Are You Smarter Than The Smartest Clothespin?

Goodness, how did they ever think up such a brilliant promotional scheme?

Still, several questions do spring to mind:

1. Is there some odd, unspoken connection between drain cleaner and clothespins?

2. Do people who clean drains NEED clothespins? Do they clean the drain with them?

3. Of course, of these are the smartest clothespins you’ve ever seen, perhaps THEY do the plumbing? (Now that would make me buy GIllett’s).

4. Did people in Windsor, Ontario in 1952 really care about what color or how fashionable the little pegs were that hold stuff up on the clothesline?

5. And why oh why will the children want some too? (I assume they means the clothespins, and not the drain cleaner).

(As for this last, maybe they wanted to make clothespin dolls. Shirley Jackson mentions having made lots of those as a teenager in the early 1930s, so many that she got sick of them. She and a friend made 431 of them, and she describes the craft at length in Raising Demons (1957), the sequel to the equally wonderful Life Among the Savages (1953), about her children and family life. I highly recommend them, as well as just about everything else Shirley Jackson ever wrote).

Cheap and Unreliable

That’s right, poke that fellow right in the eyes. That’ll teach him to complain about your cakes. Six months of cheap and unreliable, indeed – and she doesn’t really mean the baking powder, does she.

It’s not just the “getting married on $20 a week” that takes courage – you want to try fixing meals for Mr. Blackburn. Try and economize on baking powder and there’ll be a quarrel: “my husband said he’d rather have some bread and butter.”

If he was having dinner here, that’s what he’d get all right. And he can go hunt it down himself, too.

At least he didn’t bring home a bunch of important clients. And I guess threatening to eat bread and butter is not going to cause a complete marital disconnect. Or is it? Is this Blackburn’s special code for serving papers? (There’s another meal option that must be occurring to Mrs. B. about now).

This 1930s ad is from the Ladies’ Home Journal, which is the home of “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” That was my favorite part of LHJ when I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s. It was my mother’s LHJ, but i made sure I kept up. They still run this feature, a lot of people like it, but to me it’s not the same. I really wish I had saved them all. But I was in grade school, I didn’t know!

Maybe I’ll revisit some of the old Can This Marriage Etc., in future posts.

The Blackburns are happy now, though, thanks to Royal Baking Powder. Why, look at the smile on Mrs. B. up at the top left there! I’ll bet she’s making him a really special cake, don’t you? That’ll teach him to whine about “poor-flavored and dry” cake!

What kind of cake do you think she’s whipping up, anyway?