Snake America Fifty Three
Snake is a bi-weekly (though not this week) magazine covering salable goods. This week, vintage swimwear (men's) and a clock, radio. Subscribe for this in your inbox.
eBay: Vintage 1920s wool underwear/swim trunks: Man, I was upstate a month ago for a weekend and took a picture of these--framed behind glass--in a junk store and am wondering if the ones listed here are the same pair. Since how many perfect-condition pairs of wool underwear can a person run into so quickly? I bet not that many. I also bet all the swim trunks of that era are the same size. These underwear--these swim trunks--bring up a long-standing question of how exactly itchy church clothes became sports gear. This disconnect isn't unique to swim trunks--baseball players in the 1930s donned cardigan wool sweaters when they got chilly and pre-war quarterbacks were required to press their helmets before division games. But the question remains. How did people wear this stuff on the beach? This men's beach suit, below, is seeing brisker activity than the above-mentioned, and looks like something a doorman might wear one day a year:
It's just evolution, but that's not a good enough answer. Wool smells bad when it's wet, like wet wool. Didn't people notice? An undated SFGate.com service journalism piece that appears to be an ad (selling nothing) concedes that "if the [wool] rug gets wet, it may smell like a sheep in the rain." A more detailed discussion on AskAndyAboutClothes.com (summer 2011) brings forth the following information:
Wool can soak up cigarette smells, that then disappear but come back when the wool gets wet again.
Just let it dry to get rid of the smell.
The smell is still there (original poster)
Wool can only be truly smell-free after dry-cleaning--see above
Stand downwind from some sheep if you want to smell relatively better than you did before (from a moderator, not Andy) ... discussion over.
I can't offer any anecdotal evidence here about whether dry cleaning fixes smelly wool because I own better than one suit and situations beyond my control have limited those three suits' wear to bi-annual. But I wanted to see if anyone dry-cleaned their wool swimsuits after going to the beach in the 1920s. A good rundown was posted on the website of the State(1) Coalition for Remediation of Dry Cleaners, drycleancoalition.org, which wants to remediate their industry. In their words, the SCRDC is:
representatives of states with established drycleaner remediation programs .... [whose] primary objectives are to provide a forum for the exchange of information and the discussion of implementation issues related to established state drycleaner [sic] programs; share information and lessons learned with states without drycleaner-specific [sic] programs; and encourages the use of innovative technologies in drycleaner [sic] remediation. The Coalition conducts regular conference calls [tight] and has an annual meeting that focus on administering drycleaner [sic] cleanup programs and site assessment and remediation technologies
Who knew? I think they are trying for fewer spills and cleaner dry-cleaning petroleum. Per that rundown, "at least one drycleaning [sic] plant was being operated in the U.S." in 1879. That info comes from the "Dry Cleaning" entry by Van Sigworth(2) in Encyclopaedia Americana. Battistons.com, a website for a fabric-care specialist out of Glastonbury, Conn., says dry-cleaning is a "2,000 year toga party," and, more usefully, that France's Jolly Belin was first to dabble in the business. That fact is confirmed by a different dry cleaners' website, which goes further: the guy's name was Jean Baptiste Jolly and his maid spilled turpentine on his table-cloth and then the part with the spill became more white, so he called his son-in-law H Petite Didier (lmao) and they went into business (in Paris), but actually someone else used turpentine to clean things 100 years earlier, and, arguably, 1710-ish years before that, depending on the date of publication of the Glastonbury, Conn. fabric-care specialists' website. That different site also states that early 20th-century dry-cleaning businesses were prone to fire, and that "wet-cleaning" was introduced in 1993, which seems recent. Racked.com says to use steam, kitty litter and vinegar to get rid of general bad vintage clothing smells, though never together. The 1920s' equivalent of vintage swimwear were those full wool dresses of the late 1800s, often boiled, closer to three-piece suits than the modern church underwear of the Jazz Age. (I also found out about The Bathing Suit Regulations of 1917, passed by the American Association of Park Superintendents, though I am not sure if these were by-laws or something, which required womens' suits to be no more than four inches above the knee.) So who complained? Kitty litter wasn't invented until 1947, but vinegar was pretty popular before the depression. Wool holds water and cotton doesn't. To quote William Gaddis, "Justice? -- You get justice in the next world. In this one you have the law." It applies to comfortable swimwear here. Tomorrow's suits will make us feel like rubes. Anyways, the seller says someone offered him something close to asking and he's probably going to sell it soon. Recommended, but not as highly as the framed one.
eBay: Purple clock radio, $266: News reaches our home bureau at precisely 11:00 PM ET, March 25, 2015, that some clock radios are worth their asking price. Not a lot of good purple home goods out there. The company, which is Italian, was founded in 1960 and also did the Radiofonografo, which is a credenza whose dials on the front form a happy face, that has build-in speakers, on the left and right, and a turntable on top. Not sure why anyone would buy a credenza when they can put their mail on a positive record player. That idea of what to get for the man who has everything comes up here. This clock radio would make a pretty good gift. The assumption is the fellow with an explicitly pretty-good job and implicitly no kids, etc., has a Radiofonografo, or maybe even a Grattacielo, but not even someone with everything has this clock radio. I wonder if Franco Columbu, Mr. Olympia 1976 and 1981 and another 1970s Italian export, has one of these in his renowned Los Angeles chiropractory practice. The best part about the Arnold Tim Ferriss podcast from a couple weeks back is Arnold's story of how him and Franco ran an bricklaying business for extra money in the 1960s..They ran that business before Commando (USA 1985) and it helped him make his first million. So Arnold and Franco did manual labor somewhere in the ramp-up to their respective pro bodybuilding careers. I read somewhere they did two-a-days. There's also this website where a British guy who's really into stereo equipment lists out the best audiophile equipment, and says he'll email you and tell you whether your want-to-buy list is any good for $50. I can't find it ... but he only listens to Beethoven. He'd be better off using this thing for when he listens to Power 105 in the morning.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Last Snake: English Soccer Team soccer ball; US Track singlet (for sale; sold)
Snake Before That: Floorpunch (sold)
(1) The states include, per website: Alabama, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin.
(2) I can't find info on this author. The only Van Sigworth that shows to Google is this one big Terps fan who died two years ago (elderly) and was active in The M Club, and who wrote "Voice of the Turtle" columns for the organization. Fahey?