Growing up, I watched a lot of cowboy shows. Which got me to think a lot about the Old West. And to think about how I used to think about how it might have been if I had been able to just plunk myself down in the middle of it. Which I spent a lot of day-dreaming time doing when I was a kid.
I wanted to be friends with Annie Oakley. And I wanted to be the girlfriend of the Range Rider’s sidekick, Dick West, the All American Boy. (Perhaps the only time I wanted anything to do with an All American Boy.)
As I got a bit older, I wanted to be a calico-clad pioneer girl, wagon-training across the prairies in the family Conestoga wagon. Sometimes in my Wagon Train fantasies I wanted to be the pesky but adorable little girl hanging around Flint McCullough, scout extraordinaire, who would be happy to take a break from scouting out marauding Indian parties and potable water to tell me stories and give me arrowheads. Other times, I aged myself up a bit and was Flint McCullough’s girlfriend.
It was harder to picture myself having a role on Rawhide, which took place on a perpetual cattle drive full of dogies gettin’ along, and completely lacking in women. But, hey, Rowdy Yates was cute, and the cowboys did get to town on occasion.
Then I had a major crush on the dark, brainy, brooding Cartwright brother – Adam – on Bonanza. I went so far as to buy Pernell Roberts’ album. (Roberts played Adam.) In my defense, he did have a reasonably good voice, and he sang folk songs.
Every once in a while, however, I would have to grapple with the fact that none of these heart-throbs ever managed to change their clothing.
Oh, once in a blue moon, the Cartwrights had a soiree on the Ponderosa, and “the boys” put on clean white shirts and string ties.
But, day in, day out, when they weren’t whooping it up on soirees, or putting on presumably-clean duds after having their annual metal bath-tub baths, none of these guys ever changed clothing. Ever.
For years, Flint McCullough wore buckskins. Adam Cartwright was a man in black.
They must have been grubby. They must have smelled. They must have smelled bad.
By the time I was growing up, people were clean. Everyone bathed or showered daily. After a certain age, you used deodorant. And you changed your clothing daily, too.
Okay, throughout grammar school and high school, I wore a green jumper to school every day. And I had one jumper per school year. But the white blouse, plus the socks and undies, were always clean.
And most people just didn’t smell.
Historically, of course, this was not always the case. C.f., the old West.
This all came to mind when I saw a recent article in The Wall Street Journal on soap, which the author Amanda Foreman writes “represent(s) one of the triumphs of civilization.” Preach, sister.
I would have thought that soap was a relatively recent phenomenon, but “the Babylonians knew how to make soap as early as 2800 B.C., although it was probably too caustic for washing anything except hair and textiles.”
Ancient Egyptians had soap, too. (Wash like an Egyptian?)
Soaps were harsh, back in the day, so Greeks and Romans avoided washing with them, “until Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul in 58 B.C. introduced them to a softer Celtic formula.” A “softer Celtic formula?” Is that like Irish Spring, which I cut up in chunks and toss into my closets to keep mice away? (And remember the early Irish Spring ads, in which the winsome lass tells the laddie, “Manly, yes, but I like it, too.”)
Back in the day, way back in the day, Rome was the center of the soap-making universe, but once the empire fell, “soap-making moved to India, Africa and the Middle East.”
Soapa Europa? It was largely discredited, “associated with paganism.”
I like that, and may try out a few new bon mots: clean as a pagan; cleanliness is next to paganism. This may have legs. Clean legs.
Fast forward to the 14th century, and the Crusaders started bringing back stuff from the Middle East. Rice. Lemons. Dyes. Mirrors. And soap.
Not to mention “a taste for washing with soap and water, but not in sufficient numbers to slow the spread of plague.” Oh.
During the Renaissance, soap had something of a renaissance.
Southern countries had the advantage of making soap out of natural oils and perfumes, while the colder north had to make do with animal fats and whale blubber.
Good to know what my antecedents were washing with, if they washed at all. Whale blubber. Seriously.
In truth, they probably didn’t wash all that much, as soap was costly and those ancestors of mine weren’t exactly upper-crusters.
But thanks to advances in science and manufacturing, soap got cheaper and better.
Soap went into widespread use, and was one of the drivers behind the emergence of the advertising industry. With the advent or radio and, later, TV, soap manufacturers starting aiming their soap offerings at women – bet if there’d been any women other than Annie Oakley on the scene, those cowpokes would have changed their shirts more often – and thus was born the soap opera.
I never was much of a soap opera fan, but oh those horse operas. I don’t think soap was used to advertise any of them, however.
Anyway, I suppose you can get used to anything, but I’m happy for cleanliness. And for soap. And grateful to my sister Kath for sending this WSJ article this way.
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