Those Happy Days

QUESTION: My mother had a cabinet full of Melmac dishes in a variety of pastel colors. We used them for every meal. Now I have them and while most have seem better days, they bring back fond memories of my childhood. What can you tell me about them? Are they collectible?

ANSWER: Your Melmac dishes are certainly collectible, as hundreds of collectors of the plastic ware can attest. The most collectible pieces are from the 1950s when items such as this signaled the dawn of future of ease for American housewives.

Everyone knows of “Happy Days,” the 1950s-era T.V. sit com, featuring a typical middle class family. The mother on that show, much like scores of other American housewives of the period, must have thought she had died and gone to housewares heaven with the advent of Melmac dinnerware. That was just one of the items that made her days truly happy because its durability made it ideal to use in homes with children.

Initially discovered by William F. Talbot in the 1940s, Melmac, the name given for the hard plastic melamine resin by its chief maker American Cyanimid Corporation, was first used in the military.
Dishes made of early plastics and Bakelite did not hold up well or withstand regular washings or heat, but American Cyanimid showed that its new "improved plastic" could indeed hold up well. While the company produced the resin, itself, it sold it to other manufacturers which molded it into dinnerware lines for both home and restaurant use.

The Plastics Manufacturing Company of Dallas, Texas, produced Texas Ware, Dallas Ware, Oblique, SRO and Elan. The Boonton Molding Company of Boonton, New Jersey, offered Boontonware, Patrician and Somerset. International Molded Products in Cleveland, Ohio, produced Brookpark/Arrowhead Modern Design and Desert Flower lines designed by Joan Luntz. And the Prophylactic Brush Company of Florence, Massachusetts, made Prolon. Its Florence and Beverly lines were the most popular for home use.

During the late 1950s and 1960s Melmac dinnerware found its way into just about every American home. However, the tendency of melamine cups and plates to stain and scratch led sales to decline in the late 1960s, and eventually it became largely limited to the camping and nursery markets.

Melmac is used for just about any type of dinnerware, including plates, cups and saucers, serving pieces, and glasses. Manufacturers could add any type of color pigment to the resin during the molding process. As a result, they created it in a variety of colors and patterns. Muted colors, such as pea green and seafoam appeared in the late 1950’s, and during the late 1960s, makers experimented with interesting color combinations to complement the psychedelic look of the time.

Today, you’ll find vintage Melmac in thrift stores, at estate sales, online auction sites, and garage sales. It's fun to collect it and due to it's long production, it’s easy to make a whole set. Some Melmac pieces are worth more in value than others. Full sets in pinks or blues are generally priced higher. Though you may have a problem finding full sets, you can start collecting it inexpensively by piecing sets together. 

Going Retro

QUESTION: I recently purchased a one arm chair that has a metal stamp that says The B.L. Marble Chair Co. ,Bedford Ohio. It is a cool mid-century design and is walnut and leather. Do you know anything about this chair like what its purpose was?

ANSWER:  Barzilla L. Marble founded the B.L. Marble Chair Co. in 1894, after working at several other chair companies. His grandfather operated a chair factory in Marbletown, New York, and others in his family likewise made chairs, so it was natural for Marble to do so. He formed a brief partnership with A.L. Shattuck in 1885, but struck out on his own nine years later.

His company produced fine wooden chairs made for comfort and elegance that were made to last. Up until 1910, it produced chairs for the home, but during World War I, Marble added a division to make wooden aircraft propellers for the military.

By 1921. Marble’s company had outgrown its small wooden buildings and construction began on new brick buildings which had more than four acres of floor space. After Marble died in 1932,  A. D. Pettibone became president of the company and part owner. In 1953 Pettibone sold his interest in the Marble Chair Company to a group of local investors. Eventually, another man, also named Pettibone but not related to the first, bought the company, and it became extremely successful.

The company produced one-arm “modern” chairs most likely in the mid-60s under the second Pettibone owner. Furniture makers intended one-arm chairs, both originally in the 1870s and then in the 1960s as chairs to be placed in a corner. Today, most people would refer to these 1960's chairs as “retro” in style.

But exactly what does retro mean? According to the Oxford University Press Dictionary, retro means "imitative of a style from the recent past." Retro is a culturally outdated or aged style, trend, mode, or fashion, most likely from the 1940s through the 1960s. Currently, eBay offers over 468,000 different retro items at auction.

People born between the 1940 and 1950 became teenagers during the 1950s and 1960s. And because those two periods provide memories for many of them, anything retro is in, whether it’s furniture, accessories, clothing, and collectibles, especially those related to the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Life in the 1950s was conservative, but changes were about to take place. Such innovations as Velcro, Tang, frozen foods, transistor radios, Frisbees and the hula-hoop began to appear. Bill Haley and the Comets rocked around the clock while jukeboxes filled every burger joint and ice cream parlor with the new sounds.

Furniture and accessories, especially the ubiquitous pole lamp, featured streamlined styling in avocado and gold. By 1957 there were 47 million T.V. sets in America’s homes, four times the number of just seven years before. Families began to watch T.V. shows like “I Love Lucy” incessantly. They even ate in front of the T.V., thus necessitating the invention of the T.V. tray and comfortable casual furniture without frills.

Later on in the 1960s, the space race captured everyone’s attention as astronauts walked on the Moon and teens danced the twist to the music of Chubby Checker and sang along to Beatles’ tunes. More innovations such as lava lamps and electric knives caught on eventually providing the retro movement with lots of collectibles.