Do You Know Reddy Kilowatt?

One Girl Scout field trip was to the electric utility company's Home Ec demonstration kitchen with electric stoves, which we had never seen, and we practiced cooking on them, back when they WANTED people to use up electrical energy.

The electric company 's mascot was a figure made of lighting bolts with a bulbous head, a light-bulb nose and electric-socket ears, named Reddy Kilowatt, and it gave out Reddy-themed potholders and lapel pins, and electric bills had his picture on them, but after the energy shortage of 1973-74 -- the winter that, to save energy, we walked to school in the mornings with the stars still overhead -- saw him rarely, and now Reddy Kilowatt items are collectible. My sister and bro-in-law in Wisconsin collected two nostalgic Reddy potholders for me. Flummoxed because they had no tabs to hang them, I left them in a drawer for years before realizing they contained magnets for sticking them on the fridge. I now use them frequently. Here they are assisting me, saying "Be modern, cook electrically," on the propane stove with a pan of lavender shortbread.

Although Reddy looks to me now as if he suffers from terrible arthritis, I am fond of him. He was designed in the 1920s, to be consumer-friendly when farmers hemmed and hawed about buying electricity because they'd gotten along for 10,000 years without it. As I moved around the country I met people who had never heard of Reddy Kilowatt, and at times felt very alone, the way you feel when no one around you shares your archaic memories.

Then one day I had at the Divine Cabin a guest, born in Missouri in 1947. He saw my potholders and said, "Oh, Reddy Kilowatt," and I almost threw myself at his feet and begged him to marry me.

What Is It About Old Stuff?

I rearranged my bedroom to look as much as possible like a hotel room for no reason except that I adore hotel rooms, private, clean and comfy, pillows and towels plumped and straightened beautifully and magically every day while I'm out doing something fun, and I'm ecstatic and smitten out of my gourd if it's a firm mattress with--oh, rapture!!--white or cream-colored shadow-striped bedsheets.

So I bought the sheets, and a hotel-looking bedspread and pillow covers, and then rearranged the room, dragging to the garage a battered old metal foot locker given me when I started college, which nice ladies filled with "hope chest" doilies and linens -- boy, did they get a wrong number! -- I was 17 years old and the Vietnam War had ended the previous year so maybe foot lockers were on sale. It had not been moved in 16 years and was locked. Total genius me, I knew exactly where its key was: in the junk drawer, on a key ring that's a souvenir of San Francisco where I've never been: the carefully preserved "key ring holding keys I never use."

Inside the trunk lay Christmas things like stockings and "crafty" tree ornaments that had lost all their crocheted and decoupaged charm, and two green-and-maize rough woolen woven placemats, except they were too small for placemats, as ugly as they sound: a souvenir from Ireland from a certain mother-in-law, God rest her soul; all this I threw out. At the very bottom in a plastic casing was my old Girl Scout sash I thought I'd lost years ago.

You had to "graduate" from Brownie to Junior Girl Scout to get a sash to sew badges on, if we earned them. Nerdy girls earned badges enough to fill the front of the sash and start up the back--Girl Scout cool. The next step up, Cadette Girl Scouts, earned badges with yellow borders instead of green. Earning each badge required genuine mastery: 10 or 12 steps increasing in difficulty, and each step had to be shown to or performed in front of an adult, the Scout leader, who'd sign off on it. I remember most the intensity of earning the Needlework badge. Several wars later, I can still cross-stitch, huck-a-back-stitch, satin-stitch, applique, whipstitch, hem by hand, tie French knots, darn small holes, and what-all. It's the leftmost badge in the third row, above the first-aid box.

(I don't remember any first aid, though. When I'm accidentally cut or stung the first thing I do is swear.)

I left Girl Scouting halfway through Cadettes because the badges had increasingly discouraging requirements: The "Aviation" badge asked us to correctly fold and pack a parachute. I earned the "easy" ones like dressmaking and storytelling and dropped out.

Today with one click I ordered airline tickets like it's nothing and from Amazon.com a programmable coffeepot for my mock hotel room, so I will wake up to coffee or hot water for tea without moving from the bed, and the coffeepot arrives the next day.

Ride Through a Lifetime

An antique car stirs hearts like nothing else. While Dwight drove us around in his grandfather's Chevrolet 3100 "Thriftmaster" half-ton pickup truck, bought new in December 1948 for about $1000, we stopped at a light and an older man in a car beside us stared in wonder and then, teary-eyed, rolled down his window and said he remembered Ford pickups just like it. This one hauled grain, about 45 bushels per load, and silage, and everything else on Dwight's family's Kansas farm. It's always been garaged. The original's cracked engine block was replaced in the 1960s with the engine from a '53 or '54 Chevrolet. The truck was spiffed up in the 1970s, with yellow-orange shag carpeting beneath the pedals placed by Dwight's brother. Not long ago a man saw it in Dwight's driveway, stopped, and offered to trade his Cadillac Escalade for it. Dwight refused. He shared the truck's photo on Facebook and I was so delighted I asked for a ride, and hopped in to find no seatbelts, the driver using hand signals to turn left, a Kansas plate that says "Antique," a four-on-the-floor that is nothing but a stick in the floor, and a roaring engine. This bulbous old dark-green machine had personality, charisma. People stared and pointed. See how you like it (12 seconds):
Dwight said his very frugal Mennonite grandfather would never have ordered the custom cab with opera windows; it was likely the last pickup truck on the lot for that model year and Grandpa wangled a deal. Years later, the family let Dwight use it to go to college; a bookish boy lacking the the ability to fix things, essential for farming, he left the farm for the city, made it big, and his family was skeptical when years later he said he wanted the truck.

I just had to show you and let you hear its horn. The only thing hard to believe about it was that carpet.

The Lost Art of Tea-Towel Embroidery

Mom embroidered these tea towels in the 1950s while waiting for me to be born, and I know that's true because afterward she didn't embroider for seven years, having three more screaming babies in short order. She used these in her kitchen, because I recall misapprehending the image as "the dish running away with the spoon," but in fact it's a saucer eloping with a teacup. I hid this towel for years after it inspired rebellion among my own teacups and saucers. The salt cellar is backed with the forget-me-nots. Salt cellars, used for centuries, were outmoded in 1911 when Morton Salt made salt shake-able by adding magnesium carbonate. These designs came pre-stamped on the towels, and I still wonder whose surreal dream-images they were.

Bringing them out of storage perhaps ten years ago, at first I was careful with these towels, as a new mother is very very careful with Baby #1. They proved sturdy and colorfast. I now use them regularly and think of Mom. For a Scout badge in Embroidery, a Scout leader--not Mom--taught me running stitch, cross-stitch, French knots, and huck-a-back stitch. I haven't done embroidery since, but a keyboard is a kind of sewing machine.

Yes, I Do Chicken Fat

The coveted Kennedy/LBJ-era fitness patch

Full-body exercise being what it is -- important -- I want to do it, but as briefly as possible, and therefore have returned, after 45 years, to exercising to the 6-minute 33-second sound recording called "Chicken Fat," written by the composer of "The Music Man," Meredith Willson, and performed by its star, Robert Preston, and released in 1961. It's on You Tube should you miss the Cold War era when Mrs. L put it on the turntable and forced your class to exercise to it. It gets the lead out on slow mornings. I do it daily and can now do those insufferable 10 pushups military style and have developed genuine see-able front delts.

Odd history, this song. Health people concerned that we kids were watching too much TV formed the President's Council on Physical Fitness, under President Kennedy. They commissioned the writing and recording of "Chicken Fat" and sent millions of copies of the 45 rpm disc to schools. Once past its corniness it isn't a bad little workout, but obviously the only model for physical fitness back then was military, so you get orders to march ("Left! Left! Left a good pound and a quarter; was it right? Right? Then it should be left!") interspersed with the jumping jacks, pushups, bicycle, deep breathing and arm circles. And when was the last time anybody told you to touch your toes ten times to get physically fit? Or to run in place, for heaven's sake (the culminating exercise)? It's a time capsule of WWII boot camp (Robert Preston was in the army for years; you can hear it in his voice).

Yes, it's dated, but it's simple and cheap. No equipment required and only a few square feet of space and costs nothing but willpower and discipline. There's been a call for the present government to commission and distribute a motivational exercise recording on the "Chicken Fat" model. Of course it could not be uncool, so it will never be made, because kids nowadays won't do anything uncool and that changes hourly, and no matter what, there'd be parents filing lawsuits about it. Back then we did what we were told or got sent to the principal who lectured us about the Soviet threat.

Last of the Moguls

Missouri's a great place for antique home furnishings. Have two big ol' hand-me-down floor lamps, one brass (1940s), and one chrome (1930s; has a translucent marble base that lights up when you kick it a little). So old they don't have those modern plugs. So old they take an outmoded type of bulb not found on store shelves anymore, although I've been looking for a couple of years, hoping to stock up. I told the clerks,"It's called a Mogul bulb." They'd say, "Come again?" and "Never heard of it." Has a big base to fit a big socket. Expensive.

Found some Mogul bulbs online at "Bulborama.com" but then I saw they also sold ceramic adapters for reducing a Mogul socket to a regular socket -- for $4. So I bought two. That way my big lamps could use modern energy-saver bulbs. I also bought three-way energy-saver bulbs that don't work three ways, but I'm glad they work at all. (Have you seen the current prices for floor lamps?)

So my quest through the hardware and lamp stores for Mogul bulbs has ended, and along with it a part of history that was built into my home furnishings. Above you see the last of my Moguls, the adapter, and the new kid on the block.

The Beloved Paint Sign

Long-lived small-town businesses sometimes keep the same signs up for years, and this is the old Pittsburgh Paints sign I remember from when I was a kid, seen two weeks ago in Lebanon, MO. It's so simple and beautiful, and no TV commercial ever opened up such imaginative vistas as did these letters in these colors, hung high in the sky like modern art; not designed to make you want to buy buckets of paint, but to make you marvel and dream of possibilities... (we didn't know the lead in the paint was bad). I used to think I dreamt this sign, but I did not not. Life really includes it and still does. Now to find somebody who still has the Red Goose Shoes sign...