Razor Blades in the Wall and Other Artifacts

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Some time ago, when our daughter Kate was home for a few days from grad school at Carolina, I prevailed upon her to help me redo a utility room and adjoining half-bath.

At one point, while preparing the walls for repainting, I loosened the screws on a 1950s-vintage medicine cabinet and lifted it out of the wall.

“Ewww!” Kate exclaimed, peering into the empty cavity. “What’s that?”

What it was was a pile of rusty old double-edge razor blades of Gillette and Schick brand that had been languishing there in the dark on a piece of two-by-four framing for half a century or so.

“How did they get in there?” she asked.

Pulling open the heavy mirrored door of the cabinet, which now rested flat on its back on the equally dated toilet, I pointed out the little slot, labeled “Razor Blades,” through which the slender little artifacts of an earlier time had been deposited one by one over the months as they grew too dull for some “Madmen”-era guy to keep shaving with.

When I was a kid, I explained, that was par for the course. Hardly anybody had an electric razor, and those wicked-looking double-edge blades were the only kind there were. Even after you replaced one with a new blade, it was still sharp enough to cut the heck out of someone emptying the trash. So the makers of medicine cabinets came up with that simple and ingenious way of putting them out of harm’s way for some future home wrecker to deal with.

“Ewww!” Kate repeated as she examined this little collection of relics, as alien to her as something out of King Tut’s tomb.

This episode, along with the experience of daily regarding an increasingly elderly-looking stranger in the mirror every morning, got me to wondering about other things that were so familiar to me in childhood but are as quaint as buggy whips and bundling boards to younger generations. Below are just a few examples that come to mind.

— Curb feelers: These were footlong wire appendages, shaped like insect antennae, that clamped to the right rear fender of your Chevy, Ford or Plymouth and alerted you with a scraping sound, amplified by the fender acting as a sounding board, when you were getting too close to the curb. (Come to think of it, that was a pretty good idea.)

— Party lines: Many telephone customers, especially rural ones, had to share a phone line with several other households, each of which had a distinctive ring pattern. (My grandmother’s was one long and two shorts.) A common entertainment was listening in on your neighbors’ calls.

— Four-digit phone numbers: Younger phone users may be surprised to learn that their family’s number may once have lacked those first three digits (which used to be alphanumeric when they were first added, as in Pennsylvania 6-5000). Back in Missouri, our home number was 3104 — before it became Fleetwood 8-3104. Area codes came even later.

— Toni home permanents: In near-universal use among womenfolk in my childhood, these hair-curling kits were designed to give you a “permanent wave” — which, in fact, was anything but. When my mother and my aunt would break out Toni sets to begin ministering to each other while jabbering like mutually grooming monkeys, I would flee the house to escape the overwhelming ammonia smell.

— Antenna rotors: In those early pre-cable days, the average home might get decent black-and-white TV reception from two or three broadcast stations by using this device, usually made by Channel Master, to rotate the ubiquitous rooftop aerial for optimum position.

— Rabbit ears: For those who couldn’t afford an outside antenna and rotor, this internal job sat on top of the TV set, which was build like a piece of wooden furniture.

— Deposits on pop bottles: Instead of throwing away empties or recycling them (unheard of back then), you saved them up and then hauled a bunch of them back to the store, where they would bring maybe two cents apiece. The local bottling plant would then wash and refill them.

— Two-color typewriter ribbons: Some of the more advanced typewriters had ribbons that allowed you to flip a switch and type in red for extra emphasis. Very high-tech.

I could go on, kiddo, but I’m out of space. I’ll tell you about four-holer Buicks, carbide lights, Zippo lighters and slide rules some other time.

Older readers with memories of other obsolete curiosities are invited to share them.

Steve Bouser is editor of The Pilot. Contact him at (910) 693-2470 or by e-mail at sbouser@thepilot.com.

More like this story

SCCstudent 1 year, 8 months ago

Mr. Bouser => great story. But you and Toda must be the oldest men in Moore County....

"The local bottling plant would then wash and refill them." There is a law still on the books in NC about it being a misdemeanor to contaminate a reuseable soft drink bottle. People used to put their filtered cigarette butts in the bottles which were difficult to wash out if not impossible. Great reading....

OldSpook 1 year, 8 months ago

Mr. Bouser,

Yes, I hate to admit it but I remember too. Remember when we made popcorn over the fire or in a pot on the stove and not the microwave? Microwaves were something that Ming-the-Merciless used on Flash Gordon.

I remember my dad had a remote control for his television, it was three sons who understood; "Boy, go change the channel." After all, we had 5 channels up here in the city.

Speaking of Buick, I remember the cool kids would reorder the letters to cikub (Can I Kiss You Baby) on their cars. These were the kids that also used spark plugs on the end of their exhaust to ignite the gas fumes for some really cool flames. (At least when they worked)

SPAM (Special Processed American Meat) was floured and pan fired at least once a week and nobody really cared what was actually in this stuff. Mom would fry up about 2-3 tins and serve it along sides of greens (cooked with ham hocks), fried green tomatoes and cornbread. On the occasions that SPAM was too expensive for the family budget, mom would fry up some salt pork in the same manner, great stuff.

And if I may paraphrase, What ever happened to Randolph Scott?

lovemoorecounty 1 year, 8 months ago

I remember when my grandmother was the "Soda Jerk" at the local drug store and the straws were actually made of paper. They usually didn't last as long as it took to drink the soda.

intrepidreader 1 year, 8 months ago

Guys, half the stuff you remember from the Stone Ages is still around today, like rabbit ears, antenna rotors, Zippo lighters (all the cool dudes in movies still use them), and of course, Spam. And for reasons absolutely beyond my ken, self-adhesive fake chrome port holes are a big fad these days, showing up on every make of car except Buicks.

One of the interesting things about living in a house that's been in my family for nearly 70 years is coming across things from past eras that would baffle kids today. In a forgotten recess of a kitchen cabinet, I found a stack of three-partitioned aluminum TV dinner containers. Alongside them was a coffee percolator--remember those? How they'd fill the house with the smell of coffee, or as the ads always said, "fresh-perked coffee". Seeing the magnificent simplicity of this utensil makes me wonder how we were talked into consigning it to oblivion in favor of complicated, expensive, counter space gobbling, hard to clean coffee makers.

And don't get me started on Christmas decorations, but there are boxes of Shiny Brite ornaments from the WW2 years illustrated with Santa shaking hands with Uncle Sam.

None 1 year, 8 months ago

No SCCstudent ~ Mr. Bouser is older, but I remember those things he mentioned in his article..

clodfelter37 1 year, 8 months ago

How about the ice man delivering ice for the ice box. Houses had porches on the front so you could sit in the cool evenings before we had air conditioning. The bicycle with small front tire and large basket delivering groceries from the store. Candy cigarettes. Wax lips. Evening in Paris. Pea shooters. Black Jack chewing gum. Little wax bottles with sweet liquid inside. Catching lightening bugs.....where did they go...In Carthage the fire siren would wail at 12 noon to let the workers at the saw mill and the sewing plant know it was time for lunch.