What Goes Around Comes Around

 

QUESTION: For the last couple of years, I’ve been buying vintage kitchen utensils. At first, I had planned to use them to decorate my Mid-Century Modern kitchen, but I got hooked on them and now purchase them not only at flea markets but online. Some I recognize, others I don’t. What types of gadgets did women use in their kitchen? And are these old utensils worth collecting?

ANSWER: Kitchen gadgets are a popular collectible. And what’s interesting about them is that most are still usable in today’s kitchen. Even with all the electric and electronic devices available today, there are just some things that need to be done by hand, preferably with some sort of gadget. The proliferation of gadgets advertised on T.V., the Internet, and social media attests to this.

There are dozens of quirky looking utensils—graters, slicers, ice cream scoops, ice picks, juicers, peelers, sharpeners, mashers, ricers, strainers, sifters, scoops, scales, and ladles. The list is almost endless.

All these utensils—from food mincers, pitters, and corers to spiral whisks and jar lifters—eased even the most basic of a housewife's culinary chores. Ingenious kitchen gadgets made exacting tasks—such as defining the outer edges of a pie crust with a pie crimper—a pleasure. Colored handles added to their attraction.

During the late 19th century, the modernization of the American kitchen had begun. The kitchen was a place where families gathered informally to cook and bake, make butter, can and preserve fruits and vegetables, peel potatoes, dry herbs, and wash dishes. And it took a variety of utensils to complete these jobs.

From the 1920's through the 1940's, large and small companies manufactured  hundreds of these gadgets, trying to help make kitchen work easier and more colorful. Brightly painted cooking utensils of the 1920s brought the first dab of color into American kitchens. Apple green led the cutlery color wheel, followed by Mandarin red. 

What could be better than homemade pie with homemade crust? Most pie crimpers had wooden handles and resembled small versions of today's pizza cutters Whalers often carved them of whale ivory for their wives and sweethearts back home. By the 20th century, makers introduced metal with the wood. Of course, there were many other baking gadgets like dough blenders, pie lifters, rolling pins, and spatulas. 

Before food processors and electric beaters, there were efficient hand and mechanical beaters. Among these were a variety of wooden handled spiral whisks, flat wire whips, and, of course, those very efficient rotary beaters. The forerunner to the food processor was the glass pitcher beater which came in variety of shapes and sizes.

Old choppers and mincers had wooden handles and stainless steel curved blades. Many of the old ones, made of glass, wood, or steel, were more durable. Some glass jar choppers and mincers had handles to turn, making the work easier and faster. Of course, cooks also used grinders mounted to the corner of the kitchen table. Simply by putting almost anything into the wide opening at the top and turning the handle, they could grind meat, nuts, and berries.

Department stores such as Abraham & Straus, Macy's,, and Wanamaker's led the market selling colorful vintage utensils and other kitchen paraphernalia. 

Many small businesses produced these labor-saving utensils. One of the most notable was A & J Manufacturing Company of Binghamton, New York. Colored utensils from A & J can be found at flea markets and antique shops and shows simply because these products proliferated nationally and internationally in the kitchen-cutlery market for nearly 40 years.

A & J began humbly in 1909 in the homes of Benjamin T. Ash and Edward H. Johnson, who lived in rural upstate New York. After creating and marketing their first product—a one-handed eggbeater—they added numerous other kitchen gadgets with natural wooden handles to their product line. By 1918, A & J had moved to a commercial building and employed 200 workers who cranked out some four million tools annually.

The company was the first to offer knives, spatulas, ladles, and other items in one package. 

These early 20th-century kitchen gadgets have a strong relationship to today’s “As-seen-on-TV”  gadgets, advertised on many of the retro channels. Take the one-hand blender. Except for its streamlined shape and lack of a colored handle, it’s very similar to Ash’s and West’s one-handed eggbeater. It puts a new spin on the old saying, “What goes around comes around.”

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about "The Age of Photography" in the 2023 Holiday Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

Whatever Happened to Elsie the Cow?

QUESTION: When I was a kid, I remember seeing Elsie the Cow all over the place. She appeared on all Borden dairy products, billboards, and magazine ads. I even had some Elsie toys. Whatever happened to Elsie the Cow?

ANSWER: Elsie the Cow was the hottest advertising personality in the country in the 1940s and 1950s. Borden Company produced thousands of items bearing her likeness to promote its products.

In 1852, Gail Borden, Jr. received a patent for his condensed milk process, and in 1857 he founded the Gail Borden Jr. and Company. He reorganized his company in 1858 as the New York Condensed Milk Company, which ultimately became the Borden Co.

During the early 1860s, Borden sold his condensed, sugar sweetened milk from push carts on the streets of New York. His product was always pure and safe, and in 1864 when Louis Pasteur showed the world a real live germ, Gail Borden finally learned exactly why his heat process was so successful. The demand for Borden’s condensed milk grew during the Civil War and his business boomed. Though Borden died in 1874 at the age of 72, he lives on as the "father of the modern dairy industry."
   
During the 1920s and 1930s the commercial dairy business was growing. Borden's bought hundreds of area dairies, out marketing, underselling, and forcing them to sell their milk direct to the large processors at smaller profits. The public sided with the struggling farmers.

In 1936, Borden's, to create a more wholesome public image, placed a new kind of advertising in some medical journals to attract the attention of pediatricians. These ads featured several cartoon cows, one of which was named Elsie. The ads promoted Borden's high standards of quality.

In 1938 a radio copywriter intrigued by the magazine ads wrote a sample Elsie commercial and gave it to a network news commentator whose show Borden  sponsored. He read it over the air and his listeners loved it. Fan mail began arriving addressed to Elsie the Borden Cow.

Borden prepared national magazine ads and local dairies put Elsie's picture on their bottle caps.

Borden reacted quickly by choosing the most attractive of the 150 cows---a Jersey from Massachusetts whose name the company changed from You'll Do Lobelia to Elsie.

The public's response to Elsie was unprecedented. A survey done in the late 1940s showed that Elsie was a more known and recognized figure than the president of the United States.

After being a featured attraction at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 and 1940, and starring in a movie. Elsie became a highly recognizable personality. Borden began to show her wearing the popular ruffled shoulder apron and in 1941 she stood up and became an American housewife.
       
All through the 1940s Elsie collectible advertising items and toys were hot. At one point, Borden's had over 100 licensed vendors producing everything from puzzles and games to handkerchiefs and lamps. Everyone loved Elsie.

The 1950s also brought the creation of the "Good Food Line" train which featured Elsie’s entire family, her husband, Elmer, and her two children, Beulah and Baby Beauregard, promoting Borden’s milk, ice cream, and cheese. In 1958 Borden's commissioned Ringling Brothers to build a parade model of the famous train. It had a special car for the live Elsie to ride on and was used in thousands of parades until the early 1990s. After that, Elsie had faded into history. She spent her last days on a farm in Texas.

What About Early Boob Tubes?

QUESTION: While helping a friend clean out his attic, I discovered he had an old television set. Though it was covered in dust, it looked like it may have been from the 1950s. When I asked him if I could have it, he said “Sure, I don’t want that piece of junk.” But now that I have it, I’m not sure what to do with it. The screen seems to be suspended in a U-shaped ring which sits atop a box with control knobs. It bears the name Philco Predicta.

ANSWER: You have one of the prime post-war television sets, dating from 1959. This famous set had a rather bad reputation. Although collectors love them for their sleek modern look, they couldn't overcome their performance problems. In fact, they often caught on fire. So you probably shouldn’t think about restoring it to working order.

But to truly understand the evolution of television sets, you need to understand a bit about their early history. In 1908 Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, fellow of the Royal Society (UK), published a letter in the scientific journal Nature in which he described how "distant electric vision" could be achieved by using a cathode ray tube as both a transmitting and receiving device.

Originally, televisions were mechanical and simpler, consisting of a motor turning a spinning disk and a neon lamp. Scotsman John Logie Baird and American Charles Jenkins perfected the mechanical system in the mid-1920s. The projected image was only business-card size, but a magnifier enlarged the image.

Though Philo Farnsworth was working on an electronic television system in San Francisco during the late 1920s, it was engineer Vladimir Zworykin, a Russian immigrant working for RCA, who claimed the invention. However, the U.S. Patent Office gave the nod to Farnsworth in 1934 and RCA agreed to pay Farnsworth $1 million over the next 10 years to use his patents.

It's generally accepted that the 1938 DuMont Model 180 with a14-inch picture tube was the first commercially available electronic TV set in the United States. The 12-inch 1939 RCA Victor TRK-12 followed soon after, launching it at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In the set’s brochure, RCA claimed   the receiver would allow an average family to see a program simultaneously at a cost for electricity of about one cent per hour. Viewers actually watched the image on a mirror because the long picture tube was mounted vertically in the cabinet.

RCA dominated the pre-war U.S. television set production, as well as the postwar technology, until about 1948.

Color T.V. sets appeared in the mid-1950s. RCA began to manufacture the first "mass-produced" color TV in 1954, the CT-100, called "The Merrill,"and also licensed its technology to 70 competing manufacturers. However, Westinghouse beat it to market with its H840CK15, a 15-inch set priced at $1,250. The company produced only 500 and only a few of those sold.

The CT-100 debuted at $1,000, about $7,400 in today's dollars, a bit pricey for the average American household. Within months, RCA reduced its price to $495, then the company recalled most of them and swapped them out for a 21-inch model. Fewer than 5,000 CT-100s made it to retail stores and fewer sold. Only about 75 exist today, perhaps 25 in working condition. If you can find a CT-100, you'll pay about $5,000 for it.

Even so, by the end of 1957, only 150,000 color sets had sold. That’s because there wasn’t much to watch in color at the time. The first national color broadcast was of the 1954 Tournament of Roses Parade from Pasadena, California. But only a handful of TV studios were capable of color broadcasting, with the transition to color by local TV stations done slowly on a market-by-market basis. By 1960, only RCA remained producing color sets.

Things changed dramatically with the premiere of NBC's Sunday night Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color in September 1961. Other major shows followed in the 1960s and color sales began to surge and competition roared again. CBS began regular colorcasts in the fall of 1965, and NBC became the first 100 percent color network in 1966. In 1967, sales of color TVs surpassed sales of black-and-white sets.

After a lengthy duel to the death over which color technology would rule in the United States, CBS's partially mechanical color system or RCA's all electronic one—RCA emerged victorious. The broadcasting industry adopted the National Television System Committee's electronic color TV system, which was compatible with existing black-and-white T.V. broadcasting in the early 1950s and is still used today.

Though T.V. sets in the 1960s used vacuum tube electronics, that all changed by the early 1970s when solid-state electronics appeared on the market. This allowed for significantly more reliable televisions with better picture quality.

Most collectors want TVs from the 1930s and 1940s just the way they are. However, non-collectors want sets from the 1950s and 1960s that have been color converted to go with their 1950s or 1960s retro decor and in working condition.

There are millions and millions of discarded sets out there, so not all will be worth collecting. But there are key sets throughout each decade that collectors want to own, including newer ones from the 1970s and 1980s. You can pick up an early postwar set on eBay for $100 to $300. With newly made replacement parts and a good supply of new old-stock vacuum tubes available, you might take a stab at restoring one yourself.