April « 2011 « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

April, 2011

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25
Apr 11

Of peanut butter and Dr. Strangelove

Just wrapping up our falllout shelter, time capsule dive from the weekend. To recap: at my grandmothers we were invited to explore the old shelter, which was installed for storms and, maybe, the Cuban Missile Crisis. The period is write, based on some of the logos and clues like old radio call letters I found in the shelter. There are seven or eight pictures two posts below — conveniently highlighted in the link above, as well.

These are the last of our findings.

Fifty-year-old recipes are mildly interesting. You just sort of assume your grandmother could already make everything, I guess, and didn’t need Betty’s help.

And she hasn’t changed much. The first Betty Crocker was a real person, portrayed by actress Adelaide Hawley Cumming. She died in 1998 at 93. Look familiar? She played the role until 1964, so this is probably a transitional box, given the timing. When she was on everyone’s television and every woman’s kitchen Cumming was as popular as any lady in the country.

I thought this was a fairly steady image, but it seems Betty Crocker is always changing. She found the fountain of youth in 1955, became a member of the workforce in 1980 and her complexion changed a bit in the 1990s. Later, the image of Betty Crocker was said to be a composite of 75 different women.

This box of mashed potatoes sold for $.35 in the early 1960s.

This is the emergency food, meant to last one person for 14 days. All of the smaller cans are drinking water. (There’s another layer beneath those cans.) The large can to the left is what you were supposed to eat. Appetites, and drinking needs, seemed to have changed a bit over the years.

Love the can labels though. We opened one and it was fine. Not suitable for drinking, but no odd color or funky smell. If you’re supposed to drink eight eight-ounce glasses of water a day this little can wasn’t cutting it. Not sure of the explanation behind the discrepancy, unless dehydration since has really improved 400 percent since the Kennedy years.

We tried to remove the wrapper from that large can in the box, but it just tore and fell away. The Multi-Purpose Food is “protein-rich granules fortified with vitamins and minerals, pre-cooked, ready to use.”

There are directions. But if you read them closely you learn that this can’s servings are designed to give you 450 calories per tasty, grainy meal. It is pre-cooked, so you don’t have to break out the Sterno. The bad news is you’re going to want to eat this with something else to ward off fall out shelter malnutrition.

In the event of nuclear attack, pre-cooked granules go great with tomato juice! Or soup and crackers! It is yummy on a peanut butter spread!

The box suggested the contents would be all you’d need. Someone should ask General Mills about this. This product is soy-based and has an interesting history:

In the late 1950s, however, the product was reformulated to contain simply toasted soy protein (TSP, toasted defatted soy grits) fortified with vitamins and minerals. This new Multi-Purpose Food contained 50% protein and was completely pre-cooked; a 2-ounce serving provided 40% of the daily recommended protein allowance and one-third or more of the requirements for 10 major vitamins and minerals for a 154 pound (70 kg) adult male. MPF was made in Minneapolis by General Mills until 1980. In an era when protein malnutrition was considered the basis of world hunger, MPF was viewed as a concentrated protein supplement that could be incorporated into many indigenous foods.

[…]

From September 1946 until 1955 the Foundation distributed the equivalent of more than 36 million 56-gm (2-ounce) meals of MPF (2,016 tonnes total) to 86 needy nations via 126 relief and welfare organizations, chief among them the United Rescue Mission. Actually, virtually all of the food was shipped in sealed #10 cans, mostly to missionaries, doctors, and the like who operated soup kitchens, hospitals, or clinics. In the peak years of distribution in the mid-1960s, shipments were roughly 50 to 90 metric tons a year . . . never a very large amount by typical relief standards. Yet MPF garnered widespread publicity for soy and for the concept of relief feeding

Here’s more on the stuff.

We opened the can. It was a very fine powder. If only we hadn’t already enjoyed our dinner.

The box itself hurts our timeline. The Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization was in existence from 1958-1961, making this box older than everything else I can date from the fallout shelter.

Perhaps my grandfather had been holding onto it for a while, thinking it had a good shelf life and when his shelter was installed he carried it underground.* Maybe the name of the department was just to good to pass up for the product’s makers. The list of the agencies’ successors:

Emergency mobilization and general preparedness planning: Office of Emergency Planning (1961- 68)

Office of Emergency Preparedness (1968-73)

Office of Preparedness, General Services Administration (1973-75)

Federal Preparedness Agency (1975-79).

Of Surviv-All Inc. I can find only one mention. Dr. Strangelove’s America: society and culture in the atomic age, by Margot A. Henriksen, tells us they also sold shelters and radiation suits. I’m sure those were top-quality materials at $19.95, even in Kennedy-era money.

Surviv-All, if it wasn’t sued into oblivion, is a name ripe for a return to the marketplace.

*Update: My mother chimes in, thinking I am right, recalling the shelter was installed in 1961:

PRIOR to the installation, Daddy volunteered with the Civil Defense, Rescue Squad, etc. in Florence. He was a HAM radio operator and took emergency medical training offered by the Red Cross. It would stand to reason that he would move the emergency survival supplies to the fallout shelter as the Cuban Missile Crisis intensified.

Dad could get the information sent from the US government to the Civil Defense programs before the average citizen had heard the information. I recall several nights he had to go to downtown Florence unexpectedly, although I didn’t always understand why. Add all this up, and it would make sense that the Emergency-Paks possibly (and probably) came from the Civil Defense office in Florence.

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24
Apr 11

Happy Easter

He is risen. Have some hollow chocolate.

After a long night of driving across half the state and change we woke up early for Easter. The bunny had to know where to find us.

The Yankee said last night “Do you mind if we don’t race back?” She wanted to conserve gas. She is smart and thrifty. And then five hours later she said “Why did that take so long?”

Because we drove slow?

By then we were very sleepy.

So Easter services this morning, and then a birthday party this afternoon. Our realtor-turned-friend is celebrating his 30th. So we’ve counted 109 years of birthdays in the past 18 hours. I’m exhausted.

We had a lunch that was straight from Garden and Gun. The potato salad was actually from Barefoot Contessa (and should be served at every relaxed formal Southern function, but Garden and Gun does recipes, too. The cake was Easter-themed and old-fashioned coconut. Very moist. And the coconut shavings were individually dyed green.

And now we begin the search for discounted Easter candy.

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23
Apr 11

Happy Birthday!

Today was my grandmother’s 27th birthday. She had a small, family get-together. She’s just as young as ever. Someone invented a party game that we played. It involved tea bags and baseball caps. Because all of the natural talent runs through that side of the family she naturally won the game.

She played it three times, beating great-grandchildren seven decades younger.

I have video of that, but I’m keeping it just for me.

A few years ago we had a “surprise” party for her. She danced her way into the room. And then she danced her way back out again.

Here she is on that night:

That’s her son, husband and my mother. My uncle later married The Yankee and I. He embarrassed me with an off-color joke at the Christmas table last year. It was the kind of thing that you’ve heard worse, but you’d never ever imagine such a thing coming from him. They’ve all been a lovely family to grow up with.

Anyway, we sang Happy Birthday twice tonight, because why not?

Happy Birthday to my grandmother, who has been the neatest grandmother you could have, even though you can’t hand-pick them.

(She probably would have let me choose, if I’d thought to ask, because she’d spoil us all that way. Her other two grandchildren would have to be allowed to do so, too. She has always been very serious and conscientious about her grandmotherly duties. If I could pick, I would pick her every time.)

family / Friday / iPhone / memories / photo — 2 Comments
22
Apr 11

Under north Alabama

Thirty miles on the bike this morning. I toyed with the idea of 40, but glad I decided against it. The theory is that there are always 10 more miles in me somewhere. And I think that’s true. Feeling achy? Pedal 10 more. Got a cramp? Readjust and push through for 10 more. Feeling dehydrated? Ten more, no problem.

But then I thought, Ya know. You’re going to be in the car a lot today. Maybe you shouldn’t find any more reasons to cramp up mid-drive.

And so it was. And I did not have any uncomfortableness as we ventured to north Alabama this evening. There’s a birthday to celebrate tomorrow. We got to my grandparents in time for dinner — they chose the nearby catfish joint, which has become a regular destination.

The hush puppies are a bit overly greasy, but otherwise the place is good. Swamp John’s started as catfish in a gas station. (You can do that in this part of the world, and it is good. If you know what you’re looking for.) He started catering, selling out and now has three restaurants in the northwestern corner of the state. He’s done that in a decade. And he’s done that in a place where catfish is a staple of the diet, so it isn’t as if there’s no competition. There are at least a dozen other catfish joints in the county, says the all-knowing Google Maps.

This store has a mural covering a back wall of the place that features the nearby TVA dam. Be sure you notice it, or someone will point it out to you. The place just down the road, Newbern’s, has a large panoramic photograph of when the dam was being built as a WPA project.

For years I imagined all of these places pulled their product out of the Tennessee River. I knew better, but it was more fun that way. It is all farm-raised, even my aunt’s place in the next town over, where the creek drips right through their backyard. I’d never given much thought to where these places must get their shrimp. Being 350 miles inland would push it a bit for being catch-of-the-hour.

We cleaned up my grandmother’s hydrangea. She has a giant patio off her back porch, which is hemmed on three sides by privacy fences. They aren’t enclosed, but afford you access at any corner. In my life there have been two fences there, a brutally bad red fence and a natural color that’s in place now. It is starting to age a bit, too, though. At one corner of the fence there is this giant plant which always provided a natural speed bump for rambunctious children. My grandmother could grow anything. She could take the lettuce from her salad at the catfish place, plant it in the ground and win a prize with it before the season was over. Everyone knew it, everyone admired it and even the kids knew not to mess with her flowers. If you were playing tag, you had to negotiate that corner carefully, or sprint the length of the fence for the next opening. The bush is so big now, though, that passage is impossible.

So we’re snipping off old growth and breaking up stalks and limbs and my mother, in one of her well-timed moments of spontaneity, says “Let’s go down into the fallout shelter.”

I’ve never been down there. It has been in that yard since my mother was a child, and has always been a mystery and a focal point of yard play, but I have never been invited into the mysterious metal caverns until today. Everyone seemed shocked by this, which is odd, because no one ever offered me a tour. And anything mysterious or old or some place I’m not supposed to go, is a place in which I’m interested.

I have pictures.

This was a four bed shelter, and this is about half of the space. Note the support beam down low with now decades old canned vegetables. Some of them have failed seals, but some look pretty good. We opened one of the ones that still looked promising. The beans smelled fresh, at least.

In this box: enough food and water for one person for 14 days. (If you could supplement the supplementary food with some other calories and you didn’t mind being thirsty for two weeks.

This is the hand crank to recycle the air. The mechanized part is still free. My mother says she remembers the sound. As best she recalls the shelter was installed around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, but they had it primarily for the area’s stormy weather.

There was a bag of cereal samplers down there. Eighteen packages of 12 favorites. I couldn’t wait to see the logos and the fonts.

But this bag of cereal had been down there for decades. The shelter was clean enough for being underground, well-built and dry, but hardly sterile. Time marches on, and it crunched through the flakes and raisins and left nothing behind. What little moisture was in the shelter probably came from the breakdown of the contents in that cereal bag. Opening the thing, gently as I tried, destroyed all of the thin cardboard inside.

Remember, it isn’t what you know, but who you know, and I know Crackle.

Sugar Stars and OKs. No one remembers these cereals. The things you note, though, are the Hannah Barbera character endorsements and how much sugar figured into the name of things in the middle of the 20th century.

Sugar Smacks. I remember these from my own childhood. They were renamed Honey Smacks in the 1980s when we decided to get healthy. Or at least when we decided marketing makes us healthy. Then they were simply known as Smacks for a while. And now they are Honey Smacks again. Healthy! But not really.

If you’re looking to carbon date the stuff we found down there, a church flier referenced a local radio station that only used those particular call letters during the first part of the 1960s. Quick Draw carried the Sugar Smacks brand from 1961 through 1965.

More pictures, and the birthday party, tomorrow.

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21
Apr 11

Thursday, Thursday, two days after Tuesday

Twenty miles on the bike this morning. So the decadent lunch I had was OK, right?

I had my doubts about the menu in the cafeteria, but they had the best tender pork shoulder ever. And there was dressing. (It isn’t nearly as good as the dressing made by the ladies in my family, but for mass-produced starch-based food you’ve ever had.) The man that dipped my choices said “That’s the soul food, there!”

Yes it was.

Grading in the afternoon. And that got me down to just three things left to grade for the semester. This is progress.

Another day in class, another two hour session with Dreamweaver. The students are building webpages and they are coming along nicely. The lab, though, is very warm. Too many iMacs makes the room a sauna, I suppose. And if that’s as bad as your day gets, you have it made friends.

(I do.)

In the evening there was email, and plenty of it, returning phone calls and reading. Always with the reading.

And since it is Thursday evening, where the energy of the week begins to escape me, I’ll let Conan bring it home. I agree wholeheartedly with his Cap’n Crunch argument, but for the real fun stick around to the 2:15 mark.

Tomorrow: road trip!