Those dirty rings and other outdated ads
BURTON W. COLE, Editor
By Burton W. Cole
I folded the ancient, still dryer-warm T-shirt. My late wife would have thrown it away years and several dozen stains ago.
Not me. You just don’t part with a well-ventilated, well-broken-in treasure like that. It takes a lot of work to get T-shirts this comfy.
The logo was faded. A couple of the holes ensured that I wouldn’t be wearing this out in public. The collar was frayed, what was left of it.
I chuckled. No ring around the collar here. There wasn’t enough collar left.
How did that TV commercial from way back in 1968 go? It started with what sounded like a sing-songy playground taunt: “Ring around the collar. Ring around the collar.”
As the exasperated woman at the ironing board sighed over her husband’s dress shirt, the announcer intoned: “Those dirty rings. You try soaking them out, and soaping them out and scrubbing them out.”
Apparently, there was a herd of old maid aunts roaming the streets who would crook their fingers into nephews’ shirt collars, inspect, and wrinkle their noses at “those dirty rings.” None of my aunts did this, but there must have been some. Otherwise, why would anyone care about a smudge on the back of the neck that no one was going to see anyway?
I sat on Grandma’s living room carpet, trying to figure out that mystery while waiting for the commercials to finally end so we could get back to the TV show.
(Grandma had a color TV, ‘cause she was rich. She even had a second TV upstairs, a little black-and-white one, but still TWO television sets? She must have been a millionaire!)
A couple years later, that Wisk commercial was joined by a woman picking up her family’s dress shirts at a laundry. (She must have been rich, too. No one I knew used a laundry service.)
The lady asked Mr. Lee how he got clothes so clean. With a mysterious smile, he replied, “Ancient Chinese secret.”
Then the camera moved behind the curtain where Mrs. Lee said, “My husband, some hotshot. Here’s his ancient Chinese secret.” And she held up a box of Calgon laundry additives.
“Ancient Chinese secret” became a catchphrase at school. No wonder our ideas of other cultures were warped but what later were labeled as “harmful stereotypes.”
It’s why one of our favorite commercial cartoon characters went off the air in 1971 — the Frito Kid.
But if you’re of a certain age, my age, you probably still can sing the whole song, starting with “Ai, yi, yi, yi, I am the Frito Bandito…” We didn’t know any better.
Those were tough times. It wasn’t just getting cultures wrong. It was also before self-esteem had been invented. If we felt rejected by our peers, our recourse was to sing, “I wish I was an Oscar Meyer wiener, that is what I’d really like to be, because if I was an Oscar Meyer wiener, everyone would be in love with me.”
Yeah. Our therapy was to wish to turn into a hot dog and be gobbled up. Probably with a side of Fritos.
In those wild, crazy days, the Yellow Pages encouraged us to “Let your fingers do the walking.”
You see kids, back in those primitive days, when telephones were stuck on walls or desks and could not take a single photo, we had this thing called the phone book. Telephones didn’t store numbers. Every family’s name, address and phone number was printed in an actual book that you kept by the phone.
(Yes, family’s name. Unless you were super rich, there was only one telephone line per household. Ask me about “party lines.” It wasn’t THAT kind of party.)
At the back of the phone book, there were pages that were colored yellow. That’s where businesses listed their phone numbers and ads and whatnot. There was no such thing as Google — I am not making that up — so you thumbed through the Yellow Pages instead to find phone numbers of restaurants, coal companies and TV antenna repairmen.
Wait, wasn’t I folding laundry? How did I meander from ring around the color to ancient secrets and walk all the way to the Yellow Pages? That’s way too much talk about commercials when a little dab’ll do ya. (Yep, that’s an old catchphrase too. Look it up.)
While Burt puts away laundry, clap on and clap off at him at news@falmouthoutlook.com.