Another ex-urp from the stuff I'm writing these days. May bring back some memories:

The Forties Smelled Funny

"One of the limitations of writing about the Forties, or pulling out old photographs is that you can't smell those times. Maybe someone could invent a Scratch And Sniff Guide To The Forties. If they did, the first thing that I'd recommend including would be Fels Naptha. If you grew up having your clothes washed in Fels Naptha, you'll never forget the smell. Not if you live to be 100. When you walked down stairs into our basement, the first thing that would hit you would be that musty, heavy, scummy smell of Fels Naptha. Now, don't get me wrong. Fels Naptha got things clean. But it always felt like it left a carmel-colored film on everything. The closest I've ever come to seeing Fels Naptha as an adult was when my wife Ruth and I were in Ghana in 2001. Our tour bus stopped along a river where countless people were washing their clothes. We were very impressed by how brilliantly white their clothes were in Africa, so it was a surprise to see people standing waist-deep in water brown enough to plow, beating their clothes on old tires. We have a photograph that I took that day hanging above our sparkling white washing machine. One of the children showed us the soap she was using and darned if it didn't look like a malformed bar of Fels Naptha. We were warned not to take any home to use because is is so powerful that it eats clothes, just for the fun of it. When I wrote a song honoring my parent's 60th Wedding Anniversary, one of the lines that I used was "And the sweet smell of Fels Naptha filled every home." Clothes were washed in Maytags with Fels Naptha. That's just the way it was."

Jerry