic strip character, ‘Popeye the Sailor Man,’ after him. Fiegel was flattered and agreed.
Segar claimed that ‘Olive Oyl,’ along with other characters, was also loosely based on an actual person. She was Dora Paskel, owner of a smallgrocery store in Chester. She apparently actually looked much like the Olive Oyl character in his comics.
There is a lesson to be learned from Popeye that goes way beyond eating your spinach:
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Can you still buy ice creams with little wooden spatulas (or with little plastic spoons)?
These were not a feature of my childhood, ice creams being confined to ice blocks (the best being Sunny Boys) and, if going upmarket, Paddle Pops.
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Known as a mangle, it was used to press the water out clothes before putting them on the washing line to dry.
Our mangle was more advanced, my mother’s washing machine having a mangle as part of the device, like this:
We did however adopt the wire between trees and branch lifter for drying:
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Numerous products in tin cans came with their own keys for opening, although you had to be careful not to cut yourself with the razor sharp metal edges.
Some tins removed a narrow strip:
Some used the key to remove the whole top, still with sharp edges:
Some used a tab to peel back the top:
Gone.
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Most butcher’s shops and fruit and vegetable shops had scales, the food being sold by the kilo (pounds in those days). Food is still sold using scales, including at the food counters in the supermarkets, but the scales are now much more advanced. Alternatively, buy the items already packages with clear wrapping and displaying both weight and price.
When we were young the meat was cut up on the large butcher blocks visible to customers, meat was hanging upon hooks and there was sawdust on the floor:
What used to be this:
is now this:
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Although women wore garters, suspenders, whatever, with stockings when we were kids, I didn’t see any of this sort of thing. Why would we? We were kids.
With the advent of pantyhose from 1959, as a response to the rising hemlines and the advent of the miniskirt, stockings became less and less popular.
The term "pantyhose" originated in the United States, a combination of and hosiery.
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I don’t know if it was legend or not but we grew up believing that the pink part was to erase pencil, the blue to erase ink.
I noticed that you can still buy erasers like this on ebay, the description being “Pelikan BR40 red Blue rubber for pencil and ink high quality eraser”
In some cases, the more things change, the more they remain the same.
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