Roberta McKern: Exploring the era of plastics at East Linn Museum

Roberta McKern

In the mid-1940s, following World War II, an optimistic announcement declared that the era of plastics had arrived.

In reality, plastics of some sort had been around since 1869, when John Wesley Hyatt sought to produce a better billiard ball. He hoped to find a substitute for the ivory generally used, but without luck. Not until the latter part of the 19th century did celluloid come along. A product of plant nitrates (cellulose) and carbolic acid put together, it proved to be moldable and easily shaped. That is “plastic.” The name stuck.

Cellulose had various uses, among them making toys, buttons and beads, and motion-picture film. A serious drawback, however, was that it was quite flammable. It also deteriorated, becoming even explosive. Because of this, many reels from the motion-picture industry’s early days that weren’t recaptured on improved, safer film have been lost.

Around 1900, a new plastic arrived on the scene, Bakelite. Named for its inventor, Dr. Leo H. Baekeland, it combined phenol with formaldehyde. Much more stable than celluloid, Bakelite could be used as an insulator, an asset that telephone companies took advantage of. When we look at the East Linn Museum’s telephone collection, we can be pretty certain the dense, black material used in many receivers and other parts is Bakelite.

From the 1920s to ’40s, Bakelite featured primarily in pieces of costume jewelry. However, instead of being molded, it was carved. Like celluloid, it appeared additionally in colorful buttons and beads. Articles thought to be made of Bakelite can be tested by being warmed under moderately heated water or, it is claimed, simply by rubbing them between the hands. Once warm enough, the Bakelite should emit a chemical odor of phenol. We have not tried this test on the telephones!

As we stroll around the museum in plastic shoes or ones with cast soles, synthetic fabrics like polyesters and nylons woven of what are considered plastic threads, plastics might not be on our minds while we pause to check a multi-use, computerized phone or notebook. Our pockets or purses contain plastic cards affiliating us with banks, insurance companies, pharmacies and credit companies while another piece of plastic identifies us and gives us permission to drive.

We are now, in general, surrounded by plastics, particles of which have sailed into the stratosphere above us or sank into the deepest ocean trenches. They fall with arctic snows, and poly film circulates in the great Pacific Gyre while affected marine life from albatrosses to whales die from ingesting it, mistaking it for edible sea life.

If we do think of these things as we explore, we can see the museum and what it represents as a time of innocence. Most of what it contains came earlier than the enthusiastically welcomed “Era of Plastics.” Then World War II, a greater war than World War I, the great “war to end all wars,” had just ended.

Each war had been a boon to spurring the development of plastics. Nothing drives technology like the desire of countries to kill neighbors whether as aggressors or defenders, and much had been learned during World War II, when all branches of the military found uses for plastics, which with peace could be applied to a growing economy, boosted by advertising. Want to keep an economy going? Make it a throwaway one, or so ran the general line of thought.

Our current trends are not what we see at the East Linn Museum, at least not plentifully. But they contrast with what we do see, because for the most part, the museum focuses on the second half of the 1800s, when our area was being settled, and the early 1900s, when mail-order catalogs became highly influential. That, of course, meant mainly celluloid and Bakelite when plastics were beginning to find increasing commercial application. We can stop and think about what it was like without all of the plastics to which we’ve grown so accustomed.

Some of us who are older can remember when chunks of cheese and links of wieners came home wrapped in white butcher paper tied with a string. We might even recall desirable boxes of Cracker Jacks, delectable molasses-coated popcorn and peanuts costing a dime when we only had a nickle. A sailor boy waved a “Ship ahoy” on the box front and the inside reposed a paper or wooden toy. All right, we’re young enough, too, to remember when plastic prizes began to appear in Cracker Jacks.

We see the museum’s old packing materials: wooden and cardboard boxes, glass and ceramic bottles, and other containers, plus metal tins. If we look in the kitchen mock-up, we’ll see a five-gallon tin container for Mazola cooking oil, perhaps a holdover from a restaurant. There are spice tins, plus a log-cabin-shaped one not surprisingly advertising Log Cabin Syrup. Missing are examples of lard buckets, with bales (handles), the kinds our parents or even grandparents remembered carrying to school as lunch pails.

We don’t see many sacks that once held sugar, flour or salt in the museum’s collection. Muslin sacks had many uses for canny housewives, from dishtowels to diapers. A favorite example of such recycling, however, remains the small squares of applique made from calico pieces, forming the Dresden Plate pattern on flimsy muslin repurposed from salt sacks. These were pieced by a 12-year-old girl who later became Delila Chastain (her married name), mother to our late centenarian volunteer, Lucille Rapp. Chastain died in 1920 from the lingering effects of the 1918 flu.

When we look at the large picture of J.P. Harrang in his Foster grocery store, we can note the boxes, canned goods and other items behind him on high shelves. He discusses possible purchases with two young girls facing the counter. Now, with self-service and a multitude of prepackaged goods designed to be picked up and carried to checkout stands, we don’t even realize how grocery stores once were. We see photos of earlier stores that show several young men standing to attention, their uniforms consisting mainly of large white aprons over celluloid collared shirts and trousers. Their duty was to take a grocery list and scurry among shelves and up ladders and to fill it.

The story of Albert Weddle indicates the hazards of such a job. One day he was clerking in his father’s store (in early Sweet Home, we believe). Two young men entered. They came from a large family that had run up a considerable bill. In keeping with his father’s orders, Albert reminded the pair of the debt. They said they’d pay cash this time. Unfortunately, Albert climbed a ladder after merchandise, and while he was helpless, one brother slashed Albert’s midsection with a very sharp knife. Holding himself together, Albert managed to cross the street from the store to the hotel, where he fainted.

The doctor did not arrive for an hour. During that time, some of Albert’s intestines escaped from the wound and were glued to the floor by leaking blood. A second, very sharp knife was used to scrape them free so Albert could be properly sewed together. He survived, and it is not known what happened to his assailant. “Ah,” we say, “that could not take place today, not with prepackaged goods and the prevalence of charge-it-one-way-or-another, allegedly fail-safe plastic cards.”

When we get back to those two earlier plastics, celluloid and Bakelite, if we seek we can find examples other than telephones – the older ones, that is. Of late, some more modern hard plastic telephones have crept in.

Despite failing to find a good ivory substitute for making billiard balls in 1869, the search for an imitation ivory plastic continued and found some fulfillment in celluloid and Bakelite. The museum’s several dresser pieces, like a mirror and hair-brush set and shoe button hooks that seem to have ivory handles, likely have ones made of celluloid or Bakelite. We haven’t given them the warming-up phenol test, though, and there was one more ivory substitute called vegetable ivory which came from the kernel of a South American palm tree.

A cabinet in the main room holds a small, mounted sample of “belt buckles” which may be closures for the capes women wore in the early 1900s. Dark with light centers, they certainly look like celluloid. Among the dolls, we might expect to see celluloid, but, no. Kewpies, which debuted in 1909, were often made of celluloid, but bigger Kewpies in the museum made of plastic comes from 1972 and features vinyl.

Alas, the museum does not have a good selection of either celluloid or Bakelite buttons or jewelry, partly because of its focus on the late 1800s through early 1900s, the propensity for celluloid to disintegrate, and perhaps attitudes favoring wood, glass, metal, shell and more natural materials as being of higher value. “Realer,” we might say.

Those promoting the “Plastics Era” argued in favor of plastics being valued at their own worth. We might think of plexiglass. In the 1920s, celluloid was used in some airplanes as windshield material. Alas, it yellowed and was too flammable. Plexiglass and its kin better fit the bill, especially during the world’s march toward war in the 1930s.

In the military room hangs an Enola Gay photograph taken by late museum volunteer Bill Bell, who served on the ground crew when the B-29 awaited its fateful flight from Tinian to Hiroshima with the first atomic bomb to be dropped. Many plastics went into the aircraft, and looking at its prominent windshield, we can ask ourselves, “Plexiglass?” That flight the Enola Gay took in 1945 propelled us into the “Atomic Age.”

“Oh, my,” we might think while we long for the simpler days reflected by the museum’s collections, earlier plastics included. We’ve spent decades believing the “Atomic Era” would bring our destruction, but it’s beginning to appear the “Era of Plastics” will get us instead. Or maybe it should be called the “Era of Petrochemicals,” because plastics, along with gasoline and diesel, are often products of the carbon-producing petroleum industry. Or, taking another tack, we can say plastic can be depended upon to pamper us from the cradle to the grave.

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