By Alice Pollard

Mrs. Beasley was my favorite doll. Just like Buffy on Family Affair. (Above, Mrs. Beasley sits on a chair as Uncle Bill explains the birds and bees.)

I don’t know if Mrs. Beasley was created for the show or if she was a popular doll made more popular by the TV show, like Cindy Brady’s Kitty Carry-All. It didn’t matter to me as a six-year-old. Nor did it matter that my doll was a snippy old woman with a pull string that said very odd and creepy things. Things like “Come a little closer so Mrs. Beasley can hear you.”

Toy brands take us back in a way that nothing else can; it’s best when a toy is exactly as it was originally created. There is genius in a toy marketer that does not alter the product in any way. The very toy is the brand, and holds all the appeal.

I remember everything about Mrs. Beasley. The way she smelled, sounded, even the weight of her in my arms, with her clunky 1970 pull-string voice mechanism, and when I saw her in the Back to Basics Toys catalog the rush of emotion knocked me of my feet, until the $95 price tag made me think again.

I do hope the Back to Basics Toys catalog does very well this Christmas, in spite of the economy. It is brilliant. All the classics are in there. Here are a few:

• Lincoln Logs, 1916: just like the first set designed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son.
• View Master (now Fisher-Price, formerly Sawyers and GAF): The name keeps changing, as does the viewer, but everything else stays the same.
• Trio of Big Band Horns: I had a sax. I can taste it!
• Slot Car Racing, 1957: Anyone who owned one was instantly cool.
• Bozo, 1965: Was it sand in the bottom?
• Gnip Gnop, 1971: Had the best commercial. A stupid toy with a great name. They kept the color.
• Shrinky Dinks 1973: Nothing better than getting kids to melt flammable plastic in a hot oven.

The Back to Basics Toys catalog also has every toy that I coveted from my chic Danish cousins. They were a family with seven beautiful toe-headed children and true to their Scandinavian heritage they had every blond wood, well-made toy ever created under the 14-foot candlelit Christmas tree:

• Wooden Block Set: Clunky and overpriced, they can’t be beat.
• The Original Brio Labyrinth, 1947: Made popular again by a recent car commercial that gives me vertigo.
• Skittles, 1932: Endless fun and hiliarous.
• Shoot the Moon, 1920: Frustrating test of nerves. Another metal ball game.
• Wooden Maze with grooves and holes: What’s up with all the metal balls and Scandinavian toys?
• Original NOK Hockey, 1948: Air Hockey is more exciting.
• Our Rugged Balance Board, 1940: It says it helps with coordination and holds up to 250 pounds. Like to see that.

The catalog has products that are reminiscent of the original. I am glad they are in there, because they show that it is vital to keep these toys in circulation. But eventually, they need to be brought back to their original perfect form.

• Colorforms, 1951: I can just smell ‘em. Can’t you? I am sure the modern version is probably less toxic but they have done away with the cool packaging and themes.
• Lite Brite: I don’t know what happened here, but please set it right. Perhaps fire hazard? “Light Bright makin” things with light…outta sight makin things with Lite Brite!”

Now on our Top 100 List

If you want to see how much America has lost its innocence, one need only look at the Pfizer Company and its most advertised products.

In the 1960s, one of Pfizer’s best known advertised products was the cologne Hai Karate, made by Pfizer’s Leeming/Pacquin division. The ads featured a nerdy looking guy who had to fight off a woman with karate because of the incredible scent of Hai Karate. Read our post on Hai Karate, with a link to a old commercial. Very funny.

Looking back on it, it was all very innocent. Especially compared to today, when Pfizer’s best known product is Viagra.

Still famous today

Even though Hai Karate is no longer on the shelves, it still gets attention because of those ads and its cult status. It makes a cameo in The Incredibles, and is a running joke on the Bill Bennett Morning in America radio program. Simon Doonan associates it with the disco years in New York. Donny Deutsch this year talked about it on the Today Show.

Just last week, BrandlandUSA reader Gabriel Arregui asked us to put Hai Karate on our list of BrandlandUSA’s 100 Brands to Bring Back. We did. Thank you Gabriel! If we had a bottle, we would send you one.

Leeming/Pacquin History

Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company, bought the Leonard Leeming Company in 1961. Leeming made personal care items, and Pfizer turned the company into one of the largest health and beauty aid companies in the nation. The Leeming family was an old Brooklyn socialite name, and the Leeming name was preserved after the merger, though renamed.

The renamed Leeming/Pacquin, the division of Pfizer, was known for brands that included Barbasol, Ben Gay and Visine. The Pacquin brand survived until just recently. The hand cream has recently been discontinued by Johnson & Johnson, which bought the consumer products division of Pfizer in 2006. Today, there is an Internet based effort to bring Pacquin’s Hand Cream back.

Hai Karate $200 million product

At the height of its popularity, Hai Karate was selling over $200 million in product a year, including soap on a rope, shaving cream, talcum powder, cologne and after shave. The cologne came in four scents, including Regular, Oriental Lime, Oriental Spice and Iced Hai. It apparently returned in the 1990s for a time, according to press reports. The bottle said that it “originated on the island of Manhattan five years ago.”

If consumers ever wish to have Hai Karate again, there is some chance they might. Today, according to the records of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the trademark for Hai Karate Cologne is now owned by a company called Miner’s International in Surrey, England. The after shave trademark, however, is owned by Hanson Trading of Hong Kong. So we guess that means that if you wanted to give someone a boxed set of Hai Karate on a future Christmas holiday, that might be a bit difficult.

We checked some other cologne brands of the era. They include:

• DaVinci by the Steven Lewis Co. of Hollywood (one of the scents was L.S.D.)
• Cologne Pub
• Aramis
• Chant D’Aromes by Guerlain
• Canoe by Dana
• English Leather
• 4711, The Refreshant Cologne
• Villa d’Est, made by the MEM Company of New Jersey
• Wolff Freres of New York

One of the better known sellers is the Old Time Radio Catalog. BrandlandUSA caught up with Jon Folk, owner of Old Time Radio Catalog, who has made a business of old broadcasts of radio shows from radio’s golden age, from the 1920s to 1959.

The Lanexa, Kansas-based catalog has dozens of radio programs, as well as collections of radio speeches, including some from President Clinton. Most fascinating to BrandlandUSA are the brand names that are still represented in the collections:

• Tales of Fatima, with Basil Rathbone, sponsored by Fatima cigarettes
• Texaco Star Theater
• Ford Theater
• General Motors on Safari
• Lux Radio
• Redbook Dramas
• Skippy Hollywood Theater (apparently it made Skippy popular nationally)
• Carling Beer Shows and Challenge Into Space
• Old Gold Comedy
• Quaker Party, which started on WCAE and was sponsored by Quaker Oats
• Alka Seltzer Time
• Bell Telephone Hour
• Philco Summer Hour
• Philip Morris Playhouse
• Raleigh Kool Program

OTRCAT has posted thousands of radio episodes online. Visitors to OTRCAT.com can stream or download full episodes in Mp3 format as well as read detailed descriptions of the performers and series, which date from the 1920s to 1959.  In the ‘daily downloads’, there are the broadcasts of the day throughout history. Quick questions:

How did it start? I started the website as a trading website, and it has grown. Collectors wanted copies, and I then began converting them to mp3 files.

When did you start? I started the business a little more than 10 years ago. At the time, old time radio collecting was an expensive hobby and many of the shows were being stored on audio cassettes, reel-to-reels, and other audio devices that made collecting and sharing difficult.

What are best sellers? Right now, the best selling radio shows are all the horror shows.  I think that they are the most timeless and translate well to our time. Radio was the ideal medium for the horror genre because it uses the theater of the mind to create thrills and chills.

For more info, see www.otrcat.com

We all remember brands like Venus and Eberhard Faber, and can sense that feeling of a well-sharpened pencil. But many of the brands and individual pencil models have been forgotten; we forgot how the pencils looked. Not only that, but we tend to buy the cheapest office store brands

The place to learn about pencils is the website www.brandnamepencils.com. It has photos of just about every great pencil and pencil manufacturer. Writes Bob Trudy, who put up the site, “I trust that you will be amazed at the sheer number of pencil brands once produced in the USA and abroad. Sadly those days are over and the craftsmanship, skill and pride once put into the ordinary pencil is but a thing of the past.”

However, Truby found the last two surviving “Made in the USA” Pencil Companies: General Pencil Company (circa 1889) and the Musgrave Pencil Company (circa 1916). Internationally, the German Company Faber Castell still makes high quality pencils and erasers.

America’s best-selling brand is Ticonderoga. It dates from 1913, when the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company created a pencil named Ticonderoga after Fort Ticonderoga, the historic fort. They sell over half a billion pencils a year. It still feels American, and their website even includes a mention that it is made from California cedar. Apparently, they are not made in the United States. Thankfully, they are still made.

And remember: You must have No. 2!