Does any motor vehicle embody European style and hipster urbanity like the Vespa? The buzzy little Italian scooter chugged into newfound popularity in this century by being, in many ways, the antithesis of quintessential American vehicles like swollen SUVs and steroidal pickup trucks. The fussy young continental wannabe, feeling stuck in the post-millennial suburbs of Houston or Indianapolis, could zip around on a Vespa and transform their humdrum surroundings into Rome at the height of la dolce vita.

So color me sorpreso to learn that this most Italian of conveyances was sold for 16 years by the pinnacle of mainstream American retail: Sears. Rebranded as the Allstate Cruisaire, it came off the same assembly lines with the same specs - a Vespa in all but name.

“European precision and streamlined styling”

“Want a new riding thrill… a ride packed with speed and power and finger-touch control, topped off with really eye-catching style?” asked the Fall 1952 Sears catalog. “Then ride the brand new All-State Cruisaire, the newest in motor scooters that brings European precision workmanship and streamlined automotive styling right to you!” While Sears had offered other motor scooter models for years, the Allstate Cruisaire was positioned as the top-of-the-line model. (Yes, that’s the same Allstate brand as the insurance company. Sears used it for tires and other auto parts first, before expanding from outfitting vehicles to insuring them.)

Priced at $279.50 (about $3600 today), the Cruisaire wasn’t merely “a product of PIaggio & Co. of Genoa, Italy, builders of fine aircraft engines and Europe’s most popular Scooter”, as the catalog put it. It was in fact that same scooter, the Vespa, with a different badge. Could Sears have known that the very next year, Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn would zoom around on a Vespa in the hit movie Roman Holiday? If not, whatever buyer decided to import these scooters deserves credit for their foresight.

The first Crusaires were available only in a matte green color. Intentionally or not, it’s similar to the green of military hardware, at a time when millions of American men had recently had their first exposure to Europe during World War II, or while serving there after the war. Maybe that color association nudged some ex-GIs into recalling fond memories of r&r in some sun-splashed Mediterranean village.

While the Cruisaire’s motor was usually a year behind the concurrent Vespa model, it did beat its Italian twin to one innovation: a headlight mounted on the handlebars, so the beam turned with the scooter. This useful adaptation would be taken up by the Italian models in 1955.

“Power that pounds the pulses”

The suggested uses in the early catalog say a lot about who Sears saw as customers for the Cruisaire: run errands around the farm, get a paper route, ride it to your factory job. The thrust of the ad copy was about 10% style, 15% fun, 75% practicality. “Motor scooters are filling an ever-growing role in the nation’s transportation system,” ran a quote in the company’s 1952 press release, attributed in news stories to whoever managed the local Sears store. “Thousands of scooters are in daily use carrying people to school and work, running errands, making deliveries and providing healthy recreation.”

But another cultural earthquake was on the way, as newly assertive, affluent Baby Boomers reached their teens and young adult years. This was not a cohort that spent a lot of time mending fences on the back 40. Yet again, Sears seemed to sense the change in the air. “It’s Italian Racing Red,” the 1963 catalog proclaimed of that year’s Cruisaires. It would take another year for the scooters to show that color off in the catalog’s precious, expensive color pages. In that interval, the Beatles had kicked off the ‘60s as we know them.

Youth, style, and adventure were the Cruisaire’s new watchwords. The scooter was right in tune with the colorful, streamlined Swinging London look newly beloved by millions of young Americans, even if almost all were totally unaware of the mods who swarmed British high streets and holiday resorts in their Vespas.

For the next several years, the Cruisaire and the rest of the scooter line was consistently featured on the catalog’s color pages - a sure marker of its priority to Sears. The models got a couple decades younger and much more fashionable. Photos were set against collegiate campus backdrops.. Adjectives like “sleek”, “sassy”, “bold”, and “dashing” were sprinkled around liberally.

“Kitten or TIGER… it depends on who drives it,” read the excitable copy in the Fall 1966 Sears catalog. “Changeable as a mood… Smooth, quiet, and efficient as you glide through city streets… or hang on for a full-throttle start… Three quick shifts and you’re flashing down the road with a feeling of power and authority that pounds the pulses.” Finally, the Vespa, dressed in American clothes, had met its moment.

“Turns up in even the most remote corners”

A moment is all it turned out to be. The changeable moods of young people were mutating with lightning speed during these years. What seemed thrillingly new in 1964 felt passé and uptight by 1968. That was the last year Sears offered the Cruisaire. Just as the Beatles themselves got hairier and their music heavier, rougher vehicles like motorcycles and dune buggies better fit the earthier, denim-clad tastes of the decade’s later years.

Those thousands of Cruisaires sold by Sears during those 15 years didn’t just disappear. “Because they were sold through mail order, the Allstates turn up in even the most remote corners of the country,” says one vintage scooter buyer’s guide. “In fact, outside of the larger cities, you are a lot more likely to find an old Allstate than a standard Vespa when looking for a scooter. Though they are fairly common, I would still expect to pay about the same as for the equivalent Vespa.” The immaculately restored green 1951 model pictured above sold at auction for $6,325 in January 2025 - not bad for a design classic you can also deliver newspapers with.

I love reading about and looking into alternatives to giant cars and trucks to get around, though I usually live in rainy and/or snowy enough places that a Vespa has never been a year-round option. I’m currently enamored with the new Fiat Topolino, even with its absurd 25mph top speed. Ever own or want to own any sort of abnormal vehicle? Let’s hear about it in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These previous Shoddy Goods stories feature precision continental styling (I didn’t say which continent):

• Scopitones scandal: how the Mafia almost killed the music video

• From the Dauphine to Le Car: the checkered history of French cars in America

• In search of the longest soda name

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It gets weird!

When I go back to visit my hometown of St. Louis, I usually stay with my brother Jamie. One of the things I love about that is that he keeps his refrigerator well-stocked with the kinds of sodas that I can’t find in Australia. I’ve cut way back on my soda consumption at home, but when I’m at Jamie’s, I live by vacation rules.

He’s partial to the Dr. Pepper extended universe with the occasional detour into Mountain Dew territory. The flagship versions of those sodas are rare down under, let alone the kinds of flavor variants in his fridge. Most of them have so many qualifiers and details in the product name, they wind up crazy long, like Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper. That started Jamie on a quest to find the soda with the longest name - a quest I have hereby joined, as long as I don’t have to drink them all…

Smashing the seven-word barrier

Let’s define our terms. By “name”, we mean the brand and variant that the brand themselves would use to label this soda. There are a lot of words on every soda label, so when in doubt, we go with the name on the company’s official product page or press releases.

At first, Jamie thought seven words was the limit beyond which no soda name could go. Here’s just a sampling:

• Dr Pepper Strawberries & Cream Zero Sugar

• Dr Pepper & Cream Soda Zero Sugar

• Mountain Dew Baja Cabo Citrus Zero Sugar

• Pepsi Soda Shop Zero Sugar Cream Soda

• Coca‑Cola Zero Sugar Holiday Creamy Vanilla

But then Jamie discovered the “collab” between Mountain Dew and Trolli, the German-founded company that makes Gummi Bears and all kinds of sour pressed-sugar confections. This Copernican moment demolished our understanding of the universe. After finding some official confirmation of the product names, we are prepared to announce that the world record of eight words has been set by:

• Mountain Dew x Trolli Mango Pineapple Punch Zero Sugar

It is our official judgment that the “x” functions more as a hyphen than an ampersand, as it is not spoken aloud. Thus it is not counted as a word. We will not hear further appeals on this matter.

First diet, then the deluge

How did we get here? The first fizzy soft drinks aimed for a short, sharp, memorable name: Coca-Cola, Pepsi, 7-Up, and countless regional sodies from Moxie to RC to Big Red. And many of those recipes would go unchanged for generations. You knew that if you got a Coca-Cola, that could only be one thing. It would be the same one thing every time. It probably tasted just like the one your dad got, and just like the one your grandpa got, minus maybe some cocaine. So it went, decade after frosty, fizzy decade.

The first crack in this wall came in the early 1960s. In response to early low-calorie colas like No-Cal and Diet-Rite, both Pepsi and Coke launched their own diet sodas, but with one big difference. Coca-Cola the company thought Coca-Cola the brand was sacrosanct. They would not append anything to Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola would always and forevermore be just Coca-Cola, period, on Earth as it is in Heaven. Their diet soda was christened Tab.

Pepsi was not quite so precious. They decided their one-calorie cola (originally called Patio) would be easier to sell if it were called Diet Pepsi. So by 1964, Pepsi had just the one name variant, Coke had none. And as far as the Big Two were concerned, that’s pretty much where it stayed for about 20 years. (7-Up changed the name of their low-cal version, Like, to Diet 7-Up in 1970.)

In 1982, Coca-Cola finally realized that the value of one of the world’s most iconic brands wasn’t a finite treasure to be hoarded but a booster to be unleashed, especially when Diet Pepsi was beating Tab like a rented cymbal. So after a hundred years as the only Coca-Cola product, the flagship soda was joined by Diet Coke. Soon after, it was followed by Caffeine-Free Diet Coke, inaugurating the four-word era of soda names.

After dietary concerns, along came flavor variants to complicate the story further. Cherry Coke debuted in 1985, three years before Pepsi Wild Cherry. Each was also available in a diet version. The expansion of flavors built slowly through the ‘90s, with Pepsi dabbling in such misfires as the coffee-flavored Pepsi Kona and the candy-flavored Pepsi Candy, while Coke, as always, played it close to the vest. The likes of 7-Up, Dr. Pepper, and Mountain Dew were mostly content to keep it simple.

Brand x Brand

Then the 2000s hit, and all bets were off. Every big soda maker went nuts with every possibly palatable flavor combination (except actual nuts), not to mention an endless barrage of new colors, sweeteners, throwback lines, and “health” jive. This was the age that brought us Mountain Dew Baja Blast, Diet Coke Plus Vitamins, Coca-Cola Blāk, Pepsi Salted Caramel - and it’s the age we’re still living in today.

But it took a 2020s twist to finally break through to an eight-word soda name: “collabs”. This is when one junk food tastes like a totally different kind of junk food. Pepsi teamed up with IHOP for Pepsi Maple Syrup. Coke joined forces with Jack Daniels and Oreo - mercifully not at the same time. And as we’ve seen, Mountain Dew and Trolli combined for the longest soda name yet known to humankind.

The flavor arms race, the limited-time gimmicks, the collabs all look set to keep on escalating. Soda companies will keep piling on the qualifiers to grab a few moments of notoriety in an ever-more-crowded cooler case. Watch the beverage aisle, soft-drink lexicographers: the first nine-word soda can’t be far away, if it hasn’t been bottled already.

How has your soda preference changed over the years? I basically had none around the house as a kid, so when I went to 7-11, I’d mix ’em all up (sans Diet, of course). Then Mountain Dew, sometimes with a dash of cherry. These days, old man that I am, it’s pretty solidly Coke Zero outside of the occasional movie theater Mountain Dew treat. Let’s hear your picks, or what you drink instead of soda, in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

previous Shoddy Goods stories:

• 50 years of the Big Gulp, the fountain soda that changed everything

• The scariest celebrity costumes of the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s

• The weird saga of decaf

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It gets weird!

It happened at Ben Franklin. I was a kid during those years when the old five-and-dime stores were transitioning to bargain-bin dumping grounds before vanishing completely. One day, a huge pile of overstock Halloween costumes caught my eye, stacked in their gaudy Ben Cooper boxes. But on inspection, at least half of them were Father Murphy, the title character of a vaguely Christian NBC drama set during frontier days. As an actual child, I realized that grownups don’t always know everything, because what child would ever want to dress up like Father Murphy?

It must have been unsettling to have your actual human face turned into one of those cheap plastic masks with the scratchy eyeholes and the eternally stuffy atmosphere. It must have been extra unsettling when the mask looks like your empty-souled android doppelgänger. Here are a dozen costumes from the heyday of Halloween plastic, rated for how they capture the look and the vibe of their flesh-and-blood inspirations, and how effectively they curdle one’s blood.

The Beatles

The resemblance: When the Beatles first hit America, all we could see was their moptops, matching suits, and toothy grins. So they were often caricatured as looking identical to each other. These masks take some care to make them each Beatle look distinctive: angular George, sad-eyed Ringo, hawk-nosed John, baby-faced Paul. Given that the masks are also terrifying sleep paralysis demons, they could’ve been worse.

The essence: Not even in their most lysergically addled fantasias would any Beatle be caught dead in that suit: rainbow pinstripes with blue sleeves and red clown buttons, topped with a gigantic Beatles badge. If they’d actually dressed like that, they’d’ve been lucky to make it past “Love Me Do”.

Fear factor: 7/10 screams. They could just as easily be opening their mouths to chomp on your jugular as to sing “yeah yeah yeah”.

Melissa Gilbert as Laura Ingalls

The resemblance: As if the designer had never seen the show, and someone who had seen it once on a black-and-white TV described the Laura character over a staticky trans-Atlantic phone connection. No wonder Gilbert described herself as “horrified” by the costume, wondering “Wow, could Lou Ferrigno be my birth father?”

The essence: Plucky tomboy Laura is entirely absent from this bulky, near-manic visage. Nothing, but nothing on the rustic Little House on the Prairie ever shone with the radioactive glow of those flowers. Was there any quality control at these companies? Or had licensees in the ‘70s not yet become notoriously finicky about how their properties were portrayed?

Fear factor: 9/10 screams, 10/10 if you’re in a cornfield at the time.

Sorrell Booke as Boss Hogg

The resemblance: Sorrel Booke was an acting prodigy who enrolled in Columbia University at 16, and earned a Master’s from the Yale School of Drama. He was fluent in five languages and sat in as guest conductor for his hometown Buffalo Philharmonic. So good for him that he found a gig that could feather his nest in Boss Hogg. Bad for him that the monstrosity on the left is actually an identifiable representation.

The essence: Again, if any character would wear his own portrait on his chest, it’s the cornpone Caesar of Hazzard County. And the white suit is recognizably his, even with a gratuitously blue bowtie.

Fear factor: 8/10 screams. He’d know where to hide the body.

Henry Winkler as The Fonz

The resemblance: The mask has the Winkler nose, the sideburns, the Seventies-Fifties hairstyle (if a few shades too dark). But why the long face?

The essence: This could have been so easy. Black leather jacket over a white t-shirt, boom, you got the Fonz. Instead we get a sleeveless smock with a picture of a guy wearing a leather jacket on it. His catchphrase is “Ayyy!” There’s no H! And the very idea of the Fonz wearing a button that says “Happy Days” makes me wonder if the costume designer was playing a game called “Give the Coolest Character on TV the Most Uncool Costume Imaginable”.

Fear factor: 3/10 screams. I’ve been to enough rockabilly shows that I’m desensitized.

Gavin MacLeod as Captain Stubing

The resemblance: When you put a fake face onto a real face, the fake face isn’t going to have normal human proportions. The dimensional ratios will be off. Even by those standards, the exaggerated chin, mouth, and nose of this mask should’ve had Gavin MacLeod suing for defamation.

The essence: Does The Love Boat‘s captain even have an essence? The Indian chief in the test pattern had more depth than this guy. I have to admit the fixed grin and bland features do a decent job of capturing Captain Stubing’s essential emptiness.

Fear factor: 6/10 screams, more for the existential implications. Like an A24 horror movie.

Farrah Fawcett

The resemblance: Is any single detail accurate here? I’m not expecting fine art, or even Madame Tussaud’s, but jeez. I’m surprised they got the number of eyes right. It looks more like the layabout male heir of a lesser 17th century noble family than the bombshell of a million bedroom walls. I posit that this mask is the reason Fawcett vanished from the public eye for several years, emerging only when someone finally reassured her that no, she doesn’t really look like that.

The essence: Of course a mass-produced mask is constrained to a certain width. Sculpting that famous hair in molded plastic would be impossible. But I’m certain any little girl’s mom could have gotten more Farrahesque results in five minutes with a curling iron, blowdryer, and hairspray. This mask’s orangey face-curtains aren’t cutting it. And if you can’t get the hair right, you can’t get Farrah Fawcett right.

Fear factor: 8/10 screams. Anybody who’d walk around with that hair is living by a different morality.

Gabe Kaplan and John Travolta as Gabe Kotter and Vinny Barbarino

The resemblance: Welcome Back Kotter‘s title character fares better than its breakout star. Mr. Kotter’s mustache and white-guy Afro do a lot of heavy lifting, so all the mask has to do is stick with those. As for Barbarino, for all the things his mask exaggerates, it minimizes Travolta’s trademark toothy smile, making it generically unrecognizable. But hey, in a pinch, the Barbarino mask could serve as one of the other two Angels in a group costume with Farrah.

The essence: As with the Fonz, the “starburst character t-shirt” approach kills the vibe. Mr. Kotter wore some gaudy suits, but nothing this ugly.

Fear factor: 4/10 screams, although the Kotter mask could push it as high as 6/10 under the right circumstances.

Paul Reubens as Pee-Wee Herman

The resemblance: The head shape isn’t right. The eyebrows are up too high.The bottom lip’s too big and the chin’s too pointy. And yet, it’s immediately recognizable as Pee-Wee Herman. Because it nails…

The essence: Paul Reubens played Pee-Wee at a cartoon pitch, so a stylized, cartoony mask makes perfect sense. And not just cartoony in a general sense, but in a way that fits his particular aesthetic. Given Reubens’s well-documented exacting standards, and his kitsch-collector expertise, I bet he was personally involved in approving it - something that almost certainly can’t be said for anyone else on this list. Maybe by the late ‘80s, the costume industry was figuring out how to do it right…

Fear factor: 1/10 screams or 10/10 screams, depending on the context. Nothing in between.

Chuck Norris

The resemblance: Nope, late ‘80s costumes were still terrible. With the caveat that this is specifically based on a cartoon version of Chuck, from his short-lived TV show Karate Kommandos, this disquieting mask has bulges and folds in all the wrong places.

The essence: Feels more like someone who’d clear out a city bus with an agitated demonstration of his “karate” moves than a former world karate champion.

Fear factor: 10/10 screams, especially if there’s nobody else out on the street.

Merlin Olsen as Father Murphy

The resemblance: I had to include the costume that took my innocence back in 1982. It’s as upsetting as I remember. I thought Father Murphy was a Little House spin-off; not actually true, but it was produced by Michael Landon, starred Little House alum and NFL Hall of Famer Merlin Olsen, and had the same gently rustic, family-friendly vibe. The mask, on the other hand, looks like a guy who’d get into a knife fight with the Chuck Norris mask in the parking lot of a White Castle. That goes double for the creepy drawing on the shirt. TRIGGER WARNING: Not even the dog escapes. That tiny portrait of it looks like it was adopted from the kennel of Dr. Caligari.

The essence: Father Murphy was a rogue with a heart of gold, delivering folksy pioneer homilies every 46 minutes. This getup is way scarier than the fearsome Olsen was on the football field. And to think, it could have easily been avoided by not making this costume nobody asked for in the first place.

Fear factor: 10/10 screams. In fact, I just realized the loud noise I’m hearing is me screaming, right now.

All right, bad Halloween costume role call! In fifth grade I was an IRS agent, complete with a (clip-on) tie and a briefcase. In sixth grade I had the “generic Halloween costume” shirt. How about you, any childhood Halloween costumes you were particularly proud of or now embarrassed by? Let’s hear ‘em in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Remember, there’s nothing in the dark of these previous Shoddy Goods stories that’s not there in the light:

• Halloween’s Least Wanted: the mystery of peanut butter kisses

• From Jimmy Dean sausage to Beatle Bars: a history of music/food tie-ins

• The Ale Man pitches “beer’s big brother” to midcentury America

Maybe he’s a renowned author who unwinds by scuba diving, like Eugene Burdick. Maybe he’s a photographer who scales cliffs to get the perfect shot, like Ray Manley. Maybe he’s a yacht racer who runs the family sail-making business, like Colin Ratsey. He’s a man of intellect and action, of exertion and indulgence. His jaw is square, his shirts are crisp, and he’s got “a thirst for a manlier brew”: Ballantine Ale.

“Not beer?” one of his TV commercial companions invariably asks.

The Ale Man scoffs. “It’s time you graduated from beer.”

In a series of ad campaigns in the 1960s, F. Ballantine & Sons hawked ale as “beer’s big brother”, the tastier, brawnier, more mature choice for the Atomic Age man’s man. Against the prevailing trends, it was an attempt to claim space in the mainstream mass market for a more traditional brew. Was it behind the times, or ahead of them? Or both?

Of malts and men

First things first: yes, ale is a kind of beer. Originally, in medieval times, the two were distinguished by the fact that beer contained hops and ale did not. But by the late 1500s, that distinction had broken down. No less an authority than beer historian Michael Jackson (not that one), in his definitive New World Guide to Beer, refers to all ales as styles of beer. The similarly exhaustive Oxford Companion to Beer defines ale as “a broad class of beers brewed using the top-fermenting yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.”

But if you’re a beer connoisseur who’s ever offered an IPA to a visiting relative only to be asked if you have any “normal beer”, you know that “beer” as it was generally understood by 20th-century Americans is a more specific thing. Pale, golden, watery, mass-produced lagers like Budweiser, Miller, and Schlitz became so dominant after World War II that eventually a whole microbrewing revolution was necessary just to restore the diversity of pre-Prohibition American beer styles.

Ballantine, founded in 1845 in New Jersey, produced a lager in the mainstream postwar style, and promoted it heavily with the same celebrity endorsements and baseball sponsorships that other brewers used. But unlike the other major brewers, they weren’t ready to jettison the XXX Ale that had been their flagship, or their then-unique India Pale Ale (IPA), one of the only such offerings in America through most of the century. Ballantine’s initial attemps at carving out a distinct profile for ale were tentative. Was it more “crisp” and “refreshing” than beer? More “American”? More “moderate”? Or just “better”?

One 1950s campaign had famous authors “put a glass of Ballantine Ale into words.” John Steinbeck penned a mini-epic set in the desert, culminating with “Well, first, you take a big swallow to cut the crust, and suddenly you can taste again. Then you let cold Ballantine Ale rill into your parched throat like a spring rain on the desert.” Ernest Hemingway‘s paean recalled a deep-sea fishing trip: “You ought to taste it on a hot day when you have worked a big marlin fast because there were sharks after him... cool, light, and full-bodied, so it tastes good long after you have swallowed it.”

These hairy-chested, two-fisted literary exploits led Ballantine to the angle that they’d ride to the end: that ale was manlier. First with the agency William Esty Company and then, split off from the beer account in 1965, with Sullivan, Stauffer, Colwell & Bayles, they set out to make the Ale Man an American archetype.

“A man’s taste grows up when he does”

The print campaign started with the aforementioned polymaths (the scuba-diving author, the rock-climbing photographer, etc.), each one an actual person. Despite their varied interests, these bold individualists show a remarkable unanimity of opinion about the “totally different, completely rewarding” flavor of Ballantine Ale.

Before long Ballantine ran out of real guys - how many like this could there be? - and had to invent new Ale Men for the radio and TV commercials. The young executive who surfs. The rocket scientist who plays hockey. The defense attorney with a yen for skeet shooting. Between nagging refrains of the “Who is the Ale Man?” jingle, these were the “young men, blazing new trails to the future” who proved “a man’s taste grows up when he does.”

At the end of another hard-charging day, the Ale Man’s friends are always skeptical, but he patiently explains “It’s light like beer, but what a difference. Smell that aroma. That’ll tell you.” One sniff later, the ale-curious pals are convinced: “Hey, real tangy!”

If the Ale Man ads seem ridiculous today, their over-the-top overachievers and impossibly vigorous masculinity drew their share of mockery back then, too. In a parodic Sherlock Holmes story for the New York Times, humorist Russell Baker has the sleuth and Watson try to answer the campaign’s titular question. Holmes’s incisive conclusion: “Clearly, [the Ale Man] is an American who feels so insecure that he must advertise his taste as European.”

Columnist John P. McLaughlin of the Trenton Evening Times bewailed the realization that he’d never be an Ale Man: “I am not a sail manufacturer who sails racing sloops. I don’t publish eight national magazines and I have never played handball. What right, then, have I to try the bolder, keener taste of the manlier brew?” I suspect Ballantine welcomed any and all such commentary, according to the time-honored principle “don’t read your publicity, weigh it.”

Ale fellow well met

Unfortunately for Ale Men everywhere, asserting the value of flavorful beer wasn’t the only way Ballantine didn’t move with the times. They also never opened another bottling plant further west than their original New Jersey facility, so their distribution fizzled out past Chicago - a critical limitation in an era of big brewers getting bigger.

In the wave of mergers and acquisitions that swept brewing in the 1970s, if you weren’t a buyer, you were bought. Falstaff Brewing acquired the struggling Ballantine in 1972, and in turn was acquired by Pabst in 1985. The range of American beers was growing ever smaller during these years. The Newark brewery was closed, with Ballantine production shifting to Pabst facilities. Eventually only a watered-down version of Ballantine XXX Ale survived, largely in the 40-ounce bottles associated with street drunks. Oh, how the Ale Man had fallen.

In the 2010s, Pabst attempted to revive both the Ballantine IPA and the label’s once-premium reputation. By now it was just one of many (perhaps too many) in a crowded craft beer scene. But for a few years back in the 1960s, Ballantine was a lone voice for an older brewing tradition and a more complex style. It was a doomed quest, but a bold one - what else would you expect from an Ale Man?

I used to hate coffee, beer, and asparagus, and now I’d love as much of all three as my health could take. But celery’s still out. What acquired tastes have you acquired, and what do you expect you’ll never acquire? Let’s talk in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Got a thirst for a nerdier read? Graduate to the crisp, tangy flavor of these previous Shoddy Goods stories:

• RIP Schlitz… but the fun of these ‘50s ads will never die

• Why is alcohol-free beer just as expensive as the real thing?

• War, fate, and orange coffee pots: the strange saga of decaf

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It gets weird!

Hey, Jason Toon here with a new Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about consumer culture. I was surprised when I saw an ad for decaf coffee in a digitized magazine from the 1920s - I’d always assumed it was a more recent invention - but not as surprised as when I stumbled across the odd tangents in decaf’s origin story.

Some 26 million Americans will have at least one cup of decaf today, and that number is growing by 5% every year. Yet none of that ocean of coffee will be branded with the name of the first decaffeinated coffee to hit our shores - and, indeed, the first in the world, founded by the guy credited with originating commercial-scale decaffeination. What happened? The 20th century.

“Always harmless! Always wholesome!”

The story goes that in 1903, a coffee merchant in Bremen, Germany named Ludwig Roselius in the city of Bremen had a shipment of coffee beans that had been accidentally soaked in seawater. He noticed they’d been drained most of their caffeine content, but still tasted like coffee. Another legend has it that he believed that excessive caffeine had been bad for his father’s health and wanted to develop an alternative.

I can’t find anything backing either story up. What is clear is that Roselius and his partners developed an industrial-scale decaffeination process involving not only brine but benzene (now known to be basically poison). In 1906 Roselius founded a company called Kaffee-Handels-Aktiengesellschaft - Kaffee HAG for short - to produce and market this new koffeinfrei coffee, the first ever.

Roselius had a knack for marketing as well. Kaffee HAG was the first coffee to advertise in German cinemas and produced some of the most striking advertising posters of the time. Slogans like “Steady nerves” and “Always harmless! Always wholesome!” resonated with the public during the rapidly industrializing early 20th century.

Kaffee HAG quickly spread not only to the rest of Western Europe but the United States as well. By 1912, the Kaffee HAG Corporation had been established in the US and begun manufacturing America’s first decaf in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The sales pitch was basically the same: “Kaffee HAG agrees perfectly with everybody because the drug caffeine is removed. In short - all of the delights and none of the regrets.”

And so Kaffee HAG might have continued its steady march to the coffeepots of America, were it not for another German force marching into Belgium.

Sanka rise, Sanka set

When the U.S. entered World War One in 1917, the Kaffee HAG business in the United States was seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Roselius concentrated on rebuilding Kaffee HAG in war-torn Europe, at least for the moment.

In 1927, Kellogg’s purchased the severed American arm of Kaffee HAG. The cereal giant set about promoting it heavily to take market share from its rival Post’s roasted-grain hot drink, Postum. So Post, soon renamed General Foods, was who Roselius approached that same year to bring his decaffeinated coffee back to the US under a new name.

That name was an abbreviated portmanteau of “sans caffeine”: Sanka. Now General Foods had its own decaffeinated coffee to try to hang on to any Postum drinkers who might be decaf-curious. Roselius, now 58 years old, sold his share of Sanka to General Foods in 1932, to pursue other interests.

One of which, unfortunately, was Adolf Hitler, who he had first met in 1922. While Roselius was rejected for Nazi Party membership because of his suspicious tolerance for modern art, he was a “supporting member” of the SS and was appointed by Joseph Goebbels to the board of the Advertising Council of German Industry. His own crackpot racial theories differed from Hitler’s in ways that are frankly beyond my interest to parse. Roselius would come to regret his support for the Nazis before he died in 1943 - possibly strangled by Nazi agents. Lie down with dogs… anyway, if you vocal anti-decaf folks want to say decaf was invented by an actual Nazi, you wouldn’t be wrong.

In the meantime, the decaf coffee war was settled the American way: with a merger/acquisition. General Foods bought Kaffee HAG from Kellogg’s in 1937 and let the brand dwindle away, leaving Sanka the sole mass-market decaffeinated coffee in America for the next several decades. It was so dominant it became somewhat genericized, with coffee drinkers asking for “a Sanka” to mean a decaf coffee.

In turn, that success made General Foods complacent. Sanka became increasingly an instant coffee brand, its whole-bean and ground varieties disappearing. As the barista coffee market grew in the 1990s and 2000s, higher-quality coffee brands started producing their own better-tasting, less chemically treated decaf. Sanka suffered the same fate as other mass-produced instant coffee brands like Folger’s and Maxwell House. Near as I can tell, it’s now available only in institutional food-service settings in single-serve packages.

But Sanka did leave one mark on the culture. Its orange cans were so ubiquitous, for so long, that the color orange became linked in the public mind with decaf. The food-service industry started using the color to differentiate it from regular coffee. So when you see a pot of decaf coffee with an orange handle, or a carafe with an orange spout, you’re seeing the ghost of Sanka.

What’s your coffee or other morning beverage routine? I go full-caffeine, a couple cups before noon, and just black. I’m a bit fussy with a whole bean subscription and my ChemEx pour-over, but I’ve got a fondness for the cheapest cup of diner coffee I can find as well. Let’s hear what gets you up in the morning in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These previous Shoddy Goods stories are not a coffee substitute:

• Mr. Coffee Nerves, the advertising supervillain we deserve

• Jarts were banned for pretty good reasons

• Are cough drops candy or medicine? Both, kind of

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It gets weird!

I grew up in a Jarts family. Whenever we all got together, the grownups would set up the two white rings at either end of my Grandma’s little backyard. The darts would fly, the beer would flow, and the adrenaline of competition was spiked with the need for constant vigilance to keep us kids out of the way. And there were a lot of us kids. Every few turns, a cry of “wait! stop!” went up to keep one of us from wandering into the flight path. We escaped the ‘80s without serious injury, but hoo boy, there were some close calls.

The 1988 banning of metal-tipped lawn darts - widely known as Jarts, after the leading brand - is up there with the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit as a folk legend about frivolous consumer-safety overreach. As I would discover when I started digging into it, like the McDonald’s case, the Jarts ban was much more justified than the popular myth would have it. To me, the question isn’t whether they should have been banned, but how they were ever sold in the first place.

“For adults” or “family fun”?

Inventor Lawrence Barnett named his 12-inch-long, weighted, spear-tipped creations “Jarts” as a portmanteau of “javelin” and “darts”, and gave the same name to the company that made them. The earliest Jarts ads I can find, from 1958, show that they were marketed as “an outdoor game for adults”. It said so right on the box, and in ad copy like “a barrel of fun for grown-ups“ and “the sensational new Adult Missile Game“.

But even then, the messages were mixed. The very same ads would also use phrases like “fun and excitement for the whole family” and “fun for everyone, young or old.” Some of the figures in the illustrations were ambiguously kid-like, too. Still, it was clear at this point that someone at Jarts had realized that they might get into some trouble if kids played with these playthings and got hurt, so they covered themselves with the “for adults” label.

By the end of the ‘60s, Jarts resolved that ambiguity by throwing any hesitancy out the window and marketing Jarts at kids, too. The box now read “an outdoor game for the family” and unmistakable kids were added to the illustrations.

This was too much for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), who classified lawn darts as a “mechanical hazard” in 1970. This required them to be packaged with warnings to parents to keep them out of the reach of children, and barred them from being sold in toy departments of stores. The Consumer Union and the Children’s Foundation wanted the government to go further, and unsuccessfully sued the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) to ban Jarts outright. Meanwhile, Paul Robinson of Ravenna, Ohio, filed a $1 million suit against the manufacturer after his 12-year-old stepson was blinded in one eye by a flying Jart.

Of course, Robert Barnett, now president of the renamed RB Jarts Company, pleaded innocence on the usual grounds: once a Jarts set was sold, it wasn’t the company’s fault what people did with them, and anyway, who ever said life was risk-free? “It’s a game for adults, a family game if they want their older children to use it under supervision,” he told the Associated Press. “If they can put a ban on a game like this, they should ban everything there is - football, baseball, every sport there is. How far can this thing go?”

“Whipping Jarts as high in the air as possible”

The bad publicity, and the FDA requirements, didn’t seem to slow Jarts down. The ‘70s and ‘80s were an extended boom time for lawn darts. The sporting goods brand Regent took over production of the official Jarts, and dozen other manufacturers cranked up production of their own knockoffs. They became a fixture at backyard barbecues like my family’s, and by some reckonings, the most popular backyard game in the USA. Despite the “adults only” fig leaf, youth Jarts competitions started appearing at field days and school picnics.

Of course, more Jarts meant more injuries. Kids will be kids. If they get their hands on a colorful piece of plastic designed to fly, they’re going to throw it first and think about safety later, if at all. This child randomly flinging Jarts into the air at a picnic in 1982 could have been me or any other kid I knew. Dodging a falling Jart even became a game in itself. “As soon as my dad was out of sight,” wrote newspaper columnist Steve Lange, “we would be whipping Jarts as high in the air as possible, then sprinting out of the way as the giant darts fell toward us at 32 feet per second squared.”

No wonder more than 6,000 Americans went to the hospital for lawn dart injuries from 1978 to 1986, half of them age 10 or younger, and another 30 percent between 11 and 15. At least three of those kids never came home from the ER. David Snow of Riverside, California, bought an “outdoor games” set because he wanted the volleyball net. Fatefully, it included a set of lawn darts. “I never even heard about lawn darts,” he told the San Bernardino County Sun in 1989.

Not long after, on the afternoon of April 5, 1987, his son and some friends found the lawn darts in Snow’s garage and started playing with them in their backyard. One sailed over the fence into the front yard where his 7-year-old daughter Michele was playing. It struck her in the head with an estimated force of 23,000 PSI, about the same as a bullet from a .22 rifle. Michele died a few days later.

For David Snow, that was the beginning of a crusade. An aerospace engineer for Hughes Aircraft, he’d never been political before. But now, he said, “I stood over my daughter’s grave and promised her the toy who took her life would never kill another child.”

“Lining their Gucci suits with dollar bills”

He had a daunting task ahead. The Reagan administration had been elected twice on a platform of deregulation, and by now Reagan appointees made up majorities on bodies like the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). But Snow would not be daunted. He spent his life savings on his Michele Snow Foundation, and did the first public speaking in his life when he testified to Congress.

“We’re talking about [lawn dart] importers lining their Gucci suits with dollar bills,” Snow told Congress. His blunt speaking, obvious passion, endless stamina, and heartbreaking story attracted attention up to and including a segment on 60 Minutes. Against the prevailing current of deregulation, it worked. Congress and the CPSC banned steel-tipped lawn darts in October 1988.

Ever since, the ban on Jarts has gone down in folklore as a hysterical overreaction to a non-issue. A Reddit user who I’ll allow to remain nameless sums up the argument: “The fact that it is still banned because of a girl dying 35 years ago is embarrassing to this great country. You don’t need to ban things because some people are idiots.”

We’re all idiots when we’re kids, though. Is that something we, or other kids, should die for? Yes, there’s lots of pointy, heavy, dangerous stuff in the world. That doesn’t mean a weighted steel spike that falls with the same speed as a bullet should look and be treated like a toy.

The widespread affection for Jarts notwithstanding, most of America shrugged and moved on to such nonlethal backyard fling-offs as cornhole and ladder toss. As for my family, we took up the classic St. Louis DIY game of washers. It might not be pleasant to get hit with one, but it wouldn’t send you to the hospital. That sounds like more fun to me.

I’ve already mentioned the throwing stars that got banned, but somehow it seemed like every kid in our neighborhood had bb guns or pellet guns or various other weapons that they could snipe kids who dared to ride the street in front of their house. What’d you or friends have that eventually got banned, or that you think probably should have been? Let’s hear about ’em in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These previous Shoddy Goods stories are fun for the whole family, if you’ve got a super-nerdy family:

• Adventures in ‘70s meat substitutes

• What was with those “do not remove” tags on mattresses?

• The toy guns that looked too real

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It gets weird!

The early 1990s was not an easy time to be a vegetarian in America. It wasn’t just that there weren’t as many choices - it’s that it was hard to even figure out what your choices were. Whole articles in vegan ‘zines would be dedicated to breaking down what to look out for in food ingredient lists, and many a personal favorite food had to be sacrificed because of what seemed like capricious inclusions of gelatin or anchovy paste.

But when that same arbitrariness worked in your favor - when some random supermarket staple turned out to be accidentally vegetarian - the clouds parted. The most life-changing example of this, for me, was that Bac-Os, and other imitation bacon bits like Bac’n Pieces, were vegetarian. Oh, the veggie BLTs we had! Little did I know that they were the last survivor of what we can call the first wave of meat substitutes.

“Food of the future”

“From a new plant at Cedar Rapids, lowa, BONTRAE textured vegetable protein foods will flow to restaurants, schools, hospitals, food processors and consumers,” enthused the 1970 General Mills annual report. A Betty Crocker magazine ad spelled out exactly what Bontrae was to readers of Woman’s Day and Better Homes and Gardens: “It’s General Mills’ name for a food of the future made with vegetable protein… Today you can buy it in crisp little Bac-Os - a unique product with a flavor like bacon. But some day you may be able to buy Bontrae tasting like chicken or beef or ham (and very much like them nutritionally).”

So far, so uninformative. What Bontrae really was was spun soy protein, a kind of textured vegetable protein (TVP) made from, you guessed it, soybeans. Scientists had been exploring how to make fibers out of the leftovers of the soybean oil processing since the 1920s, when Henry Ford thought it had promise as a source of fabric, or plastic, even debuting a soy-plastic car in 1941. But as food scientist Nadia Berenstein explains, it was the catering for that event that really pointed to the future, with the vegetarian Ford laying on a buffet of soy steaks, soy milk, and soybean coffee.

It would be decades before the most obvious drawbacks in soy “meat” were ironed out: the taste and its propensity for causing excessive farting. Then there was the related question of who would eat the stuff. The first commercial imitation meat made from spun soy protein, in the 1950s, was FriChik, a canned chicken substitute marketed to Seventh Day Adventists, whose religious faith required vegetarianism.

But in a booming postwar America with a dozen burgers on every grill, there was about as much demand for vegetarian meat as there was for Bolshevism. Besides, Americans still remembered when soy meal was used as a “meat extender” to bulk up such World War II delicacies as “victory sausages”, and those memories were not fond.

“Picked by a computer”

It would take a convergence of economic, ecological, and health anxieties to make companies like General Mills consider the potential of soy protein. Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb was published in 1968, declaring “In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” Its nightmare scenarios of global famine quickly became conventional wisdom. A less alarmist school of thought, embodied in another bestseller, 1971’s Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé, argued that the planet produced more than enough food to feed everyone; the issue was that too much of it was used to feed animals to produce meat.

Either way, steadily rising meat prices seemed to confirm that the future of food would be increasingly meatless. By 1969, General Mills was ready to meet the trend.

They gave their non-meat the non-name “Bontrae”. General Mills president James MacFarland told the hometown Cedar Rapids Gazette that Bontrae didn’t mean anything in particular: “It was picked by a computer.” More likely, what it meant was that he hoped the meat industry (which General Mills was part of) wouldn’t see it as competition, and consumers wouldn’t associate it with bad memories of victory sausage.

Then they took the “food of the future” on a national coming-out tour of publicity luncheons. The Cedar Rapids event featured such dishes as “a seafood dish called Coquilles Saint Jacques and Bontrea alla Barbara, containing chunks of ham made from soy.” In Richmond, Virginia, General Mills experimental chef Edward Stettin told the Times-Dispatch “General Mills has been experimenting with this for 20 years,” predicting that the “ham”, “chicken” and “meat loaf” served at the event would be in supermarkets within two years.

The bacon bits already were. At first, Bac-Os made no secret of its Bontrae connection. The aforementioned Betty Crocker ad devoted as much space to Bontrae as to Bac-Os themselves. The Bac-Os jar initially bore the description “Crispy Bontrae bits with a flavor like bacon”. The product was clearly meant to introduce the public to this “new kind of food”, as General Mills was hoping the US Department of Agriculture would classify Bontrae, neither flesh nor flora. (Its petition was denied.)

Bacon bits made a lot of sense as the first mass-market Bontrae product. So much of the appeal is in the texture, and neither that nor the smoky flavor was difficult to mimic. It was also an embellishment to another dish, not a main dish itself, so nobody would really be tasting it in isolation. A small jar of shelf-stable Bac-Os was a low-risk purchase for a curious homemaker. Initial sales of Bac-Os were so strong that General Mills introduced Pepr-Os and Saus-Os, spun soy protein takes on pepperoni and sausage chunks. If Bac-Os were any indication, America was hungry for the rest of the Bontrae line.

“Just like the Army”

As you may have noticed, it didn’t work out that way. In 1972, just a little behind Chef Stettin’s prediction, the first Bontrae diced chicken and ham started to appear at butcher counters, after first being rolled out to institutional kitchens at facilities like schools. In many of those cases, Bontrae was used as an additive in meat products, helping bring the phrase “mystery meat” into the vocabulary.

Hopes were high - “you can cut your protein cost by 25 percent and have a food that is lower in bacteria count,” chirped a newspaper advertorial - but sales and reviews were mixed. A Boston Globe reporter was initially fooled into thinking the fake chicken was real turkey before noticing “a potato-like taste.” Some of the University of Massachusetts students he spoke to thought it was OK, but others thought it was “a little powdery” or, in the words of a school administrator, “just like the Army”. Turned out replicating the complex experience of eating fresh meat - the overall flavor, the texture and bite, the way it cooked, everything - was more complicated than mimicking the smoky crunch of bacon bits.

As Bontrae stubbornly refused to fly off the shelves, any mention of the “new food” was quietly removed from Bac-Os packaging and advertising. By 1975 General Mills was running a campaign called “the Bontrae Bribe”, offering customers a $1 rebate on any fresh Bontrae purchase even if the customer hadn’t spent that much to begin with. “Why would we pay you a $1.00 to try our under-a-$1.00 product? Because we think once you sink your teeth into no-chicken ‘chicken’ and no-ham ‘ham’ you’ll be hooked - on saving money, saving time, saving cholesterol - and besides, we’ll bet you can’t taste the difference.”

Like their big investment in Bontrae, that was a bet General Mills would lose. It would take more than a dollar to get 1970s America to swap its meat for sculpted strands of soy protein. As the very title of the industrial-cannibalism dystopia Soylent Green (1973) shows, there was a deep vein of public mistrust toward the idea of futuristic engineered foods. General Mills didn’t do itself any favors by using terms like “textured vegetable protein” and “meat analogs” in the media.

That was Bontrae’s last stand. In 1976 General Mills surrendered and sold the trademark, converting the Cedar Rapids plant to make Wheaties instead. But Bac-Os would remain a staple of home salad bars and vegetarian BLTs until 2016, and imitators continue to this day: the last remnants of an idea that was several decades ahead of its time. My teenage vegetarian self appreciated it.

My habit of scanning the ingredient lists started when my mom said I pick any cereal I wanted, as long as sugar wasn’t in the first two ingredients. It’s absurd how hard that is. But it’s continued on through my vegetarian years and into hunting for food allergy issues. Have you lived blissfully unaware of the ingredients lists on everything in your pantry? Or do you have your own reasons you’re checking those side panels? Let’s hear about ’em in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These previous Shoddy Goods stories contain no more than 30% spun soy protein:

• The DIY origins of the salad bar

• Is Cheez Kisses the grossest name for a snack food ever?

• Speef, Treet, Wham, and other pretenders to Spam’s throne

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It gets weird!

“The women have been at it again!” announced the July 19, 1940 edition of the Daily Press of Newport News, Virginia. “And they’ve solved the problem that’s given many of us desperate qualms and hostess-jitters for a long time. The problem of entertaining a dozen or more people in a modest-sized dining room - without a servant! The women - bless ‘em - have seen fit to invent - and now present - the salad bar!

“Simple? Practical? Of course it is! We said the women invented it, didn’t we?”

Just who invented the salad bar is a point of contention that will never be settled (we’ll come back to that later). But long before it was a fixture from steakhouses to cafeterias to fast-food chains, the salad bar was deployed by home hostesses as an easy, fresh (in more ways than one) way to satisfy guests with diverse tastes - and by ladies’ organizations to socialize and raise funds.

“A one-woman job”

Of course, like many a grassroots phenomenon, this one was helped along by advertising. When smorgasbord eating made something of a splash during the New York World’s Fair of 1939, Wesson Oil saw a way to sell more oil for salad dressing.

Wesson launched a full-court press in 1940 for “the Wesson Salad Bar”. Ads in magazines like Life, American Home, and Woman’s Home Companion touted it as “a quick one-woman-job - for six guests or twenty!” and explained how it worked. “You serve a Salad Bowl of mixed greens as a starter, then they add the chicken, anchovies, cheese, or whatever they like best from the side dishes.”

A parade of noted hosts and hostesses appeared in the ads to give their imprimatur to the concept. “Guests declare I really have a ‘live one’ in this gay new idea,” says Mrs. Frank Buck, wife of famed African hunter Frank Buck. “I serve the greens from a large, old bowl of African teak.” To a one, these hospitality experts wax effusive about the merits of Wesson Oil: “so pure, delicious and healthful,” as Mrs. Hendrik van Loon puts it.

“A strictly feminine repast”

But whatever its origins, food editors at newspapers around the country took to the new idea for its ease, novelty, and ability to satisfy a wide range of diners. “Forget allergies when planning this party,” said the Duluth News Tribune. “No longer will you have to leave out the onions for fear that some prefer not to eat them, omit cucumbers because some of your guests may have ideas that they don’t agree with them or alter your bowl because of an allergy of one of the diners.” (I’m getting the feeling the unnamed writer had a bad experience with an allergic dinner guest.)

The salad bar solved two drawbacks of any dinner party by giving the guests something to do, and the hostess a little less to do. “In this do-it-yourself era, let your guests help themselves at a ‘make-your-own salad’ bar,” wrote the Vancouver, Washington Columbian. “Everybody will be happy arranging plates according to personal preferences, and entertaining in this casual manner means you can be the hostess and still enjoy yourself.”

The informal sociability of the salad bar, and its whiff of exciting newness, made it a natural format for fundraisers, socials, and other group functions. “One of the most charming events of the summer was the ‘salad bar’ luncheon yesterday at the Neptunian clubhouse in Manhattan Beach,” reported the Alameda, California Daily Breeze in 1941. Attendee Mrs. Walter Mace told the paper that “The attractive array of salads was most tempting and delicious. A different idea and it was received with great enthusiasm.”

A 1951 Lutheran church salad bar in Indiana was described as “a strictly feminine repast” by the Vidette-Messenger of Porter County. “The tables were luxuriant with bowls of pink cherry blossoms, and a welcome sun shone warmly on quaint little colonial doll centerpieces.”

The salad bar goes pro

The easy preparation and wide appeal that made salad bars useful for hostesses also caught the eye of restaurateurs. That’s where passions start to run high. The self-proclaimed “Home of the first EVER Salad Bar” is the Sky Club Supper Club in Plover, Wisconsin. Their claim rests on a reasonably well-attested story that they were the first to come up with the ice-filled tables that keep salad ingredients cool enough to be served bar-style, in 1950.

Thing is, there’s evidence that other restaurants were also offering something called a salad bar at least as early as 1950. I found a restaurant in Honolulu called Gam’s advertising its salad bar in June of that year. The previous month, Gam’s was mentioned in a Vancouver Sun travel column: “never, never, never shall I forget the gastronomical bliss of that Gam’s salad bar at the hotel in which I stayed in Honolulu”, implying that the visit was even earlier. Hawaii seems to have been a hotbed - no pun intended - of salad bardom. Even the famous demimonde nightspot the Waikiki Tavern, an early hub of the local gay scene, mentioned a salad bar in its nightlife listing.

Another claimant to the throne, the Chicago steakhouse Judd’s, was advertising its salad bar as early as 1952, offering more than 30 options from the usual cucumbers and olives to sliced beef tongue and herring fillets in wine sauce. Fortunately for the Sky Club Supper Club, all of these other establishments went out of business long ago, leaving nobody to contest the claim. At the very least, Sky Club deserves the undisputed title of America’s longest-running salad bar.

But whoever first brought it from the home kitchens and church basements of America into the restaurant, there was no stopping the salad bar. By 1976 it was so ubiquitous that the cookbook Parties for All Seasons suggested “Perhaps you’d like to borrow [a] restaurant idea. Set up a salad bar with all the fixings, and let the guests serve themselves.” Hey, good idea. We said the women invented it, didn’t we?

My trick with a salad bar is to realize there’s no rule you have to make a salad. Skip the lettuce entirely and you can fill up on the tastier (and pricier) stuff, making a smorgasboard of olives, cheese, and nuts. What’re your favorite salad bar or other -bar tips and tricks? Let’s chat in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Grab a plate and serve yourself these previous Shoddy Goods stories:

• Do not remove under penalty of law: the story of those mattress tags

• Why are insurance mascots so annoying?

• America’s cheapest Michelin-starred meals

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It gets weird!

The proceedings of the US House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce rarely produce comedy gold. But a bill they deliberated in 1957, which was passed into law in 1958, became the set-up for one of the most inescapable punchlines in American entertainment.

“You know those little ‘do not remove under the penalty of law’ labels they put on mattresses?” asks the escaped convict Mickey, who has just picked up the hitchhiking Pee-Wee in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1987). “Well, I cut one of them off.”

Mickey was far from alone. From Portnoy’s Complaint to SpongeBob SquarePants, the “crime” of removing a mattress tag has long been a reliable way to mock a vainglorious villain, send a milquetoast character spiralling into criminality, or lampoon an over-regulated society. The teenage rebel in Green Day’s “Warning” video (2000) starts a day of low-stakes mayhem by ripping the tag off his mattress, before moving on to swim right after eating and take candy from a stranger.

While I doubt the framers of the Textile Fiber Products Identification Act had comedy writers in mind among the law’s beneficiaries, jokes about the sternly worded tags on mattresses (and pillows, etc.) have been almost as ubiquitous as the tags themselves ever since.

“Such a label would not be read”

Think the mattress industry is shady now? A century ago, “new” mattresses were not uncommonly stuffed with used filling, shredded rags, or worse. A 1919 newspaper story tells of “a mother who let her 9-months-old baby sleep on a newly bought expensive cotton mattress. The baby was not thriving. The mother smelled something peculiar about the mattress. She ripped it open and found that it was stuffed with unwashed guano sacks.”

Mattress fraud could be even more dangerous than that. The Chicago Board of Health issued a 1924 bulletin titled “Menace of the Mattress” warning about reused mattress stuffing from “beds of sickness and death… used by persons ill from contagious and infectious diseases and oftimes infested with vermin… Dangerous infections, such as tuberculosis, typhus fever, leprosy, and other skin diseases, are possible perils from intimate association with these mattresses.”

Various remedies, from local “pure mattress” laws to an ultraviolet light that could distinguish between old and new cotton, left enough holes that by 1957, Congress was ready to take up the issue as part of a broader effort to require the composition of all textile products be accurately labeled.

Of course, politics is politics. Cotton growers and their representatives supported the law because it would protect their crop from the new synthetic-fiber interlopers. Industry lobbyists and congressmen from manufacturing-heavy states opposed it on the usual grounds.

“If this act is passed it would simply result in a lot of unnecessary red tape and would certainly increase production cost,” wrote J.H. DuBose of the Bridges Furniture Corporation in a letter to Congress. “Such a label would not be read by one customer out of a thousand, and if read, would have no meaning to the customer.”

“At least while I lived, I lived big!”

The act was passed, becoming law in 1960. DuBose couldn’t have been more wrong about the readership of at least one of these new labels: the one required on mattresses. Tens of millions of Americans, innocently changing their sheets, were startled to encounter the warning “DO NOT REMOVE THIS TAG UNDER PENALTY OF LAW”.

While some specifics varied from state to state, the tag designs were mostly strong stuff. Strident typefaces, more suitable for wanted posters and civil emergency alerts, spelled out intimidating blocks of legalese. The charge seemed absurd - certainly nobody would go to jail for tearing a tag off their own possessions? - but that tag looked like it meant business.

It wasn’t the kind of thing good citizens of midcentury America could just shrug off. Best not to tempt fate or the Federal Trade Commission. “You could walk into the most elegant homes in the world,” wrote the humorist laureate of the suburbs, Erma Bombeck, “but there was always that one common denominator: a limp tag flapping under the chair like a piece of dirty underwear.”

Alexander Portnoy, the dirty young man protagonist of Philip Roth’s landmark 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint, imagines getting gunned down by police because “I tore the tag off my mattress… But at least while I lived, I lived big!”

“I was pretty sure they applied to the seller of the furniture, not the buyer,” wrote newspaper columnist Sid McKeen. “My wife wasn’t so sure… [she would say] ‘Why take a chance? Obviously there must be some reason for a law like that.’”

McKeen continued: “The tags that I did take off made me very nervous. I never threw them away. I stored them in a dresser drawer just in case of a raid. I reasoned that while the detectives were pounding on the door, I’d have time to scurry around the house and reattach all the tags - somehow.”

“Power to the people!”

McKeen was right, of course: the prohibition against removal applied only to the seller of the mattress, not the buyer. American mattress owners had been free all along to rip the tags off to their hearts’ content. So in 1971 the FTC allowed new wording: “This tag not to be removed under penalty of law except by the consumer.”

Nevertheless, the jokes kept coming - or rather, the joke, since it was basically the same thing every time. In 1977, it might be Fred Sanford of Sanford & Son ripping a tag off and proclaiming “Power to the people!”. In 1987 it was a Soviet defector on Night Court hoping that removing a mattress tag would get him deported back to Russia. And so it goes. Sections on the TV Tropes page “Mattress-Tag Gag” for webcomics and web video attest to the one joke’s ongoing durability.

The mattress-tag gag wouldn’t work if “not one customer out of a thousand” had read those tags. But they do depend on misunderstanding their purpose - maybe willfully. Of course no SWAT team is going to descend on you if you take a tag off your own mattress. It’s just more fun to believe it will. So that joke probably isn’t going away anytime soon.

“Fun of ripping off tags is gone“ was the headline of a 1986 column by Eric White after he belatedly noticed the changed label on some new pillows. “I ripped those tags off,” he wrote. “It wasn’t much fun, though. I missed the outlaw’s thrill of defying the law.”

I happened to have dressed up as escaped convict Mickey for Halloween this year. Maybe I'll dig up a photo and share it in the chat this week. I'm not sure I ever worried about going to jail for this one but we definitely had playground rumors that if you got pulled over 3 times, for any reason, you were going to jail. I remember being terrified the second time my mom got pulled over for speeding. Do you remember any myths about getting arrested or going to jail as a kid? Any warnings you were terrified you'd accidentally not follow? Let's talk about 'em in this week's Shoddy Goods Chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These previous Shoddy Goods stories may not be consumed except by the consumer:

• J. Peterman’s last ride

• Why you can’t buy tear gas pens anymore (and why that’s a good thing)

• The great fruit scare of 1989

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It gets weird!

Whenever I explained my copywriting job at Woot to someone not hip-deep in ‘00s Internet culture, they usually landed on the same comparison: “Oh, like Elaine on Seinfeld!” That character’s job as head writer for a fictionalized version of the J. Peterman catalogue was indeed a pretty dead-on parallel. We both went way beyond what was necessary or even sensible to make our product copy entertaining and original. Our mockery of retail was right there on the surface while theirs was more implied, but I think I detected a kindred spirit, in both the show’s version of the catalogue and the genuine article.

We’ve talked about Woot here before. Now this week comes news that J. Peterman may finally have met an ending it can’t wriggle free from. After years of purported losses, the company appears to have not taken any orders since July, and their listed phone numbers have been disconnected.

The company has been on the ropes many times before, and always came back. This time, though, namesake founder and driving force John Peterman is 85 years old, and it’s a legitimate question whether he’s got any more flamboyant gambits left in him.

“Uncivilized decibel level”

If this is the end, it’s a sad one for a brand that stayed unusually true to its original weird instincts. At a stretch, Woot lasted about a decade in its peak incarnation; J. Peterman has been doing its thing for 39 years, although a couple of those were under different management.

By “its thing”, I really mean “his thing”. The company’s eccentricities were Peterman’s own. The catalogue itself was like nothing else in that highly standardized field. It’s not just the famed copy, which might start off a blazer description with “Fiona has all-night spat with Beckwith. Uncivilized decibel level, tears, recrimination.” Or muse on how a beret was worn “by jazz oboists, by commandos… by Che Guevara, Tyrone Power, Groucho Marx, Picasso.”

It also called itself not a catalogue but an “Owner’s Manual”, with numbered issues, implying a certain collectibility. Instead of slick product photos, it used hand-drawn illustrations. Even the shape was weird, tall and narrow instead of the standard 8.5”x11” optimized for easy mailing. “I broke all the rules of a catalogue, but I didn’t know I was breaking them,” Peterman told his college alumni magazine in 2001.

Born in New York in 1941, Peterman played minor-league baseball in the Pittsburgh Pirates’ farm system from 1963-1965. It appears his strength was his good eye: he drew a lot of walks. Years later, in 1986, that same eye was drawn to a floor-length cowboy coat in a Wyoming shop. After receiving compliments while wearing the coat, Peterman - by now a sales manager and serial entrepreneur - and a copywriter friend took out an ad in the New Yorker to sell “The Horseman’s Duster”. Thus J. Peterman the company was born.

“A risky modus operandi”

For such seat-of-the-pants origins, Peterman’s creative vision was sharply defined from the beginning. “Unique, hard-to-find items with a little romance attached to them” was how he described it to the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1988.

“Peterman says he sells what he likes, figuring that his eclectic tastes are shared by enough people to keep him in business,” the paper continues. “It’s a risky modus operandi, he admits, ‘but no one has job security except in yourself.’” He was right: the catalogue was profitable from the beginning, and its “factually romantic” copywriting approach got attention.

“As usual, I dropped what I was doing and sat down to read it,” wrote best-selling management guru Tom Peters in a 1990 syndicated column. “The J. Peterman catalog is fun. The products and presentation are ‘world-class quality’ writ large. A few thousand more J. Petermans and we could kiss our economic woes goodbye.”

Of course, J. Peterman’s Q rating really took off when it was noticed by the writing staff of TV’s top sitcom. What’s stunning to me about Peterman’s Seinfeld fame is how young the company still was when it happened. The first catalogue launched in 1988; the show’s “Peterman” debuted in 1995. Like many others, I assumed it was some long-standing blue-chip import-export concern. Maybe that’s down to its old-world, old-money aesthetic, or maybe we were all just mixing it up with Hammacher Schlemmer, an actual old company.

The Seinfeld spotlight, followed soon after by a big score on official Titanic movie replica collectibles, brought a lot of money into the company. But in a familiar story, the sudden weight of success knocked it off-balance. Private equity investment, ventures into brick-and-mortar retail, spending based on projections of $500 million in annual sales (the real figure topped out at $75 million)… “I was trying to go too fast and hit a brick wall,” Peterman said in that same alumni magazine interview. “Revenue was slipping, the banks began pulling credit lines, and there was a flurry of activity to save the ship.”

That time, it worked. After losing the company in bankruptcy, Peterman recruited new investors, including John O’Hurley, the actor who played his pompous Seinfeld doppelgänger, to buy it back in 2001. More recently, a 2016 Kickstarter finally attempted to bring the Urban Sombrero to life, but fell short of its funding goal. Whatever may be happening now, Peterman has managed to keep the company alive for the quarter-century since his reacquisition of it.

To me, Peterman’s career is better understood not as a businessman’s arc, but an artist’s. The initial shock of the new. Whirlwind fame. Competing pressures. Uncertainty about how to develop. Some flops. Then the settling of a certain equilibrium, and a long steady coda in relative obscurity, as the frontiers move on and some of his innovations are assimilated by the mainstream of his craft. The “rediscovery and reappraisal” phase is still pending at press time.

There hangs a (re)tale

Of course, all this is on my mind quite a bit lately, because part of my day job is restoring the glories of another idiosyncratic mail-order stalwart, the aforementioned Hammacher Schlemmer. At their respective peaks, both Hammacher and Peterman were among that rare class of catalogue that had fans, not just customers. Either one arriving in the mailbox was an event. Both took chances no other catalogues would; both were willing to risk baffling nonbelievers to please their devotees.

Nobody yet, that I know of, has figured out how to translate that peculiar appeal to the Internet age. Meh, to me, is as close as it gets - and I’m not just saying that because they sponsor this newsletter, I’m saying you can tell it’s true because they sponsor this newsletter. Who else would commission someone to write 113 issues (and counting) of these nerdy little stories? And then start up another one with Gnomenclature, the Hammacher Schlemmer newsletter?

Our job now is to prove that in the face of ultra-optimized agentic algorithmic data supremacy, “if we think it’s cool, other people probably will too” can still be a sustainable basis for a store. And to discover what forms can keep eccentric retail storytelling alive now that we know sending 20 million print catalogues isn’t the answer. Wherever you are, John Peterman, thanks for the courageous example.

It's likely no surprise that I absolutely love brands that put stories and narrative around their pitches. Along with J Peterman, I used to love getting the old Banana Republic catalogs, back when they kept up their pastiche of faux-yellowed pages, sketches from their 'explorations' and visual sketches of their clothes in use in jungle adventures. Do you have any fond memories of catalogs or brands that you loved paging through because it didn't really feel like 'shopping'? Let’s talk about it in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

previous Shoddy Goods stories:

• How the Woot was lost

• Insurance mascots just keep getting worse

• The disappearing car brochure

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It gets weird!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an insurance company in want of customers must be represented by some kind of allegedly funny character. Since GEICO debuted their gecko in 1999, a quarter-century of mascot devolution has bottomed out in Liberty Biberty, the latest annoying spokesthing for Liberty Mutual.

The phrase “Liberty Biberty” is a reference to a 2019 commercial where an actor struggles to pronounce the company’s name. Describing this entirely scripted “flub” as “hugely culturally relevant“, Liberty Mutual and its creative agency, Bandits & Friends, created Liberty Biberty as “the embodiment of the warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you have great coverage at a great price.” That’s not a human emotion I recognize, but hey, I know how it is to fudge the justification for a creative idea you like anyway.

Unfortunately, the puffball’s first outing doesn’t bode well. It starts to deliver a promotional spiel from the roof of a car. Then it gets swooped up by a hawk, in the kind of cheap jump-laugh moment so typical of mediocre commercials. Just when you’re about to thank that anonymous raptor for sparing us, it drops Liberty Biberty onto a different car, where the spiel resumes. Tagline: “Great coverage. Great savings.” That’s it. That’s the ad. No warm and fuzzy feelings, nothing about what makes the coverage or savings great, not even an actual joke.

No one is surprised, of course, that the sixth-largest property insurer in the world chooses to embody itself in a clump of fluff with a name that sounds like baby babble. Never mind the old image of insurance companies as exemplars of steady reliability: “Get a piece of the rock”, “Like a good neighbor”, “You’re in good hands”. Now we expect insurance to be sold by TV commercial mascots who vaguely suggest the name of the company, from the GEICO gecko to AFLAC’s quacking ducks to Liberty Mutual’s other longstanding familiar, LiMu Emu.

How did we get here? How did one of the industries where trust and competence are most crucial wind up being the one advertised with the goofiest, most irrelevant mascots?

Buy my product or face legal consequences

As with most technologies, the law took a while to catch up to the automobile. The growing frequency of car accidents led Massachusetts and Connecticut to adopt “financial responsibility” requirements in the 1920s. This meant drivers had to prove their ability to pay for the damages in any potential accident, most commonly by showing they had insurance to cover it.

But these laws remained local curiosities until New York passed their own law in 1956 and North Carolina followed suit in 1957. That set off a steady spread of compulsory insurance laws over the following decades. A majority of states had some kind of car insurance mandate on the books by 1980. Virginia’s belated entry in 2024 brought the total to 49 states and DC, with New Hampshire the sole holdout.

These laws dragged a huge new pool of customers - willing or not - into the insurance market. “It’s like a supermarket here,” State Farm agent Don Drott told the Houston Chronicle in 1981, as Texas’s mandatory insurance law was about to come into effect. “We don’t even have time to take lunch.”

Younger and lower-income, these clients weren’t perusing wordy ads in U.S. News and World Report and didn’t play golf with any insurance salesmen. They were much less likely to have other kinds of insurance: today, while 71% of Americans have car insurance, only 39% have life insurance. This cohort just needed proof of coverage fast to meet the legal requirements to drive.

The most effective “advertising” to reach these customers was to open a storefront near the state licensing office. That’s how I insured the first few cars I ever owned, back in the ‘90s. I couldn’t have told you the name of the insurance company, or how their policy offerings differed from any other company’s. All that mattered was that they were next door to the DMV, and offered cheap, minimal plans so I could get the registration chore done with as little hassle and upfront expense as possible.

When they did advertise, these mostly small-time local outfits hammered on the cheap-and-fast message in the time-honored tradition of local TV hucksters. This 1990s classic from Chicago’s Eagle Insurance not only has a scrappy charm and an authentically bizarre “story”, it’s also informative (arguably too informative) about the company’s pricing.

Thus car insurance customers were essentially split into two tiers. One was traditional clients, who often bundled their auto coverage with other forms of insurance, usually through an agent affiliated with a major national company. The other was working-class drivers who’d deal with anyone who’d give them the piece of paper that would keep their cars legal. And so it would have remained, had the Internet never been invented.

“Kick Flo’s ass”

As more and more commerce shifted online through the 2000s, the storefront near the DMV mattered less. The big insurers could now sign up all those little customers without needing to pay agents to do it. Policies began to look more and more alike in a comparison-shopping race to the bottom.

Car insurance mandates plus the Internet turned insurance into a mass consumer commodity. The result is clear any time you watch commercial TV, or scroll through social media, or attend a sporting event: an unprecedented glut of insurance advertising. The total insurance advertising market has tripled just since 2010, from $5.1 billion then to $15.6 billion this year. It’s hard to remember now that it wasn’t always like this. I watch a lot of blocks of old TV commercials, recorded as they aired, and it’s striking now how rare insurance commercials were in the ‘80s and ‘90s compared to today.

But the law and technology didn’t just spur the volume of ads, it also shaped their tone. As differences between companies and their policies shrank, insurance companies stopped trying to tell any kind of coherent story about the advantages of their offerings aside from the everpresent references to non-specific “savings”. The vibe of insurance marketing, once calm, sober, and reassuring, turned increasingly loud and silly in the quest for cut-through.

Ads became mnemonic devices to simply drill the company’s name into people’s heads through brute force repetition. “I need insurance. Where do I get it? I guess the one with the gecko/quacks/emu.” The relentless GEICO is the worst offender, also running what feels like a hundred other campaigns featuring such first-thought college-improv concepts as “happier than a camel on Wednesday” (because it’s hump day, get it? Me neither) to “cavemen in the modern world” (because switching to GEICO is so easy a caveman could do it, get it?), a campaign which has now run longer than actual cavemen roamed the Earth.

Other mascots, like Flo (Progressive) or Mayhem (Allstate), at least have something to do with insurance. But the ads seem aimed more at each other than customers. Leo Burnett creative exec Nina Abnee said the ad agency created Mayhem to “kick Flo’s ass”. Yet while the Mayhem campaign was winning a shelfload of awards, Allstate was losing ground to Progressive, which passed them in market share in 2018 and has stayed there ever since.

Whether you find these ads funny is a matter of taste. I think most consumers, though, would struggle to articulate a single difference between any of the major insurance companies, even after saturation exposure to their branding. Which just makes the insurers double down on hitting the jackpot with the next viral wannabe. It seems impossible to come up with a mascot more lazy and infantile than Liberty Biberty. But with the insurance advertising market still growing by at least 10% a year, you better believe they’re trying.

Funny thing that Jason didn’t know — I’ve actually met the guy who does Liberty Biberty. I took a tour of the Henson studios and he was our guide, showing us around where the Muppets were filmed and doing a how-to demo where I was the volunteer. Spoiler: I was terrible at it. But he was great, and funny, and regardless of what you think of insurance ads, it’s awesome that there’s still new physical puppet opportunities out there. So who’s your favorite puppet — Muppet or otherwise? Let’s talk about it in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These previous Shoddy Goods stories promise neither great coverage nor great savings:

• I found my old MP3 player and fell in love again

• You Bet Your Sweet Aspercreme this was a real commercial

• Mr. Mucus, the Grime Gang, and other repulsive advertising monsters

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It gets weird!

I was braced for the obvious emotional gut punches of cleaning out a storage space. My wedding suit. My kids’ preschool artwork. The IKEA toy shelves I’d stayed up late assembling, now never again to hold their Playmobils and LEGO. Insert Loudly Crying Face emoji.

But I wasn’t ready for the surge of nostalgia that hit me when I found my old Rio Forge MP3 player. I suddenly remembered listening to specific songs on specific flights back then, and loading it up with Radio Disney favorites for a family road trip. This wonky little teardrop of a gadget had been my constant companion for the last few pre-smartphone years.

Did it still work? The Rio line, home to one of the very first MP3 players, was already defunct when I got this one from Woot at least 20 years ago. But I popped in a fresh AAA battery (no charging necessary!) and it fired right up, still in the middle of a song I had paused during the George W. Bush administration.

Walking with dinosaurs

No doubt the technology was more sophisticated in the many phones, laptops, and tablets I’ve had in the last 20 years. But how many of those would still work today? The heft and durability of 2000s MP3 players, the tactile experience of buttons and wheels rather than a touchscreen, is one reason why “The World is Basically Begging for Another iPod Right Now“, as Gizmodo puts it. Sales of both used iPods (up more than 40% across the board on resale site Back Market) and new MP3 players are climbing. “I can’t even count the number of [new] digital audio players I’ve seen in recent months,” writes Gizmodo’s James Pero.

Another reason, of course, is focus. Scrolling through the songs on my old Rio Forge, I remembered how much thought I put into what songs to load it up with. If I was out and about and didn’t feel like listening to anything I had with me, tough shit. So I had to anticipate a range of moods - some punk, some soul, some ‘60s pop, a little reggae or West African psychedelia - lest I be stranded in silence.

Would it really change the listening experience? On my morning walks, I replaced my phone with my prodigal MP3 player. My usual choice paralysis melted away. With only a few albums and a choice mix of 50 or so other songs to choose from, I did seem to spend a lot less time wondering what else I could listen to and a lot more attention on the music itself.

When I did scroll through the library, I wasn’t distracted or tempted to do anything else with the device, because it doesn’t do anything else. Just a monochrome LCD screen, some text menus, and some basic physical buttons: no recommendations, no notifications, blessedly no ads.

When I have to use my phone for everything, using my phone for anything feels more like an obligation. Choosing a Spotify playlist, paying my gas bill, and blocking scam texts mush together into one experiential slurry of “using my phone”. The vastly restricted library on my Rio Forge paradoxically feels like freedom. This thing is devoted to nothing but my music. The rest of the world can’t bother me here.

Radio gaga

As it happened, another retro digital device had recently come into our lives. Remember Internet radios? They made a bit of a splash in the late 2000s and early 2010s, dedicated appliances for browsing radio feeds from around the world, usually through a proprietary server maintained by the radio’s manufacturer.

Then smartphones happened. My wife loves radio, and uses iPhone apps like Radio Garden to wander the planet’s airwaves. But she also found herself wanting that experience somewhere different from where she turns in her timesheets for work. She just wanted a radio she could turn on and leave on all day, something she never needed to charge, that would never be interrupted by calls or texts. She asked for an Internet radio last Christmas. To be honest, I wasn’t sure anyone still made them.

“There are still a dozen small brands that sell internet radios,” said Greg Fadul, CEO of one of those brands, Grace Digital, in a story on Radio World. Some of the bigger names like Logitech had not only stopped making Internet radios, but also stopped supporting their URL servers, meaning existing devices could no longer connect to streams. But what Radio World calls “a vibrant niche market” has found “success in stealth mode”.

So I wrapped up the handsome Audizio Foza. After an hour learning the clunky, très aughts wheeled navigation, my wife added a bunch of her regulars to a Favorites list, then discovered a French oldies station, a good jazz station from New Jersey, and a Slovenian country music station where the steel guitars mix with accordions.

Of course, her phone can do all that and a million times more. Which is the problem. It reduces something she loves to the same category as all the tedious and/or toxic demands our phones make on us. A sturdy box on the bookshelf that does only one thing says “this thing is special.” Slovenian country music hits different when it’s not just one more shard of quirky content from the quirky content and marketing surveillance machine.

I’m also a fan of the physical media revival, but it’s tough to participate if you’re short of cash or space. Once you’ve bought these “dumb” digital devices, they’re yours. You can enjoy a similar level of focus to a physical media collection, without having to add new shelves to your home. I’ve started to think about getting a digital camera again. And my brother just bought a charging cable for his old iPod.

In some ways it’s amazing how the phone can do everything that took a dozen different devices before. I’d hate to have to carry around a GPS device and a music player and a texting device in my pocket. But on the other hand…it might be nice to just have a dedicated alarm clock on my bedside table instead of making sure I set my phone up to serve yet another purpose. What things do you have or want that could technically be done by your phone but just might be a little better on their own? Let’s talk in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These previous Shoddy Goods stories combine digital convenience with handcrafted timelessness:

• When did we start calling old songs “oldies”? And when did we stop?

• Why there probably won’t ever be a new physical media format

• A pen full of tear gas? What could go wrong?

For more retro audio gear, cock an ear to Hammacher Schlemmer’s collection at The Best Portable Record Player and More.

When firearms started to be regulated in the United States, after years of rising murder rates during Prohibition, some enterprising types probed the limits of the definition of “firearm”. What if a weapon didn’t shoot live ammunition, but canisters of gas?

Those, it turned out, were perfectly legal and remained unregulated, at least at the federal level. The little ads in the back of men’s magazines soon sprouted with a new essential for any self-respecting urban soldier of fortune: the tear gas pen. It was everything it sounded like, and less.

Vicious dogs and morons, beware

Could this little pen really offer “protection for everybody against robbers, criminals, morons, vicious dogs, etc.”, as one ad put it? The folks at Personal Defense World did some digging into how they worked. Essentially, it’s a little gun with the firing mechanism built into the barrel. Load it with a cartridge (the one they looked at carried 1.5g of the active ingredient in Mace), point, and fire away. “Firing is a WIPING motion of the thumb on the trigger screw - not a push,” warn the instructions for the Penguin Industries tear gas pen.

Oh, there were a few other little things to watch out for. If you fire it indoors, get out of the building for at least 15 minutes. If you fire it at a range of three feet or less, the blast itself could cause injury. “Keep out of the hands of children and irresponsible persons,” Penguin Industries advises, although there’s nobody stopping an irresponsible adult from buying it in the first place. But qualms aside, “when handled with respect it can save your life.”

Maybe. But the launch of tear gas pens in the late 1920s was followed by a contrail of newspaper stories about people accidentally gassing themselves or bystanders. “I didn’t know it was loaded,” said Chief City Magistrate Joseph E. Corrigan of Portland, Oregon in 1930, after discharging a tear gas pen accidentally in his pocket in the mayor’s office. “The eye-smarting gas gushed out and filled the room and the halls,” reported the Portland Press-Herald.

That same year, Isadore Zeplowitz, owner of a clothing store in Hammond, Indiana, tried to thwart a thief with his tear gas pen, only to be engulfed and incapacitated himself. “When he regained his eyesight, he found the robber had left with $75 and the Zeplowitz watch,” reported the Associated Press. Elsewhere, a Philadelphia dietician was hospitalized after she dropped her tear gas pen in a hotel lobby and it fired.

It seemed police were particularly at risk of inadvertent gassing. A police sergeant in Salt Lake City was temporarily blinded by the accidental discharge of a tear gas pen taken off of a suspect, while a New Jersey sheriff and his assistant suffered the same when the aide dropped a tear gas pen in the police station’s seized liquor vault. (Hmm, wonder what they were up to in there…?) Most comically, a tear gas pen salesman demonstrating his wares cleared a sheriff’s office in Oroville, California. “That just shows what one of our little fountain pen gas throwers will do,” the unnamed salesman gamely told the local paper. History does not record if he made the sale.

“Not terribly intimidating”

With all that accidental mayhem to its credit, the tear gas pen must have been even more devastating when used intentionally, right? Well, stories about the effective use of them are much more thin on the ground. In Compton, California, in 1931, one C.S. Smith used a tear gas pen to subdue a man named Fred O. Rossman who fired three shots at him from a revolver. But the complexion of the story changes somewhat when you discover that both men were cops themselves: Deputy Smith was trying to arrest Deputy Rossman for drunk driving.

But that spotty record, and the Oroville farce, didn’t stop law enforcement agencies from ordering them for their officers. During the early 1930s, police departments from California to Oklahoma to Minnesota to Ohio armed themselves with these nonlethal gadgets. Were they effective? I’ll leave that to the expert at Personal Defense World. As much as he values stopping power in a handheld device, he’s skeptical: “I’m not so sure 1.5 grams of [Mace] fired out of a pen gun in an open space is going to be terribly intimidating.”

Meanwhile, federal indifference aside, the law was closing in. Several states and cities moved to specifically ban tear gas pens without a gun license. “Tear gas fountain pens may be novel playthings, but their sale or possession is unlawful in the City of Los Angeles,” reported the Los Angeles Evening Citizen-News in 1931 about a recently passed ordinance. The makers of tear gas guns mounted a counter-campaign to keep their products on the market, with success in some jurisdictions.

After that initial wave of action and reaction, tear gas pens hovered in a legal twilight, advertised on the grimy back pages of men’s magazines, sold at gun stores and truck stops, passed around through the teenage contraband network. They still made headlines, mostly for going off accidentally in public places, or for low-level hoodlums being arrested with them. A 1963 piece by syndicated columnist George Dixon even said more and more Congressional representatives, staff, and families were carrying tear gas pens as the DC crime rate rose.

It all came to an end in 1975. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms reclassified tear gas pens into the same legal status as any other firearm. As the loosening of gun laws began in the 1980s and accelerated to today, the tear gas pen was redundant: if you’re going to carry a weapon, why bother with one of questionable effectiveness whose “ammo” goes wherever the wind blows it?

Its undeniable Bondian charisma aside, the tear gas pen is no more. But like ninja stars and M-80s, tear gas pens will live on in the arsenal of schoolyard legend: weapons that seem more powerful than they are, to little boys who haven’t grown into their own power yet.

I don’t think I want a tear gas pen, but it does make me think of all the silly novelty pens I’ve seen through the years. I mean, of course, the ‘flip the pen upside down and everyone’s clothes float off’, but after you’re 13 or so, that has less appeal. I loved those “6 colors in one” pens. I remain obsessed with space pens, where I can write upside down or under water or in space, all circumstances I continue to wait for. How about you, got any favorite pen, especially if it’s got any special features? Let’s talk about it in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Rest assured that you can fire these previous Shoddy Goods stories indoors or outdoors, without risk of blindness or suffocation:

• Lost burger kingdoms: the failed imitators of McDonaldland

• Why people in the 1920s loved drinking radium

• The case of the self-rocking crib and the lost silver mine

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It gets weird!

Despite his thin characterization and insipid personality, Ronald McDonald is recognized by upward of 90% of Americans, including kids. His supporting cast in McDonaldland can’t be far behind, from Grimace to Mayor McCheese to the Hamburglar. I’m skeptical that any kid actually likes these characters - a suspicion confirmed anecdotally by my own kids - but every kid knows who they are.

“Our move to the suburbs was a conscious effort to go for the family business. That meant going after the kids,” said McDonald’s president Fred Turner in 1973, a decade after Ronald made his debut. “We decided to use television, so we created our own character, Ronald McDonald.”

It’s hard to argue with the results. So when competitors Burger King and Jack-in-the-Box started “going after the kids”, they created their own extended universes of characters - nonentities so vacuous, they make McDonaldland look like Yoknapatawpha County.

Trapped in the box

If you think Ronald McDonald is lame, meet Jack the Clown, leader of the Jack in the Box Bunch, who debuted in 1971. The imagination saved on thinking up clever names for him and his crew was not spent developing any other aspect of these characters.

Jack himself is a generic clown head on top of the most nondescript outfit imaginable: white shirt, blue pants, black shoes, drawn with a level of detail that makes you wonder if the early 1970s suffered through an ink embargo. OK, so the name “Jack in the Box” has a more coherent claim to a clown mascot than McDonald’s. But that’s all the more reason to do something with it. Ronald’s boring but at least he wears giant red shoes. Jack is the kind of sketchy, low-effort clown you’d send home from your kid’s party. He’s giving twelve-step program, not three-ring circus.

As depicted in a charmless series of commercials, the rest of the Bunch was also in no danger of displacing Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse in children’s hearts. There’s Hamburgermeister, an elderly German man in lederhosen who never addresses the question of what he did during the war. There’s Small Fry, a boy who has mistaken liking French fries for a personality. There’s the Secret Sauce Agent, whose trenchcoat, evil snicker, and shifty demeanor seem to be aiming for the Hamburglar quasi-villain role, but he never does anything that would reveal a motivation even as developed as “I want to steal hamburgers”.

Most disturbing is the Onion Ring Thing, who has a raging jones for onion rings, yet appears to be an onion ring himself. What’s going on there? The only faint signs of life come from the Shakes, a band of three first-draft Muppet sketches who specialize in sub-Merseybeat close-harmony jingles a decade too late, and from the legendary Paul Winchell’s voice acting, which is too good for this flimsy material.

These lazily conceived characters never had a chance of breaking through, and not for lack of trying on Jack in the Box’s part. Along with the commercials, they made cardboard cutouts, rubber bendy toys, and a series of PSA comic-book-and-record sets, including one with the disturbing title “How Pain Helps Us”. But the pain of us knowing these characters didn’t help Jack in the Box. Within a couple of years, the Bunch quietly went to that big grease trap in the sky. They were not missed. Another try, the Jack Pack, around 1990, was basically just food with sunglasses on.

Where’s a peasant revolt when you need one?

Burger King took a different tack: if you can’t charm ‘em, disturb ‘em. Their namesake mascot started as a cartoon, then became a rudimentary puppet, then a different cartoon. When he evolved into the live-action Marvelous Magical Burger King in 1976, the titular king himself was standard fairytale fare. His subjects in the Burger King Kingdom were not, unless you’re talking about the kinds of fairytales that stern Bavarian parents used to keep their children in a state of constant terror.

The King’s naysaying nemesis the Duke of Doubt labored under the most disturbing facial prosthetics this side of Eraserhead. No wonder this pessimistic nobleman had trouble believing in the Burger King’s magic tricks; after what had been done to him, how could he believe in anything at all?

The royal allies were scarcely more comforting. The relentlessly twitching Sir Shake-A-Lot delivers an Oscar-worthy portrait of a hopeless addict, while The Burger Thing is a talking hamburger bun in a picture frame for some reason. The Wizard of Fries is many things: a really strained play on “Wizard of Oz”, a robot with an order of Burger King fries under a dome, and a fry-dispensing slot machine. Why hone one good idea when you can execute several half-assed ideas at once?

Once again, this grotesque menagerie somehow failed to delight the youth. After their initial burst onto the scene, the Burger King Kingdom was gradually shuffled off into the attic like an embarrassing, demented great-uncle. They were fully replaced in the late ‘80s by the no more inspired but far less unsettling BK Kids Club campaigns.

If you’ve heard of any of these characters, it’s most likely in their later, satirical versions. Jack in the Box would revive the “clown head + normal clothes” bit in 1994, this time as a sort of shlubby everyman CEO who can’t pronounce the word “chipotle”. In 2004, the Burger King would return as “Creepy King”, wearing a similar regal outfit but, like Jack, with a dead-eyed, permanently grinning giant plastic head.

Both are still with us today, vastly outliving their straight ancestors. It says something that both companies realized the only way to salvage these misbegotten mascots was to make fun of them. Are they more interesting and funny than Ronald McDonald? Of course, who isn’t? But the fact that you can’t imagine McDonald’s ever making Ronald McDonald a parodic creep tells you all you need to know about which fast food chain succeeded in “going after the kids”.

I was never scared of clowns as a kid, but I gotta say, Grimace always freaked me out. I just couldn’t get my head around what he was supposed to be. What weird mascots creeped you out as a kid? Let’s talk in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Retreat to the comforting embrace of reality with previous Shoddy Goods stories:

• Famous monsters of adland: advertising’s scariest villains

• Cheez Kisses: gross name for a snack or the grossest name for a snack?

• People in the 1920s drank radium for health. It didn’t go well.

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It’s gonna get weird!

Life is tiring. Science is complicated. So when some strange new substance comes along that promises to restore your step’s lost pep, a weary nation opens its wallets - and, unfortunately, mouths, digestive systems, and bloodstreams. If other people are doing it, how bad can it be?

Unfortunately, every miracle reinvigorizer turns out to have its downside. Some are fairly benign, like Red Bull. Some are disastrous, like cocaine. But the worst has to be a miracle tonic that enjoyed a widespread vogue during the 1910s and 1920s: radium.

Yes, that radium. Before regulators finally acted, radium was sold as the magic ingredient in elixirs, cosmetics, kitchenware, food, and even, ahem, marital aids. It went about as well as you’d think.

“Power far beyond our wildest dreams”

When Marie and Pierre Curie isolated radium from pitchblende in 1898, they didn’t just discover a new element. They discovered radioactivity, the release of high amounts of energy from decaying atomic nuclei. But it would be a while before science understood that radiation destroyed human tissue and DNA at the atomic level - or that radium was among the most unstable of elements, and thus the most radioactive and toxic.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. News of radium’s discovery made it a celebrity among metals, a strange new symbol of the future. Some early studies seemed to show that it had a positive effect on cancer and overall health; “radium wards” opened across Europe and the US, mostly to treat benign skin conditions where surgery would have been disfiguring. The average American had seen dizzying advances in technology in their lifetimes. Why doubt this one?

“Only a few years ago, we thought the automobile was a toy; to telephone without wires was ridiculous; to fly in the air was a crazy notion,” as a 1921 advertorial put it. “In Radium and Radio-Activity the scientists believe we have a power far beyond our wildest dreams.” The ad was hawking a device called Degnen’s Radio-Active Solar Pad. When worn “day and night, receiving the Radio-Active Rays continuously into your system”, this miracle advancement “will benefit about 95 per cent of all human ills”.

You may have noticed that that didn’t happen. Radium was great for the health of the snake-oil industry, though. Like “atomic” and “cyber” in future years, just dropping the name added a scientific modern sheen to the same old patent medicines that were still being hustled on the backroads of early industrial America. “Radium, having occupied the public mind and excited the public fancy,” wrote Samuel Hopkins Adams in a series of articles for Collier’s magazine in 1906, “has furnished material for the lively commercial imagination of the quacks.”

“There’s money in ‘em if they’re pushed right”

The flood of radium-branded products that arose in the early 1900s didn’t abate for some thirty years. Radium suppositorites. Radium bath salts. Radium chocolate, cigarettes, toothpaste, jewelry, razor blades. A radioactive jockstrap called the Testone that promised to “restore your sex power”. The Revigator, a radium-treated water jug that let you make your own irradiated water, like a nuclear Sodastream. Lingerie made of “Radium Silk”. Radium was especially popular in cosmetics and hair treatments in Europe, which gave the trend extra cache in the US.

Consumer advocates were outraged… but only because most of these products didn’t contain radium. The worldwide supply of radium at this point could be measured in ounces. Even the minuscule amounts needed to actually have an effect were extremely expensive. But using “Radium” in your product’s name was free and, at the time, unregulated. Adams writes of questioning the president of “Dr. Warner Medical Company”, makers of “Radium Rings”, if there was anything in them at all: “Yes, there is… There’s money in ‘em if they’re pushed right.” There was no Dr. Warner, either.

In 1923, the Physics Department at the University of Illinois launched a study of supposedly radium-enriched skin creams, but again, only to ferret out the fakes. “The presence of a radium compound would no doubt be beneficial to the skin,” said Professor S.C. Knipp in a quote that hasn’t aged well. “However it is not likely that any radium will be found, since the price of such a cream would be prohibitive.”

Of course, the customers who merely wasted their money on phony radium products got off easy. The skeptics should have worried more about the products that were accurately labeled.

“Perpetual sunshine”

Foremost among them was Radithor. This “radium water” sold for the princely sum of $1 a half-ounce vial (about $20 today). Unlike the fraudulent nostrums, this one actually contained at least 1 microcurie each of two radium isotopes, Ra-226 and Ra-228.

“Radithor - Perpetual Sunshine,” ran one ad. “Just a tiny bottle of apparently lifeless, colorless and tasteless water is all that the eye can see or the tongue can detect, yet in this bottle there reposes the greatest therapeutic force known to mankind - radioactivity.”

But if Radithor’s connection to radium was more legitimate, its creator wasn’t. William J.A. Bailey had served time in 1915 for collecting deposits for a new model of car he had no intention of building. In 1918, he was fined for promoting a supposed aphrodisiac whose primary ingredient was actually strychnine.

Bailey joined the wave of radium hustlers in the wake of Marie Curie’s celebrated visit to the US in 1921. Fancying himself a scientist, complete with a fake doctorate from the University of Vienna, he wrote and lectured on his theory that “the energy lost through ineffective metabolism could be replenished using the power of radium’s alpha particles,” according to a 1990 JAMA article by Roger M. Macklis. I barely passed high school biology, but even I can catch the stench of bullshit there.

“Doctor” Bailey then spun his cockamamie musings into an extensive range of stuff people could buy. Macklis lists names like the Radioendocrinator, the Thoronator, the Bioray (”a radioactive paperweight”), and the Adrenoray (”a cure for impotence that consisted basically of a radioactive belt clip”). But Radithor made his fortune, selling some 400,000 bottles around the world from 1925 to 1930.

This empire would all be undone by one of Raidthor’s best customers, who would pay a much higher price than Bailey ever would.

Radium silence

If Eben Byers hadn’t existed, F. Scott Fitzgerald would have had to invent him. Yale big man on campus. National amateur golf champion in 1906. Young chairman of his father’s steel company. The very model of a Jazz Age international playboy. Then, in 1927, he fell from a sleeping berth on a train and injured his arm. When the pain just wouldn’t go away, and the normally vigorous Byers couldn’t shake the blahs, his doctor suggested Radithor.

Bingo! Byers reported immediately feeling like his old hard-charging self. Along with drinking several bottles a day himself, he gave Radithor away as gifts and recommended it to his likewise type-A friends. He wasn’t just a satisfied customer, he was an evangelist.

But it didn’t last. Does it ever? After a couple of years, Byers told his doctor he felt worse than when he started taking Radithor. He went from losing weight and having headaches to his teeth falling out. His doctors were stumped - until a radiologist realized that the bony lesions in Byers’s jaw reminded him of another prominent radium case that had been in the news.

Another early, tragically misguided commercial use of radium was to make clock dials glow in the dark. Women who were employed painting these dials at three different factories from 1917 to 1926 were told to roll their brushes into a fine point using their mouths rather than water or rags, which would have cost the companies money. They soon developed horrific lesions, ulcers, and necrosis around their jaws, with many of them rapidly dying. Of course the companies denied that the Radium Girls, as they were known, were in any way hurt by the radium paint. Their lawsuits against the companies, and the resulting media coverage, would lay the groundwork for occupational health regulation for decades to come.

And their story would point Byers’s medical team to what was wrong with him: radium poisoning. By then, though, it was too late. By 1931, almost his entire jaw had been removed, and holes were opening up in his skull. He died on March 31, 1932 at age 51 of radium poisoning.

Stunningly, the Food and Drug Administration found that Radithor hadn’t broken any laws, since it said it was radioactive right on the package. It took a headline-making Federal Trade Commission investigation to finally spur the government into banning, at least, the advertising of Radithor. Byers’ death marked both the legal and cultural end of the radium craze.

Bailey put up a brief defense in the press, claiming “I have drunk more radium water than any man alive, and I have never suffered any ill effects”. The court of public opinion was the only court he’d ever see over Radithor. After fading quietly into private life, Bailey died of bladder cancer in 1949 at age 62. Did the radium kill him? In 1968, his remains were disinterred for an MIT study into radium physiology. His bones showed extensive radiation effects and “were still quite radioactive”, Macklis writes.

Which is more than we know about anyone else whose lives were shortened by the radioactive hustles of “Doctor” Bailey and his ilk. Like Byers and the Radium Girls, those nameless victims paid a high price for trusting the authorities at the moment when snake-oil quackery overlapped with the atomic age.

Ok, vulnerability time - I’m extremely skeptical that any advertising works on me anywhere…except Instagram. I don’t know what it is about their algorithm tied to my likes and scrolling habits, but they’ve got my number. So far, the few things I’ve bought have actually not been total crap, but I’m just waiting to get a brick in the mail or something purporting to be steel that’s clearly cardboard. Have you ever fell for any advertising you’ve later regretted? (Note: Instant Regret Kits advertise regret, so paradoxically you can’t feel tricked if you end up regretting it.) Let’s hear about your shameful ad clicks in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These previous Shoddy Goods stories will neither reinvigorate nor kill you:

• Cheez Kisses: the grossest name for a snack ever

• When do songs become oldies? And why did they stop?

• Are cough drops candy or medicine?

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It’s gonna get weird!

I love cheese. I love junk food. I love when the two intersect. I can find as much rapture in a bag of Doritos as in a triple-cream Brillat-Savarin. So what I’m about to say comes not from some elitist gourmand snobbery but straight from the rawest depths of my viscera:

The phrase “Cheez Kisses” makes me sick.

I don’t remember this Borden’s product, sold from about 1974 to 1980, well enough to say what it tasted like. But the very name curdles my gut into a defensive crouch.

It’s not so much the “Cheez” as the “Kisses”. Of all the things to compare a kiss to. “Chocolate kisses”, OK, it’s sweet, it’s decadent. “Peanut butter kisses” isn’t great, but it’s arguably not off-putting enough to convey the dreariness of the candy itself. But cheese? If you kissed someone and they told you it reminded them of cheese - or better yet, cheez - would you be flattered? Even if you knew they really liked cheese?

“Instead of sweets ‘n’ stuff”

The ‘70s saw the food industry searching for savory snacks that could deliver a little more substance than chips and pretzels, to appeal to health-conscious consumers and fill that void between a snack and a meal. Slim Jims took the convenience store counters by storm. Beef jerky and pork rinds came off the ranch and went mainstream. Less successfully, Dannon debuted a chocolate-covered yogurt on a stick, and a “protein product” called Skinny Munchies made chips out of some kind of dried milk solids.

Borden Foods seemed up to the task. The dairy giant’s portfolio included, or would soon include, such snacks as Cracker Jack, Wise potato chips, Guy’s potato chips, Campfire marshmallows, Drake’s snack cakes, Old London Melba Rounds, and perhaps most relevantly, Cheez Doodles. If anybody could crack the not-quite-a-meal moonshot, Borden could.

“Snacking’s a great American pastime. But if nutrition is lacking in your family’s snacking, treat ‘em to a high-protein snack: Borden’s Cheez Kisses, instead of sweets ‘n’ stuff.”

So went the 1974 commercial introducing Cheez Kisses to a few test markets. These “high-protein snacks” were little globs of cheese-adjacent material wrapped in plastic like bonbons. The official designation on the package - “Pasteurized Process Cheese Spread” - was the same as that applied to Cheez Whiz and Velveeta, which suggests that Cheez Kisses were on the soft side. But in a rare instance of restraint, Cheez Kisses were paler in color than their neon-orange brethren.

A 1977 Knight-Ridder news story said they were “born in response to American’s nutritional consciousness-raising, says a spokeswoman for the manufacturer, Borden Inc… ‘Consumer response has been so positive,’ according to the spokeswoman, that Kisses will be available nationwide by January (1978).”

“Unsuitable for the future”

To make Cheez Kisses happen, Borden brought to bear the full promotional arsenal of the late-20th-century packaged goods conglomerate. TV commercials. Christmas recipes. A campaign pushing Cheez Kisses as the “healthy” treat to give away on Halloween. Open up and say “ugh”, America: you’re getting Cheez Kissed whether you like it or not.

For the first few years, Cheez Kisses was the cherished baby of the family. Borden’s 1975 annual report touts the addition of supplemental production facilities to make “the new ‘all-family, anytime’ snack”. The next year’s report celebrates “full national roll-out only three years after their introduction as a totally new kind of snack”, while the 1977 report heralds Cheez Kisses’ introduction to Japan. (The diplomatic ramifications for US-Japan relations are unknown, presumably suppressed by Borden’s highly-placed agents within both governments.)

But all was not well in the house of Borden. Declining performance and disgruntled investors led to a series of restructurings, retrenchments, and divestments starting in 1979. “It is not an admission that past policies and actions were wrong,” wrote CEO Eugene J. Sullivan in the 1980 annual report, “only that some had outlived the times for which they were intended and are inadequate or unsuitable for the future.”

The many products disposed of in the “disposition of several lines of business” included Cheez Kisses. The volume of advertising dropped precipitously through 1979, with the last mentions in supermarket ads coming in January 1980. All good kisses must come to an end. And all gross kisses.

Coincidentally, the future king of cheese snacks was already taking shape, but not under Borden’s umbrella. A Wisconsin cheesemaker named Frank Baker had begin experimenting with ropes of mozzarella he’d cut into little hand-friendly pieces. After soaking the pieces in a salty brine, he found that they pulled apart in stringy strips. Testing his recipe on the patrons of local bars - doubtless a good way to reach a cross-section of Wisconsinites - Baker refined his creation to make it ever more snackable. By the end of the ‘70s, it had become what we would recognize as string cheese. Thus would it conquer lunchboxes a decade or two hence. No icky name, no -z ending required.

I’ve probably been too hard on Cheez Kisses. Chances are I liked them as a little kid, and/or would still like them today. But names matter. I can’t get the image of drippy cheese-smeared lips out of my head. A cheez by any other name would not sound as gross.

I don’t think I’d have ever been tricked into liking Cheez Kisses, though as a kid I did like some weird ‘treats’. I was oddly obsessed with white chocolate. It just seemed…fancier? More exotic? Or even just weird enough that it was my go-to any time I could pick out whatever bar I wanted. These days I’m 180 the other way and love dark chocolate. Did you have any weird food choices growing up? Let’s hear about ’em in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Snack healthy with these pasteurized process Shoddy Goods stories:

• Where’s the Speef? And other pretenders to the canned meat throne

• Halloween’s Least Wanted: the tragedy of peanut butter kisses

• How old do songs have to be to be “oldies”?

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It gets weird!

I am a sucker for those factoids that play on the telescoping nature of memory. Like the fact that Raiders of the Lost Ark is closer in time to The Wizard of Oz than the present day. Or that the first Strokes album is as old now as the first Ramones album was when that Strokes album came out. Or that The Office (US) is older, relative to my youngest daughter’s age, than Good Times was for me.

But even I am blown away by the fact that, if the first “Oldies” compilation album was released today, it would include songs from, like, 2023 and 2024. Even if the Internet went down forever starting right now, I have to think it would take longer than that for kids to need to be reminded of Chappell Roan and Shaboozey. But that was the timespan for the first ‘50s oldies to be labeled “oldies”.

Let’s take it all the way back to two years ago

For almost as long as mass entertainment has existed, people have been using “oldies” to refer to songs, stage shows, or movies from days gone by. Radio listings from 1938 show KMTR in Los Angeles was playing not just “Oldies” but “Oldies but Goodies” - the first use I can find anywhere of that term. I just wish I could find out what songs they were playing; I’m imagining the kinds of classics that populate the Michigan J. Frog repertoire.

Why “oldies but goodies”? The implication that old songs would naturally be less desirable feels odd in an age when the entertainment industry shamelessly spins mega coin from hologram ABBA, Friends binges, and countless other decades-old properties. Imagine a time when the poobahs of showbiz actually felt pressure to come up with new stuff rather than endlessly recycling the old.

“Oldies but goodies” then starts popping up regularly in newspapers in the early 1940s, to describe everything from a Gay ‘90s Revue to used cars to an old-timers baseball team. Since the earliest mentions are all in Southern California, I have to assume KMTR propagated it.

A teenager named Arthur Egnoian was listening raptly. After moving to Los Angeles with his family in 1938, Egnoian fell in love with radio. He’d get his first job in the industry in 1943, while still serving in the Navy. Now self-rechristened Art Laboe - “catchier” and “more American” - he started taking phone requests from listeners, maybe the first radio DJ to ever do so. Some of them wanted to hear the latest hits. But a surprising number asked for songs that had already fallen off the hit parade.

By 1959, now at KPOP in Los Angeles, Laboe had taken enough of these requests that he saw an untapped goldmine in the record industry’s dusty old castoffs. And “old” is a very relative term here. When Laboe’s Original Sounds label released his first Oldies but Goodies compilation LP that year, yoinking the name from KMTR, most of its r&b and doo-wop chestnuts were three years old or less. The oldest, “The Letter” by the Medallions, dated all the way back to 1954, while the newest, the Mello Kings’ “Tonite Tonite”, had only come out in 1957.

So nostalgia for the ‘50s started in the ‘50s. That’s how fast pop trends moved in those days. Once a song wasn’t on the radio, you had to buy the record to hear it. And if it wasn’t hot anymore, the record company would let the record go out of print, so you couldn’t buy it.

Art Laboe moved fast, too. He trademarked “Oldies but Goodies”, correctly assuming nobody would remember KMTR came up with it 20 years prior. With more compilations soon to follow, and a bigger platform on LA radio giant KRLA (also home to the likes of Casey Kasem and Bob Eubanks), Laboe was well-positioned for the coming day when rock ‘n’ roll memories became big business. He’d go on to a long career as a promoter and syndicated radio host.

“Rough, direct music”

It wasn’t just cranky senior citizens who were disoriented by the post-Beatles cultural upheaval. The teenagers who’d first screamed at Elvis would’ve been born around 1940, so by the Summer of Love, they were well into buttoned-down adulthood. They were happy to trade magic swirling ships and long beautiful hair for milkshakes and sock hops.

“Rock ‘n’ roll revival” shows started touring the UK in 1967 and 1968, before hitting the US the following year. Elvis’s black-leather comeback special was a sign of the times. The other original stars, discarded by the industry earlier in the decade, played to slightly more sedate but still rapturous crowds. “Bill Haley and the Comets made their first appearance in New York for eight years and they rocked the place,” said the New York Daily World of an October 1969 rock oldies revue. “You better believe the Big Beat is back and you better believe it still swings.”

Also on that bill were Chuck Berry, the Shirelles, the Coasters, the Platters - and Sha Na Na, the only act that hadn’t been around the first time. A few months earlier, they’d played the next-to-last set at no less a hippie watershed moment than Woodstock, followed only by Jimi Hendrix. Amidst the mud, nudity, and brown acid, Sha Na Na’s gold-lame street gang costumes and throwback takes on “At the Hop” and “Get a Job” were their own kind of avant-garde novelty.

“One of the most interesting parts of the audience is the large element of 30-year-olds still clinging to the 1950s style,” wrote Billboard in a 1972 article about rock ‘n’ roll revival package tours. As the post-hippie progressive rock of the moment “is experimenting in all directions,” the piece says, “some of the exploratory rock is overly dry and cerebral. This leaves a void for rough, direct music” to be filled by the likes of Little Richard, Fats Domino, and the Five Satins, who “hadn’t even seen each other for five years” before their recent reunion.

The following year, George Lucas’s American Graffiti would tap that vein of boomer nostalgia to the tune of $140 million at the box office. Thence came the onslaught. Happy Days and Sha Na Na on TV. Endless compilations of cheap-to-license oldies - or even cheaper anonymous cover versions of those oldies. And on the radio, the Oldies format.

By the early ‘80s, every major market had at least one oldies station, pitching themselves as the “station you sing along to” that goes down easy in the kitchen or the office. The “fun oldies” framing could feel inane: I remember one DJ following up Otis Redding’s tragic “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” talking about how that song made her feel like she was sipping coffee in her breakfast nook. But if you weren’t in sync with what your teenybopper sisters or stoner uncles were listening to, it was an alternative with a rich base to draw from.

“A narrow format”

Unfortunately, corporate Oldies stations limited themselves to a tiny sliver of old hits, and it didn’t take long for those limitations to show. “You can’t keep playing the same 2,000 songs over and over,” said Rick Shaw of Miami’s WAXY-FM in 1984. One of the early oldies radio success stories, by then WAXY had shifted to a more mixed Adult Contemporary format with some Oldies thrown in. “Oldies is a narrow, targeted format. It’s like a great movie, such as Gone with the Wind - if you see it once a year, that’s enough.”

Rather than dig deeper into the catalogue, maybe play a Sam Cooke or Everly Brothers song that wasn’t the same two or three they always played, these stations tried to keep it fresh by shifting the definition of Oldies.

First, in came Motown and the British Invasion, pushing out much of the ‘50s music. My little brother and I taped a stretch of our local Oldies station off the radio in 1986. I listened to it quite a bit for a while there. The selections ranged from “That’ll Be the Day” by Buddy Holly to “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas and the Papas, and the Manfred Mann version of “Quinn the Eskimo”. There was nothing like “Sh-Boom” or “Rockin’ Robin”. Still, that range felt pretty coherent.

The fatal line that Oldies crossed was when it shifted to music from the ‘70s. “What if you could build a new kind of oldies radio station that was really different?” asked a 1993 commercial for LA station Arrow 93FM. “What if you could take out the ‘50s doo-wop and bubblegum oldies… and you could put in all the great rock ‘n’ roll oldies from the ‘60s and ‘70s?”

Out with the Fleetwoods and in with Fleetwood Mac, whose “Go Your Own Way” surges on the commercial’s soundtrack. Their 1977 mega-smash Rumours is shown among the CDs replacing old bubblegum-encrusted vinyl 45s, as is Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA (released in 1984). OK, that move was probably more in line with where the audience’s ears were. Or, more accurately, where the coveted 25-54 demographic and their money were.

But the distinction between Oldies and Classic Rock started to collapse. Classic Rock stations already owned the listeners who wanted to hear “the same 2,000 songs” from the ‘70s and ‘80s plus the very occasional new release. The more Oldies stations encroached on that turf, the more redundant they made themselves, and the more of them changed music formats, turned into talk radio, or went out of business. Today, if you want to tune in to ‘50s and ‘60s pop, you probably have to go to either satellite radio or the Internet, or shuffle a Spotify playlist.

The fracturing of retro-flavored radio since then, into Classic Hits and Adult Hits and Variety Hits and “We Play Anything”, is more turf than we can cover here. But essentially they all play lots of ‘80s and ‘90s, some ‘70s, a little ‘00s. Oh, and they have one other thing in common: they never, ever use any variation of the dreaded o-word. Even if their favorite nostalgic songs came out 40 or 50 years ago, the last thing today’s oldies listener wants is to be reminded they’re old.

Something's definitely wrong with time - 2010 has got to be just a few years ago, not 16. And there's no way Nirvana's Nevermind is closer to Ella Fitzgerald’s songbook era than today. What shocks you when you think back to things that sure seem recent, but are apparently just a billboard telling us how very old we're getting? Let's talk in this week's Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Remember all the fun we had when we were young, grooving to these good-time Shoddy Goods oldies?

• In praise of the greatest-hits album

• The shoe store that made the ‘70s funky

• How a guy named Bryan started two major industries

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It’s gonna get weird!

Global canned food sales are now more than $210 billion annually. The average American eats about 200 pounds of canned food every year. Meanwhile the worldwide paper industry has seen steep falls in the production of newsprint, printing paper, and writing paper since 2010, but the rise in paper and cardboard packaging has more than made up for it. The paper industry is bigger than ever, with revenue of $485 billion in 2025.

For better or worse, our world would simply not look the same today without these two industries. And one person was the key figure in starting both of them. Bryan Donkin can legitimately claim to be the “father” of the canned-food industry and the paper industry as we know them. So who was he, besides one of the very few guys named Bryan in the 18th century?

Shake paper and roll

Born in northeastern England in 1768, Bryan Donkin went into the same business as his father: real estate. But it didn’t speak to him. So in 1792, at the rather ripe age of 24, he became an apprentice to John Hall at Dartford Iron Works to pursue his true calling as an engineer.

At the time, all paper was made by hand, more or less the same way it had been done since the Middle Ages. Cotton and linen rags were soaked in water and beaten into a pulp. A shallow, rectangular mold with a screen bottom would be dipped into the liquid slurry and shaken. A thin layer of the macerated fibers would settle on the screen; when dry, you’d have yourself a single sheet of paper.

Donkin started his post-apprenticeship career making these molds. But around 1801, he got connected to the Fourdrinier brothers, who produced stationery in London. They’d made a deal with a French inventor, Louis-Nicolas Robert, to bring a new paper-making machine to Britain. At the time, between the post-revolutionary turmoil in France and England’s more advanced industrial base, the latter seemed to hold more lucrative prospects for the new invention.

Unlike the laborious single-sheet, mold-based method, this new “Fourdrinier machine” used a cylinder to continuously produce rolls of paper. A mechanism called the “shake” agitated the conveyor belt at a high speed, to spread the wet pulp fibers in an even layer. Unfortunately, this rapid movement put a lot of strain on the mostly wooden machine. One of Donkin’s improvements was to use metal parts instead, for improved stability and precision.

Another refinement of his was adjusting the rollers that squeezed the water out of the paper, to maximize contact between them and the paper, to dry the paper more quickly and thoroughly. This and other improvements turned the Fourdrinier machine from an interesting prototype to a viable technical advancement.

It quickly became the industry standard, and remains so over 200 years later. The publishing boom of the late 19th and early 20th century wouldn’t have been possible without it. Those big machines you see today producing rolls of paper are most likely Fourdrinier machines. Donkin also made some key advancements in printing technology, so the Pulitzers and Murdochs of the world owe him double gratitude.

Oui, we can

His fortune secured, now the head of a company bearing his name that still exists (these days they make gas valves), Donkin’s restless mind turned to another puzzle: the preservation of food. Like too many technological quests, this one was spurred by military needs. Best frenemies England and France were both spreading their empires around the planet, frequently clashing, and looking for ways to keep their troops fed. In such wide-ranging conflicts as the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), far more sailors died of malnutrition than in combat.

It seems yet another French inventor had visions of pounds sterling dancing in his eyes. Philippe de Girard had come up with a method of preserving food by putting in inside a sealed tin container, then boiling the container in water to sterilize it. Or maybe he swiped the method from another French inventor, Nicolas Appert. Or maybe they were in cahoots. What we do know is that in 1810, de Girard went to London and engaged a merchant named Peter Durand to be his frontman for getting a British patent, which de Girard would not have been eligible for since Britain and France were at war.

Durand was duly awarded the patent in his name. Ever since, he’s been often called the inventor of the tin can, despite having nothing to do with inventing it, and doing nothing with it except selling the patent for £1,000 in 1812. The buyer? Bryan Donkin’s old apprenticeship master, John Hall.

Now on equal terms as budding titans of industry, Hall put up the money and Donkin provided the brains along with a third partner, John Gamble, to bring tin canning to an industrial scale. Again, it took a couple of years, but Donkin and Gamble steadily refined the process. One of their major innovations was to use iron coated in a thin layer of tin, combining the strength of the former with the non-reactive properties of the latter for an imperturbable can that could survive the longest, roughest ocean voyages.

For the second time, a French invention plus Donkin’s enhancements equaled le jackpot. After getting the likes of Queen Charlotte and the Duke of Wellington hooked with some free samples of canned beef, the firm of Donkin, Hall and Gamble received an order for 156 pounds of canned food from the Admiralty in 1813. That grew to 2,939 pounds the following year, increasing annually to 9,000 pounds by 1821.

Having bested the canning challenge, Donkin again wandered off in search of other worlds to conquer: helping Charles Babbage with the “difference engine” that would eventually become the computer, consulting on bridge and canal projects, inventing the first metal pen and a screw-cutting machine, being a founding member of both the Institution of Civil Engineers and the Royal Astronomical Society.

He died in 1855, an esteemed eminence in Victorian scientific and engineering circles. Today Bryan Donkin’s impact is out of all proportion to his memory. On a visit to his grave in London, the BBC found it made no mention of his achievements. Cemetery staff didn’t know who he was.

Food and books are good, actually

I can sense the question from some quarters of the audience: are Bryan Donkin’s achievements worth celebrating? Not only did canned food help enable imperial conquest and war, it also led eventually to the mass industrialization of food production, with its attendant crises of public health and monocultural farming, and our psychological distance from our food supply. And one look at any municipal dump will show you how much paper and cardboard waste still goes into landfill, even in a supposedly “paperless world”.

Those points are well taken. But it’s easier to dismiss these advancements when you live in a world that’s always known them. Over the last century or two, large-scale paper production enabled the rise of mass literacy, from only 10% of the world’s population being literate in 1820 to 90% today.

And it’s not just British seamen who eat better because of canned food. A 2011-2013 National Institutes of Health study found that people who eat six or more canned items a week “consume more nutrient-dense food groups such as fruits, vegetables, dairy products, and protein-rich foods, and also have higher intakes of 17 essential nutrients” including potassium, calcium, and fiber. Canned food has helped overcome the tyrannies of distance and time to get more nutrition to more people.

From the perspective of people in 1810, both food canning and mass paper production were immense steps forward. We can’t lay our subsequent inability to maintain some equilibrium at their feet. It’s true that Bryan Donkin didn’t invent the machines he perfected. Both industries probably would have happened, in some form, eventually, without him. But in being the first to perfect them for large-scale use, and granting all the downsides they’ve brought along with them, he hastened the coming of a less hungry, more educated world. Not bad for a guy named Bryan.

I’ve long wondered what I might be able to invent, if I went back in time with no supplies or information other than what’s currently in my head. Probably not a paper manufacturing machine or canned food. My best idea so far, as long as we are past the age of Gutenberg’s printing press, is the Choose Your Own Adventure style books. How about you, what would you be able to invent, with time travel to anytime in the past 500 years? Let’s hear about it in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Become a well-rounded polymath by devouring these previous Shoddy Goods stories:

• The Far Side and the golden age of the page-a-day calendar

• Where's the Speef? The pretenders to the canned-meat throne

• Inventor or con-man? The case of the self-rocking crib

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It’s gonna get weird!

Parents of teenagers, you get it. Especially if you’re as lazy as I am. You need to communicate some essential information or ask a crucial question of an adolescent located inconveniently in another room. You call out at a volume you know can be heard from that distance. Silence. They’re holed up with headphones or something. Again.

So, to avoid a laborious trek down the hallway, you (meaning I) pick up your (my) phone and text them. Or call, if it’s really serious. To send a message twenty feet, you bounce it off a cellular tower a mile away. Am I the only one who feels a pang of guilt over the WALL-E-like sloth and decadence of this digital convenience?

20th-century technology once offered another solution to this predicament: the home intercom system. It wasn’t quite as ridiculous - but still a little too ridiculous to really change The Way We Lived.

“Standard equipment in the home of tomorrow”

“A ‘Sound Investment’ for Every Home! A Blessing for a Busy Mother,” says a 1958 brochure for NuTone built-in home intercom systems. “She speaks softly… and yet is heard in every corner of the house.”

For companies like NuTone, hopes were high that the age of intra-home radio had come. The postwar building boom saw more than 1 million new homes built in 1946, climbing to 1.95 million in 1950 and staying well above a million annually thereafter.

Those homes were filling up with modern conveniences, too. In 1941, only 45% of US homes had an electric refrigerator; by 1957, that figure had doubled to 90%. Before the war, only 55% of American homes had complete plumbing (hot and cold running water, a bathtub or shower, and a flush toilet). By 1960, that number would be up to 83%. Telephones, too, spread rapidly after the war: from 45% of homes in 1945 to 75% by 1957.

Homes were starting to get bigger. The size of the average new home built in 1950 was 983 square feet, while in 1960, it was 1,289 square feet - in other words, the average home grew by 31% through the decade.

The millions of families stretching out in these spacious, modern new homes would need to talk to each other, right? What better way than the friendly old radio? And what better time to build a home intercom system than right along with the rest of the new house?

As a 1953 newspaper story put it, “Many experts say that such systems will be standard equipment in the so-called ‘home of tomorrow’.”

Home Communo-phone Systems

“We feel any new house that costs from $18,000 and up is a potential market,” said L.H. Bogen of the Bogen electronic company in 1953, when that price was about the median for new homes. “The cost of the average installation is not expensive - about $300 (about $3750 today), but the small house owner just wouldn’t have as much need for it.” He said his company had sold 6,000 “home communo-phone systems” over the previous two years.

Another manufacturer that same year said “Mother may not be a broadcaster, but she knows her needs as a homemaker. So the intercom units are designed to fit her needs for simple operation.”

Their design model was radio. These units, set flush into a wall at about head height, had a familiar configuration: mostly speaker, with a set of dials and a switch or two. A bigger base unit, generally shown in the kitchen, connected to smaller “remotes” throughout the house.

While the functionality varied, home intercoms generally allowed two-way communication, or whole-house announcements, or eavesdropping on a particular room, like a baby monitor. Most included AM/FM radio that could be piped throughout the system, so Mother the non-broadcaster could listen from room to room.

The novelty of hearing a familiar voice coming from the “radio”, and the feeling of being in a science fiction future, sparked a wave of excitement over home intercoms. Newspapers ran stories like this one from Arizona, about three neighbors who connected their homes with an intercom system set up by one of their teenage sons. They could chat while each were doing their chores, and mingle in each other’s homes freely while keeping an ear out for the kids.

It was practical, it was futuristic, it was kind of fun. So why did home intercoms never really catch on?

“Hated that thing so much”

Statistics are hard to come by, but wired home intercoms never made the leap that TVs and telephones did, from luxury to essential. Anecdotally, they’re remembered mainly as either something only rich people had, or as a little-used, troublesome white elephant. “What a waste of money that was, we never used it,” said one Facebook user.

“We used it as a baby monitor,” said Redditor Xyzzydude. “That required a bunch of switch flipping at the central station to figure out. They weren’t exactly flexible or user friendly… That was the only practical use we got out [of] it in over 40 years.”

“Our intercom system caught fire when I was a teenager,” another Redditor, FireWaterSquaw, said. “My brother and I hated that thing so much. Our parents would abuse it to wake us up for school.”

It’s a classic case of “features vs. benefits”. Yeah, home intercoms could do something. But that something just didn’t improve people’s lives enough to be worth the expense and effort of using it. Once the novelty wore off, an expensive, hard-wired, finicky unitasker was a tough sell.

Dedicated home intercom systems lingered for a few decades, gradually made redundant by other devices that were either more multifunctional or simpler. First came portable “wireless” intercoms that plugged into any outlet and carried sound on the home’s electrical wiring. Then, in the 1970s, some phone systems allowed you to dial to other extensions in the same house. The mid-’80s saw the first cordless phones with simple page and intercom functions between handsets, while simple wireless baby monitors made it easy to keep an ear on your kids.

Smart phones and smart speakers would seem to have finished the home intercom off for good. But they also affirm its basic use case, like every time I call my daughter two rooms away. With concern growing about data security, and a mood drift toward simpler “dumb” technology, the time may have come for the dedicated home intercom to make a comeback.

New systems like the Hosmart Ultraspeak and the Wuloo S600 might just be the first of a new generation of unconnected, cloud-free, wireless home intercoms. And you probably don’t need to worry about them catching on fire.

My childhood home (built in 1973) totally had these intercom systems in every bedroom, though I can't remember ever using them. Possibly for the crappy radio they had before I got my own. How about you, ever had these in your house or seen them in any others? Have anything quirky installed in your place that future residents will wonder about and/or gripe about having to uninstall? (I'm guessing my 'smart' thermostats will not be appreciated in the future.) Let's hear about 'em in this week's Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Tune into these previous Shoddy Goods stories wherever fine infotainment is narrowcasted:

• Porta-Fi: when GE tried to wire your house for sound

• The radio ad blocker that never got manufactured

• The first baby monitor was a work of art, literally

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It’s gonna get weird!

“Ad blocking is a threat to the whole advertising industry. It’s essential people understand that online content isn’t free.” - David Frew of the Internet Advertising Bureau on ad blockers, 2015

“No advertiser will pay $500,000 for a 30-second spot on Friends if it gets to the point where everybody is skipping over the commercials. And if advertising revenue dries up, who’s going to pay to create the product?” - Garth Ancier of Turner Broadcasting on TiVo, 2003

“Fast-forward modes and TV sets with remote control are the biggest threats to TV advertising today.” - Richard Kostyra of J. Walter Thompson on VCRs and mute buttons, 1984

It’s gone back and forth for decades. Audiences naturally want to avoid obnoxious, intrusive advertising. Innovators come up with technology that gives them that control. Publishers, broadcasters, and advertisers warn that it could mean the end of the very entertainment or news the audience wants. Everybody’s got a point. Advertisers get more clever about slipping in ads (like this sneaky plug for today’s Meh deal) and viewers get more savvy about avoiding them. As today’s story shows, this dynamic isn’t going anywhere. And it’s a lot older than the VCR.

“Born to be robbed”

“Lee de Forest is a roué, a cad, a thief,” says historian Susan Douglas in the 1992 Ken Burns documentary Empire of the Air, “and yet, probably the man most responsible for bringing radio broadcasting to the American public.” Lee de Forest’s self-defeating antics could fill a book, and in fact, they have: the documentary was based on a book of the same name by Tom Lewis, from which I’ve cribbed much of the following overview.

From an early age, de Forest was the prototypical brooding geek: socially awkward, convinced of his own genius, rejected by his peers who called him “monkey face”, contemptuous toward his intellectual inferiors, the “hayseeds, farmers, ignorant, uncouth, rough fellows.” Around 1900, in his late 20s, doctorate from Yale newly in hand, de Forest became convinced his destiny lie in “wireless telegraphy”, or what we would call radio.

This destiny would express itself in a pattern of stolen ideas, grandiose claims, financial chicanery, and bitterly broken partnerships for the rest of his life. De Forest had a penchant for stumbling across the inventions of others, making inferior copies, and taking credit himself. When he showed one of his early stolen ideas at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, he erected a 30-foot tower with DE FOREST spelled out on it.

This ruthlessness didn’t help his fortunes, with one business partnership after another falling apart in the most acrimonious ways. In one case, his partner cheated de Forest out of all the company funds and patents; in another, he narrowly avoided conviction after a lengthy fraud trial in which his partners were found guilty. “I was born to be robbed... robbed of opportunities to invent... robbed of the fruits of my years of toil,” he wailed in his diary. There was little room in his self-pity for any examination of his own intellectual pilfering.

His judgment was no better in his personal affairs. In 1908, de Forest married Nora Blatch, daughter of one of the most prominent suffragettes, and the first woman engineering graduate of Cornell - and then insisted she give up her career, leading her to divorce him after four years. Later, he would marry his fourth wife before getting around to divorcing his third.

And yet, de Forest’s accidental perfection of the vacuum tube (even he didn’t understand quite why it worked at first) laid the technological foundation for radio, and later television, and still later, the computer. He also did some of the very first radio broadcasts - the predominant idea at the time was that radio would be used to send messages over the air, as implied by the name “wireless telegraphy”, but he was thinking bigger. Infuriating though he could be, de Forest was without doubt one of the most significant figures in the most significant communication advance of his time.

Not that it did him much good. By 1930, radio was flourishing, bringing broadcast media into millions of homes worldwide for the first time - and de Forest was shut out of the bonanza, having sold all his radio interests and then lost his fortune in the stock market crash. When he turned an ear to what was being done with “his” invention, he did not like what he heard.

“Terminating the awful caterwaul”

“One tires of continually getting up from his easy-chair every little while and going over to the dial, shutting off the set, or tuning it to another station as soon as the music of a program ceases and the blatant advertiser begins to announce his wares, “ de Forest wrote in a 1930 article in the Radio News. “What the long-suffering radio user needs is a simple wireless device whereby he can instantly assassinate the advertising announcer and allow the set to resume its musical outpourings when the story of the tooth-paste or furniture salesman is terminated.”

OK, so he was no prose stylist. But de Forest was expressing an exasperation still as fresh as the latest pop-up ad you irritatedly X’ed away. Unlike most of us, he did something about it. As explained in the article, the Anti-Ad was a set-top box that would let you mute the radio for a pre-set amount of time, simply by shining a standard flashlight at it.

“When the musical program ends and the advertising agony begins, she merely picks up this flashlight, presses the button, aims this spot at the shadow-box on the Anti-Ad and presto! the relay operates, the antenna is cut off and our friend Mr. Radio Advertiser is talking into empty space, as he should be,” de Forest sniped. “One experiences a new joy not unlike that which one would experience in shooting a noisy tom-cat on the top of a back fence on a moonlight night and thus terminating the awful caterwaul.”

After “20 or 30 or 45 seconds” - whatever time the user set - the show would resume. I have no expertise to say whether de Forest’s invention would have worked, but presumably the editors of Radio News did, and found it plausible enough to publish.

So why then didn’t we all grow up with the Anti-Ad? Blame the financial imperatives of commercial broadcasting, with an assist from the inventor’s personality. Commercial radio broadcasting was initially conceived as a way to sell radios. By 1930 the ad model was firmly entrenched and growing, and the connections between radio manufacturers and radio broadcasters were still there. Little wonder that the captains of an industry didn’t build a device that would sabotage their own profits for the sake of a man they considered an abrasive crank when they thought about him at all.

Indeed, there’s no evidence the Anti-Ad ever went further than this one article and a smattering of newspaper coverage. Neither Lewis’s book nor de Forest’s own self-important 1950 autobiography, Father of Radio, even mentions it. Having gotten it out of his system, De Forest quickly moved on to other fruitless attempts to recapture his earlier success. He never stopped raging against the advertising machine - “Louder and more strident became the shrieks of [the] zealous announcers, more insistent, impudent, and repetitious [the] demands that listeners rush out forthwith to buy his merchandise, his nostrum, his laxative,” he wrote in his autobiography - before dying in relative penury in 1961.

No doubt, de Forest would not be at the top my barbecue invite list. But credit where it’s due, for how ahead of its time de Forest’s quickly forgotten invention seems now. In one swoop, it presaged the remote control, the mute button, commercial-skipping, and ad blockers. It would take decades, but eventually the rest of us would get tired enough of obnoxious ads to do something about it, too.

I think if there was a system where I’d only ever see an ad one time, I probably would actually enjoy watching ads. It’s the repetition, especially of terrible ads, that’s so painful and makes me want to block everything. I still have fond memories of the most bizarre local ads, furniture stores, carpet & tile stores, the Tik-Tok shop (whatever that was). Got any favorite quirky local ads? Let’s hear ’em (or even see ’em if you can find a YouTube link) in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These previous Shoddy Goods stories will not impudently shriek that readers rush out forthwith to purchase our laxative:

• The funky fashions of Flagg Bros., masters of pimp style

• The world’s finest wool comes from… the musk ox?!?

• Inventor or con-man? The case of the self-rocking crib

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It’s gonna get weird!