Metal Whiskeys and the Louisville Brothers-in-Law

This is the third in a series of articles on metal whiskey objects,  the first two having been posted in December 2010 and September 2011.  This one focusses on just two distillers,  Isaac Bernheim, creator of the famous I.W. Harper Brand, and his brother-in-law,  Nathan M. Uri.  Each issued multiple whiskey-related containers of metal, perhaps in competition with each other.

Bernheim, born in Germany,  emigrated to the United States in 1867 with $4.00 in his pocket.  For a while he worked as a peddler,  traveling through Pennsylvania on horseback selling household items to housewives.   Then his horse died.  So he packed up and moved to Paducah, Kentucky, where he went to work in the liquor trade.  More important,  Isaac met the Uri family,  long established Kentucky residents who for years had been in the whiskey business.   He married Amanda Uri and in 1872 joined up with her brother, Nathan, in a liquor sales firm called Bernheim Bros. and Uri.  (The other Bernheim brother was Bernard whom Isaac had brought from Germany).

Because of Paducah’s proximity to large waterways,  the business grew rapidly.  About 1888,  the company bought the Pleasure Ridge Park Distillery and renamed it the Bernheim Distillery Company.  About the same time,  the Bernheims and Uri moved their business to Louisville, in order to be closer to their distillery.   Soon they began the production of an elite whiskey brand called I.W. Harper, a name they had trademarked in 1879.

Within three years of the move,  Nathan Uri had left the partnership and in 1893 set up his own firm.  called N.M. Uri & Co.  The reasons for the split, to my knowledge, have never been adequately explained.  Uri bought his own whiskey production facility, the International Distillery at Hunters Station, Kentucky.  His principal brand was “Parker Rye” which he advertised nationally.   His business flourished as did Bernheim Bros.

Each brother-in-law featured multiple “full metal jackets” either to contain or advertise their whiskey.   Shown here first are three such items from Bernheim brothers.  The Old Harper decanter is labeled “quadruple silver plate.”  It carries no maker’s mark but probably was the product of the Homan Silver Plate Company.  Founded in 1847, it was located in Cincinnati and produced such silver objects for distilleries, breweries, hotels, restaurants and even riverboat companies.

The two teapots following were made by other companies.  The just plain “Harper” teapot was the product of the Taunton Silver Company. During the 19th century, Taunton became known as the "Silver City", as it was home to many silversmithing operations, including Reed & Barton, F.B. Rogers, and Taunton Silver.

The second teapot is marked on the bottom as quadruple silver plate and the product of the Western Silver Metal Company.  Brothers-in-law Louis Schnitzer and Nathan Gelfman had both been experienced metalworkers in their homeland of Kiev, Russia.  In the early 1920s, they were polishing and plating silver at their silver housewares business in New York City called Western Silver Works, Inc.  This may have been one of their products.

Not to be outdone by the Isaac Bernheim,  Nathan Uri also produced multiple metal items for his whiskey.  The silver decanter marked “Parker Rye” on the base is a Homan-made product.  It is marked “Special Metal,” another name for silver soldered silver “quadruple” plate.  The whiskey jug that follows mimics the shape of many ceramic jugs of the time.  It says “Parker” on one side and “Rye” on the other.  It is marked quadruple plated with a shamrock logo and “afc co.” 

The third container is a whiskey dispenser with a spigot.  It presumably could hold a gallon or so of Parker Rye and be ready for the saloonkeeper to turn the handle.  Because it was impossible to tell just what these back of the bar items were dispensing,  they were banned by law after the repeal of Prohibition.

Uri issued two teapots.  The first shown here advertises “R. H. Parker Whiskey.”  I personally like the simple but elegant lines of this object.  My notes, unfortunately, are silent on its maker.  The second teapot, shown in in two views,  is once again a Homan product.  The base also says that it is warranted quadruple plate, with an additional statement “808 Special H Metal.”

Why are these brothers-in-law each responsible for issuing to favored customers these several whiskey metal artifacts?  My guess that rivalry between them spurred each to try to outdo the other in providing attractive containers for bar use.  Whether Uri was imitating Bernheim or Bernheim was imitating Uri, however, remains undetermined.

Politicians with Feats of Clay

It is 2012. The country is immersed in national politics, with the primary seasons over and the head-to-head between Barak Obama and Mitt Romney in full steam. Accordingly it seems appropriate to take a look at how Presidential contenders and their parties have been captured in ceramics down through the years. 

 Grover Cleveland was the first Democratic President following the Civil War. . Cleveland also is the only U.S. President to serve two nonconsecutive terms (1885–1889 and 1893–1897) and therefore is the only individual to be counted twice in the numbering of the presidents.  He also was a man of tremendous girth so that it is not clear whether the pottery pig shown here was a ceramic artifact from his supporters or his detractors.

Teddy Roosevelt became Chief Executive in 1901 when, as vice president, President McKinley was assassinated.  Roosevelt was 42 years old when sworn in as President of the United States in 1901, making him the youngest president ever. Known for his “cowboy” persona,  Roosevelt declared once that in foreign affairs it was good to “walk softly but carry big stick.”   An enterprising potter incorporated that idea in a corked whiskey flask. The item probably dates from Teddy’s second term, 1905-1909.

The small whiskey jug shown here was entirely appropriate vessel to  carry the name of  “Al Smith.”   Smith,  an Irishman, a Catholic and a very popular governor of New York, was an unabashed “Wet.”  That is, he opposed National Prohibition of alcohol which had been imposed in 1920.  His opponent, Herbert Hoover was a Dry and in the election of 1928 he trounced Smith in a landslide.

 Old timers may remember the time when the rooster was a popular symbol of Democrats.  In the 20th Century it was the donkey that came to epitomize the party of Jefferson and Jackson.  Here it is a ceramic figural labeled “New Deal Coin Bank.” The designation likely was a sarcastic comment on President Franklin Roosevelt’s programs which were widely attacked by for allegedly putting money into Democratic  coffers.

Like the donkey, the elephant has become a familiar object in political parlance as a symbol for the Republican Party.   Less well known may be Everett Dirksen, after whom one of the Washington D.C. Senate office buildings is named.  In December 1943, Congressman Dirksen announced that he would be a candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1944. He stated that a coalition of Midwestern Republican Congressmen had urged him to run and that his campaign was serious.  Word was he really was trying to syphon votes away from another Midwest Republican, Wendell Wilkie, or was angling to become vice president.  When all was said and done, Dirksen received not a single vote for either office at the 1944 Republican Convention. He subsequently would be elected to the U.S. Senate and part of the Republican leadership there.

 Adlai Stevenson was another politician who twice sought the presidency.   Stevenson had been a very successful governor of Illinois and the Democratic Party was strongly behind his candidacy.  But in the elections of both 1952 and 1956 he faced Dwight D. Eisenhower,  a World War Two general and hero.  A coffee cup depicted Stevenson apparently riding the Demo donkey toward the White House.  He never got there.

 The ceramic ashtray, next in line,  is clearly a satire with its message: “Nixon and Agnew in ‘76.” By the time of the 1976 Presidential campaign,  Richard Nixon had left the White House in disgrace over Watergate and Spiro Agnew had preceded him from the vice presidency because of a criminal conviction in Maryland.  Neither was in the slightest contention for the Republican nomination.  Jerry Ford and Nelson Rockefeller were the (losing) GOP candidates that year.  The winner, however, was a man whose toothy grin marked a field day for cartoonists and caricaturist -- Jimmy Carter.  His face is unmistakable on a ceramic coffee mug.

Beer mugs and coffee cups frequently have been the utilitarian ceramic of choice for political comment.   The elephants shown here, dancing in line, date from 1987 during the Reagan Administration.  Republicans in Congress were well known for hewing to party discipline and doing the will of the President.  The cup is an affectionate spoof on “keeping the party line.”

 Our final piece brings the story pretty much up to date.   The last ceramic is a small statue of George W. Bush.   Bush is as recognizable on the item as the former President as Jimmy Carter on the coffee mug.  Nevertheless, I am somewhat mystified by the crown.   In fairness, whatever Bush’s shortcomings may have been, taking on imperial airs was not one of them.   That said, the statue fully is in the American tradition of satirizing our leaders.

 Here we have seen politicians described and sometimes satirized in pottery “feats of clay.”  Not a new phenomenon.  We have seen examples ranging for more than 132 years in American history.  Let’s hope the tradition lasts another 127 years, one symbol of free speech in America.  And, by the way,  a source of interesting collectibles.







 

Curing Malaria Without a Clue

I have a abiding fascination with the quack medicine purveyors and their phony wares of the 19th and early 20th Century before food and drug laws helped to shut many of them down. Of particular interests are the nostrums and accompanying advertisements to cure malaria at a time when no one had a clue to what malaria was, how it was spread, or how to treat it.

Lack of knowledge never inhibited the “medical messiahs,” as one author has called them. In fact, utter ignorance was their friend since the ordained medical profession did not have much of an idea about malaria either. The disease, often called “ague” in an earlier day, is believed to have been in existence for centuries.

It was a familiar plague among Civil War soldiers who often were camped in marshy ground in order to be near sources of water. The mosquitoes that carry the disease were endemic to such locations. Ayers Ague Cure. “warranted to sure all malarial disorders,” took advantage of this identification with swamps in its trade card advertising. The scene is a Louisiana bayou or Florida wetlands. Even an alligator is sick and being fed the ague cure by frogs.

During the U.S. military occupation of Cuba and the construction of the Panama Canal. At the time, malaria and yellow fever were a major cause of death and disease among the workers constructing the canal. Of the more than 26,000 people working on the Canal in 1906, more than 21,000 were hospitalized for malaria. Ayers, a patent medicine firm that made a multimillionaire of its owner, was quick to pick up on the Panama connection, showing a compesino being ministered to by his lady friend. Malaria also was a scourge in other parts of the United States. In the late 1870s the number of cases peaked and victims ran close to a million annually. In some localities malaria was the cause of one death in seven.

Brown’s Iron Bitters was a quack medicine merchandised to mothers with trade cards stressing its value for babies and toddlers. A analysis of Brown’s Iron Bitters in 1883 indicated that it contained cocaine and 39% alcohol, virtually the alcoholic strength of whiskey. The potion also contained phosphorus, calisaya bark and, yes, even some iron: Just the thing for baby. Although Brown’s Iron Bitters sold well, it was not until the proprietor claimed that the medicine also cured malaria that sales soared. Brown declared in his merchandising that his Iron Bitters was “a sure antidote again malarial poison, fever, and ague and other intermittent fevers.”

Using a considerably less dramatic image than Brown to sell his product was G.G. Green.
Green, a Yankee colonel in the Civil War, started a wholesale drug business in Baltimore soon after the conflict, then moved successively to Ohio and New Jersey. It was after he bought the rights to several nostrums that he found his groove. . George created a marketing campaign involving mass mailings of free samples, and the distribution of thousands of his almanacs. His elixirs, including the Ague Conqueror, were found to be mostly derivatives of opium. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 spelled an end to his business and the Ague Conqueror met its demise about 1916.

If opium was a common ingredient in anti-malarial nostrums, so was alcohol. Perrine’s Barley Malt Whiskey, shown touted in a trade card as a “specific” for malaria and other ailments was not the product of a drug outfit, but a Philadelphia whiskey distributor. The Perrines had discovered that in addition to its “Palace Gin,” “Palace Rye,” and other liquor brands, a whiskey nostrum would add significant cash to the till. The picture of a winsome lass filling the orders from the ague-stricken on its trade card was added indication that it was, as advertised, “pure.”

Chambers & Brown of Louisville were also promoting whiskey as a remedy that would fix loss of appetite, bronchitis and malaria, all in the same big gulp. But to the alcohol they added an ingredient called “boneset,” which was just then becoming the darling herb of the quack medicine crowd. It is a common plant that grows in low meadows and damp ground throughout North America, The popular name Boneset is said to have been derived from use of this remedy in the treatment of a particular flu because the pain attending it was commonly called “Break-Bone Fever.” Boneset is reputed to have been a favorite in the pharmacology of Native Americans. They called it by a name equivalent to “ague-weed,” not indicating if it caused or cured the disease. Since Chambers & Brown knew nothing about malaria, why not cure it with an herb about which they also knew nothing?

Edwin Wiley Grove actually put something in his “Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic” that would relieve malaria symptoms. Quinine had been known for centuries as alleviating the chills and fever of the disease. Its bitter taste, however, rendered it unpopular. Grove is quoted to have said: “I had a little drug business in Paris, Tennessee, just barely making a living, when I got up a real invention, tasteless quinine. As a poor man and a poor boy, I conceived the idea that whoever could produce a tasteless chill tonic, his fortune was made.” His enterprise was called the Paris Medicine Company and it made him a fortune. Grove’s advertising was a bit startling, however, with a baby’s head superimposed on a pig’s body and the assertion that the tonic makes children and adults “as fat as pigs.”

Lash’s Kidney and Liver bitters also employed a wee tot who is crying over his chamber pot while his puppy looks on. Because this nostrum claims to a sure cure so many ills, including malaria, we can speculated on what is bothering the youngster. Noting that it also is said to be good for constipation, perhaps that is what is on the little one’s mind.

Prior’s Ague Cure made its trade card prop the primitive phonograph of the time, broadcasting the word that it cured malaria “in any form” or money would be refunded. P.J. Prior was a druggist in Plainfield, Connecticut, who advertised his nostrum widely. We can assume that his ague cure was swallowed in some form. The Holman folks would cure your malaria by application of their medicinal pad. It was, they averred, “the only true cure for all forms of malaria.” By the way, it also was a “sovereign remedy” for liver and stomach troubles of undefined origin.

Interestingly enough, the American Medical Association which spent a great deal of time, money and effort in debunking various quackeries, never spent much time on malaria cures. My theory is that the real medical experts of the time had so little knowledge of the disease that they largely refrained from comment. During the 20th Century a great deal of knowledge about malaria was gained and its incidence in the United States virtually was eliminated. Worldwide, however, malaria remains a scourge . While millions of dollars have been spent to find a preventative inoculation, including U.S. government money I myself authorized in the 1970s, a solution continues to be elusive.

Discovering the Swasey Solution

Much of my research over the past thirty years has been devoted to discovering who made America’s pre-Prohibition whiskey jugs, particularly those with “fancy” exteriors. As a result I have been able to identify and write about the attractive ceramics of the Fulper Pottery Company of Flemington, New Jersey; Knowles, Taylor and Knowles of East Liverpool,Ohio, Thuemler Manufacturing of Pittsburgh, and Sherwood Bros. of New Brighton, Pennsylvania.

The identification of Sherwood Bros. was of particular interest because of its ability to design and execute elaborate underglaze transfer labels of quality equal to those of a number of potteries in Great Britain. Now it is clear that there were at least two American potteries with those capabilities -- the second right under my nose.

It was the E. Swasey & Co Pottery of Portland, Maine, a company that once was among the most productive in New England but today is all but forgotten. As the letterhead shown here indicates, the firm was an importer and jobber (selling for other potteries) but also a manufacturer of ceramic items. Despite its size, the company is not mentioned in most pottery books, including Lehner’s presumably comprehensive “Encyclopedia of U.S. Marks.”

Eban Swasey was a potter who apprenticed in Exeter NH in the mid-1800s. In 1875 he and his partner, Rufus Lamson, moved to Portland ME and established the Portland Earthen Ware Manufactory, producing redware. Swasey and Lamson eventually went their separate ways, and in 1890 Swasey established E. Swasey & Co. at 273 Commercial Street in Portland. Shown here is a photo of the pottery circa that time. In 1897, Swasey's youngest son Perley joined the company, which became a sizable enterprise by the turn of the century. Eban died in 1906, but the business carried on until finally sputtering out of business during the Depression.

Swasey became known for the array of pots, crocks, jug and other items that bore the company’s elaborate logo design, best seen on its footwarmer. The elaborate nature of the mark and its prominence on many items has intrigued me but, again, my earlier research yielded nothing about its origin or meaning.

Among the array of Swasey products shown here, I once owned a the pint-sized jug shown at the far right. That is an embarrassing revelation because it never gave me an inkling that Swasey might be behind many of America’s most attractive whiskey jugs. Other writers had portrayed the company as principally importers and jobbers and I had not investigated much further.

My ignorance was revealed in a flash recently when a E. Swasey & Company catalogue was put up for sale on eBay. It advertised “Light and Dark...Glazed Bristol Ware, Decorated Ware and Fine Glazed Stoneware.” As I turned the pages (electronically) there were surprise after surprise. An illustration appeared labeled “Bonnie Castle,” a jug for Scotch that many have felt was U.S. made because of the way “whiskey” was spelled on the label. It is a common bottle but one whose maker had never been identified.

A following page showed a jug that was listed “kornschnapps,” a kind of liquor that was popular among German Americans and often bottled in the U.S. Neither drawing proved conclusively that Swasey designed either the Bonnie Castle or kornschnapps jugs. As a jobber the company simply could have sold the shapes to other outfits for printing. The solution came on a following catalogue page. Displayed there were illustrations of three whiskey quarts with elaborately printed underglaze labels, all of which I have owned at some time in the past. Among them were the drawing of a Nordhausen Kornschnapps jug, not just the shape but the actual design. A photo of the actual jug, a fairly common item, confirms the identification.

There too was the illustration of a “R.H. Parker Old Style” whiskey. This is one of America’s most elaborate and attractive jugs, featuring cherubs, heads of grain and a banner type label. The liquor was produced by N.M. Uri of Nelson County, Kentucky, brother-in-law to the Bernheim Brothers of “Old Harper” fame. Again the catalog picture and the photo coincide. Swasey stands revealed as another American pottery able to produce underglaze transfer printed ceramics of a high quality.

Alan Blakeman, a British expert on whiskey containers, has long contended that several American potteries had the capacity to produce ceramic jugs of a quality rivaling those of more than a dozen Scotch and English manufacturers. Well, Alan, we are now up to two -- and still looking.

When America's Top Artists Rolled Out the Barrels

With the end of World War Two, the Hiram Walker Distillery of Windsor, Canada, and Peoria, Illinois commissioned some of America’s leading artists to illustrate a magazine ad for its Imperial Whiskey brand. As a result, some of America’s top painters and illustrators from 1945 to 1947 provided a series of art works that probably are unique in the history of liquor advertising.

Commissioning art was not totally unusual for American business. Corporations for some years had been hiring noted artists and photographers to provide interesting images of their plants and operations. Among the most noted of these was the Ford Motor Company in 1927 hiring Charles Sheeler to photograph and paint scenes of its River Rouge Plant in Michigan. The unique aspect of the Hiram Walker commissions was that every artist was limited to only one detail of the distilling operation: barrels.

Thomas Hart Benton, born in Missouri in 1889, was known as a Regionalist painter of the 1920s. His reputation has grown in recent years even as it was declining in the late 1940’s as Abstract Expressionism was taking hold as the new force in American art. Few are the U.S. museums who do not have at least one Benton on display. Even he was required to paint barrels. As shown here, his ad is perhaps the most dynamic of the group.

Born in Philadelphia in 1910, Joseph Hirsch was a distinguished member of the school of Social Realism, a group of artists who chose to depict ordinary and every day scenes. Particularly during the Great Depression, social consciousness and commentary were important components of the movement, dictating subject matter. Social commentary was the backbone for the majority of Joseph Hirsch's paintings. This comes through in his Imperial ad. Unlike Benton’s painting, the individuality of the four workers is evident.

The third picture is from Zoltan Sepeshy, a Hungarian born in 1898, who became one of the least émigré artists in the United States during the middle years of the 20th Century. His work was eagerly collected by museums, particularly in the Middle West, because he was seen to have a freshness of vision and willingness to experiment. "Art arises from the common needs and aspirations of all men and that compartmentalization is a hindrance to its growth." Sepeshy once said. In his work for Hiram Walker, however, he did no experimenting. Unlike Hirsch, the barrels take center stage, we see mostly the backside of the worker.

Like Sepeshy, Lawrence Beall Smith shows us lots of barrels. Born in 1909, Smith had been hailed as a premier American painter, sculptor, lithographer and illustrator of the twentieth century. His reputation peaked during the 1940’s and today examples of his original lithographs, paintings and sculpture are included in the permanent collections of such major galleries as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, and the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Despite Smith’s accomplishments, Hiram Walker wanted -- and got -- barrels.

Just about the time Franklin Boggs was painting his barrels, Life Magazine was naming him one of the best young American painters. Boggs, born in Indiana in 1914 gained a national and even international reputation early in his career. He went on to be a distinguished teacher of art at a Wisconsin college and died at the age of 95, leaving behind a prolific amount of works, including the fifth illustration.

Aaron Bohrod was a another artist born in the Middle West, Chicago in 1907, who spent much of his active career teaching at the University of Wisconsin at Madison where he spent 25 years in residence. Like Hirsch, he chose social realism as his topic, picturing Midwest city scenes and the working class. His Imperial whiskey illustration reflects that consciousness, personalizing the workers who are drilling bung holes into the barrels. Bohrod’s art, as many others here, can be found in major American museums.

Like many of the artists shown here, Paul Sample was a Midwesterner, born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1896. Also classified as a “social realist,” Time magazine in 1934 ranked Sample as one of America’s most important living painters. His conservative style and aversion to abstraction excluded him from mainstream American art after World War II. As shown in #7, his work for Hiram Walker exemplified his realistic style,

Earnest Fiene, born in Germany in 1912 and a naturalized citizen in 1927, was able to put more artistic design in his painting. While far from abstract, it includes design elements in the round barrels and dark iron rings that, with the exception of Benton, are largely absent from the other pictures. He is known for injecting his interest in human life and his optimism into art, qualities also exhibited here.

Another foreign born artist was Georges Schreiber who was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1904 but moved to the U.S. in 1928. His works have been exhibited in a number of major American museums, and collections of his works can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum. Although, unlike Fiene and others, his style changed over the years to more abstract imaging, at the time he did his Imperial Whiskey ad, he was firmly within the American Regionalist movement. His ad shows definite influence of Thomas Hart Benton and others of that school.

Our last artists was not a Midwesterner nor foreign-born. Fred Ludekens was born California in 1900 and spent most of his life there. Remembered primarily as an illustrator, Ludekens was no stranger to advertising work and later produced a series of paintings to be used in advertisement for the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company. Perhaps more at home in commercial work than other artists shown here, he managed to get some drama in his picture by showing workers, somewhat inexplicably, rolling barrels in different directions.

Taken together, these 10 artists could fill a museum with striking images of America during the middle of the last century. Probably none of them would entail men rolling barrels. But such were the demands of Hiram Walker on these noted gentlemen that we are left with this legacy of two years of ads, barrel after barrel after barrel.

The Many Uses of the Mermaid

In keeping with one of the evolving themes of this blog, images as iconography, this post is devoted to the mermaid, its origins and significance, and the many uses for the figure that have been devised. Before or after reading this piece, log on to eBay and search “mermaid.” Checking in there regularly I find no fewer than 57,000 entries of mermaid-related items on auction.

That is a rather astounding number but then the mermaid has an impressive history. The first known mermaid stories appeared in Assyria about 1000 B.C. The goddess Atargatis loved a mortal shepherd and killed him by accident. So bereaved, she jumped into a lake to become a fish but was, so the story goes, was so beautiful that the waters would not mask her face or breasts. As a result she was human above the waist, a fish below -- and lo! the mermaid was born. Similar stories appear in the mythology of Greece, Syria, Arabia, China, India, Scotland and England.

One influential image was created by British artist John William Waterhouse in the late 1800s. Entitled “A Mermaid,” is an example of late British Academy style artwork. The painting, shown here, debuted to considerable acclaim (and secured Waterhouse's place as a member of the Royal Academy). It is currently in the collection of the Royal Academy in London. Waterhouse has captured a romantic, enduring image of this mythical creature.

But as occurs so frequently, human nature seems to demand that we find other -- often practical -- uses for our icons. The artifact that launched me on this post was a cast iron brown mermaid with a bulbous nose and both arms raised high. As it turns out, she is a bootjack, a device for that uses her V-shaped arms to help extract someone’s foot from a boot. She is purely utilitarian and a far cry from the beauty in Waterhouse’s painting.

The bootjack mermaid, like Waterhouse’s, has bare breasts. This anatomical reality has caused a problem for those using the mermaid for practical purposes. The frontal nudity has draw criticism from persons made uncomfortable by the unclothed female figure. Thus a number of strategies have been devised to deal a more modest mermaid. The bottle opener shown here is an example of one solution: crossed arms. Another ploy, one used frequently in the movies, is the mermaid’s hair streaming over her bosom. Witness a door knocker where the visitor is greeted with a welcome sign and a chance to grab the knocker.

A third way of covering up the lass is to give her a C-cup in seashells. This is demonstrated by a waving mermaid, flanked by a leaping porpoise and a lighthouse. Is she urging sailors onto the rocks to their doom? No, she really is part of a metal plate meant to disguise a hose reel. Some artifacts have gone so far as to put the fishy lady in swimming togs. Shown here is a metal coin bank mermaid-style. She appears to be wearing a two-piece bathing suit and a matching cap. Even more modestly dressed is the wide-eyed, blonde haired mermaid. Believe it or not, she is a pencil sharpener.

It is not hard to get a handle on the next mermaid. She IS a handle and appears to be wearing a bathing suit as she anchors a cup on a maritime saucer. Note that her tail is double and a variant on the usual fin. Another artistic effort, this one by glass artist, Milan Townsend, transmutes the mermaid into a bottle. Her human half makes up the stopper, while the fishy part is the actual container. Here too the artist has taken liberties with the usual image by including porpoise-like flippers as well as a cleft tail.

The last figure shown here uses the classic shape of the mermaid, bare breasts and all, but colors her hair red, body green, and inserts one nasty looking hook from her naval and another from her tail. My Dad always said there were fishing lures meant to catch fishermen rather than fish. This clearly is one of them. It provides another example of the many uses of the mermaid. If space permitted, I could have included images of mermaids as finger rings, fountains,vases, tattoos, and a dozen other uses. Clearly the notion of the half woman, half fish, conceived first in antiquity, has a continuing fascination in contemporary culture. That helps explain those 57,000 plus items for sale every day on eBay.

















.