Mark Dunn - Ibid - A Life

16. Accidents and other odd happenings plagued the plant. No one has any idea how Elwin Lyster got inside the box. One moment he was observed by co-workers at his usual station in Section 17B on the assembly line. The next moment he was gone. Elwin was later found curled sleepily among packing material and deodorant sticks. A co-worker recalled that Lyster’s face was beatific, “as if he had been to a wonderful secret place mortals don’t generally get to visit.” For years thereafter Lyster would eagerly relate to those he’d meet all the details of his fifteen minutes in “a place difficult to describe without assistance from the clergy.” Unhappy with the adverse publicity generated by those who found such individuals socially menacing, Blashette would eventually be forced to fire the former game warden and butter-and-egg man without severance or apology, although Lyster was allowed to keep the box, which he nicknamed “My Portal to Paradise” and more informally “Roy.” Reinhold, The Story of Dandy-de-odor-o , 162-66.

17. Soon they were crawling out of the woodwork.Dandy-D seemed to attract individuals like Bucky and Mr. Scrum who must have assumed that factories run by men with three legs could be havens for their alternative approaches to life. Jonathan didn’t help matters by hiring many of these strange characters himself and without any form of background check. Among the other oddball workers whom Blashette found himself eventually cashiering or sending off for reorientation sessions at Miss Love’s School of Conformity was conveyor operator Chigger Farrow, who would hold his breath at random moments and occasionally lose consciousness, then topple off the milk stool his mother had given him for the express purpose of mitigating damage to his head and spine when he took his tumbles. Blashette also employed slow-talker Hoyt Spivak and horse-reviler Algernon Accola, Carmine “The Weeper” Morrow, as well as Dabney Whalen, Mormon father of twenty-three who was not only married to seven women simultaneously but who had troubled unions with each of them. Ibid., 166.

18. “Something’s got to be done with this company or we’re going under. All we need now is a major economic downturn and we’re sunk.”Memorandum from Charleton Caldwell to Jonathan Blashette, 15 April, 1929, Dandy-de-odor-o Corporate Records.

19. “Stocks Collapse in 16,410,030 Share Day” New York Times . 30 October, 1929.

20. “Wall Street Lays an Egg” Variety , 30 October, 1929.

1. “I’ve seen one blue tit before, but never two at the same time.”Jonathan would not realize until much later that his drinking companion for the evening was an amateur ornithologist who was referring to the old world titmouse Parus Caeruleus , distinguished by its cobalt-blue crown. Jonathan’s Diary, JBP, 2 November1929.

2. “It was a fabulous party.”The story is totally apocryphal. There is no evidence that T.E. Lawrence, Ted Shawn, E. M. Forster & Bill Tilden had ever met one another, let alone devised plans to gather at Jonathan’s home in his absence to look at magic lantern slides of wrestling Muybridge male nudes.

3. Oliver Hardy was one of the few well-known actors Jonathan never had the chance to meet.The closest he ever came was once mistaking the popular orchestra conductor Paul Whiteman for Hardy in the lobby of the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago. The two men strongly resembled each another and were often confused, especially when Whiteman did his Oliver Hardy impression.

A side note from a sideman: Jonathan was never a big fan of Paul Whiteman. He felt that the “King of Jazz” while embracing and exploiting the black jazz idiom, should have, at the same time, demonstrated his gratitude by racially integrating his orchestra. Jonathan sympathized with those African-American jazz musicians who felt that Whiteman was either a racist or too much the coward ever to make the attempt. One trumpeter whom I interviewed several years ago for a book I never completed about the Harlemphiliac author and photographer Carl Van Vechten (and whose name I withhold at the request of his family), passed along this story of his stage door confrontation with Whiteman after a performance by his orchestra in New York City: “I asked the fat lily white ass why he wouldn’t hire any of us Colored folk for his orchestra, especially since he’s always playing our music. He just giggled and did that funny flippy-doodle thing with his tie like Oliver Hardy always does in them Laurel and Hardy pictures. Then when he realized that I wasn’t digging this, he got real serious and said, ‘Look here, my Colored friend. I’m not in the business of losing money by putting any Negroes in my orchestra. Plain and simple. Besides, the name is Paul Whiteman , boy. That’s Whiteman, not Blackman. Now if you will kindly move aside, I have reservations at the Cotton Club.’” Furman, The Story of Jonathan Blash — [ette], 133-34.

4. “We can weather this storm.”Memorandum from Jonathan Blashette to Dandy-de-odor-o employees, 12 February, 1930. Corporate hatch battening began with the sale of the product itself. Jonathan, determined to keep Dandy-D afloat, slashed the wholesale price of the deodorant by half. Joked vice president for marketing Vinton Kalet, “We’ve got those damned deodorant sticks so cheap now, they’re probably using ’em for lard down in Appalachia.” (Reinhold, 175-77). Other means by which Jonathan hoped to tough out the hard economic times involved cutting employee salaries by 25 percent and significantly reducing overhead. “You won’t find this company going belly-up, no sirree,” he stated with resolve. “Even a guy with a hole in his sole and a soup kitchen crust in his hand’s got a right to smell like a swell. And knowing that fact, he’ll scrape up whatever he can to purchase our product.” With the exception of radio, advertising expenditures were also trimmed. Reinhold contends that it was the popularity of radio that saved the company.

5. “You won’t find a job if you smell like a slob.”The jingle reached its peak in popularity in the mid-1930s. However, as late as 1947, the slogan was ad-libbed by Bob Hope in the only Hope/Crosby “road” picture to be dubbed an inarguable “stinker” by American film critics. Road to Irkutsk was shelved after its premiere in Hollywood and all prints subsequently destroyed. According to co-star Dorothy Lamour in an interview with Sinematic Confessions Magazine (12, no.4 [1970]:34), Hope accused Bing Crosby of having never heard of deodorant, and Lamour came close to making an unkind comment or two herself, the heavy woolen uniform the comedic crooner wore unleashing wafts of male apocrine unpleasantness “to the detriment of all of us who value an unpolluted work environment.”

6. The new director of product planning limped to the easel and took the pointer.Reinhold, The Story of Dandy-de-odor-o , 184. Arnold Haverty’s left leg had been mangled in a childhood game of blindman’s bluff. After local toughs crashed the eleven-year-old boy’s birthday party, he was blindfolded and walked right off the small bluff that marked the boundary of the backyard meadow in which the game was played. The young bullies confessed that they were only tangentially familiar with the rules of the game. The same excuse was offered following an earlier game of Snap-the-Whip, which resulted in Haverty’s young cousin being flung up into a tree.

7. Haverty had a bit of the devil in him. Ibid. Among other popular pranks perpetrated by mischievous Arnie was sneaking into Sally Rand’s dressing room at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair and replacing the stripper’s body balloon with a dangerously smaller inflatable.