I'm Not Old, I'm "Vintage."

Back in my hormonally over-charged youth, I developed a roster of colognes and after-shaves that I depended on to attract rather than repel folk of the female persuasion. Heaven help me in identifying one of those in today's high school market. You can't even tell by their pronouns anymore. Anyway, I depended on those masculine scents to attract (or at least avoid repulsing girls), a species of human in which I found myself developing a keen interest. Television in the sexually charged late 60s and early 70s, was rife with ads for allegedly irresistible colognes and after shaves. 

• There was Hai Karate which promised you would have to resort to some form of martial arts in order to save yourself from the hordes of ravening women who would descend on any male wearing Hai Karate cologne. I tried it but never had to fight off women. 
• I don't think Brut will ever be discontinued. Brut is the king of affordable after shaves, likely because of its better-than-sweat scent and it's ability to inexpensively cover up the aromatic aftermath of a fellow's Mexican food lunch. Brut is kind of the go-to cheap destinkifier for daily use.
• Then came English Leather, which had a vague warrior poet sort of sound which apparently women are attracted to. It was okay, but I didn't notice women flocking around my horse. Likely, because I didn't have a horse at the time.
• Avon ladies used to sell a scent called "Wild Country" in clever decorative bottles. It turned out to be my second favorite scent and they still make it. I may have to order some online as it's an affordable $15-$25 and seems to be available. Apparent it was Avon's best-selling scent. They even make Wild Country for women nowadays. 
• Finally I found Jade East Golden Lime after shave. It had a light citrus smell and though it never drew women like flies despite its fruity ambience, I myself rather liked it. It had the advantage over earthier scents of toning down the smell of sweat. The King boys were and are prodigious perspirers.

Imagine my dismay in searching high and low on the Internet  only to find that my beloved Golden Lime had been discontinued.  Probably it was focused grouped into extinction by those heartless wenches at Jade East who prefer a man to smell like a sweaty British riding saddle; the kind with those ridiculous delicate stirrups that force you to stand up if your horse breaks into a trot. 

Hai Karate was apparently not terribly woke and I can guess what happened to it. Probably the metrosexuals who make cologne decided they had better chances with some kind of muskier scent - something less obvious (not to mention offensive to women) that still drew women without being obvious. The rising flock of feminist young females did like to feel in control of dating rituals back in the 70s and 80s.  The decision to D.C. the dream scent of adolescent males back in the halcyon days before the disco epidemic. Early "woke" girls may have stopped buying Hai Karate because of those patronizing commercials. At the very least the whole boycott of the Karate man may have been due to their resentment of the idea that a mere cologne might force some hormonal response to the application of a deadly mix of male pheromones, a pleasant scent and man sweat. I did find some on ebay at $179.00 for a vintage bottle.

 I finally resorted to a deep search on the Internet for Jade East Golden Lime and was disappointed. Oh, Jade East is still in business but sans Golden Lime. In desperation I shelled out $34 bucks for the scent they were offering, but was disappointed. It was okay, as far as that goes. I did discover in my quest that they do sell vintage Jade East cologne on Ebay and Etsy, but there are apparently no vintage Golden Lime bottles left. I may have bought the last one in 1978. A vintage bottle of 70s era standard Jade East runs from $60 to $89 per elderly bottle.

English Leather is still around and available on Amazon for a price that won't force you to buy it on credit. Apparently the scent of an English riding saddle still brings 'em in. It's okay, I suppose, but English Leather is getting quickly out of my retiree price range. and besides, I prefer a western saddle to a fancy English one.

And then there's Wild Country - more of the scent of a new Western saddle than its mustier English counterpart - fresher and not overpowering. Sheila bought me some after we were married, probably in the 80s. The wife did like the smell which was a big plus for Avon's signature scent. I remember it well. It seemed to still do the trick after a decade or so, though my youthful pheromones had begun to fade. So with some regret for the loss of Golden Lime I've got to find myself a new scent. Wild Country, is still available thanks to the steady marketing and promotional efforts of those wonderful Avon ladies, steeped in the more conservative traditions of Avon. These lovely gals have preserved the now vintage smell of my adolescence. I, therefore, have decided to become a regular Avon customer. 

Truth be told during my short-lived heyday as a popular guy with the ladies, I was a summertime  lifeguard at Lone Star Camp and generally smelled like fishy lake water and man sweat. But I could still dig out my trusty bottle of eau' de cologne, shower up and manage to smell acceptably manly while playing guitar on the boat dock by the light of the moon. Later, when my Sweet Baboo and I worked a couple of summers at camp as a married couple, the pretty girl whose heart God and I had captured, did sometimes resort to sprinkling me with Jade East or Avon's finest - usually, in the evening after I wandered back to the cabin at the end of a particularly hard day on the lake. Hey, maybe a splash of Wild Country might rekindle some of those lovely memories.

A word of warning to those of you with boy children. If your prepubescent sixth grader EVER brings home a bottle of something called Aramis, either hide it in the nearest dumpster or buy yourself a gas mask. It's potent stuff when juxtaposed with the smell of sixth grade boys' feet. I call it Middle School Agent Orange.

Smell is a powerful mnemonic, tied to regions of the brain which store the more permanent kinds or memories. Rekindling the scent of your youth makes your brain cells happy. So unlimber Google or Duck Duck Go, Yahoo Search or Bing, whichever you like best and do a search for your favorite cologne or perfume. You might even buy your main squeeze a bottle of whatever she was wearing when she wrapped you around her little finger. Or you might buy your guy whatever smell that drew you to the handsome guy who walked past you trailing a cloud of pheremones and stole your heart back in school  .

What a blast from the past that could be! Almost makes me look forward to a reminder that I'm "vintage" these days. Sounds better than being an antique or worse, just plain old.

© 2026 by Tom King

PS:  Don't tell anyone who is boycotting China right now, but TEMU, the Chinese version of Amazon sells all kinds of copycat versions of "vintage" and current scents including a version of my favorite Golden Lime. I'm going to order some and see how it stacks up to what I remember. If Jade East is going to stop making it, I don't have any problem buying it where I can get it!

 

 

Of Libraries, Books, Basements and Icky Twerp!

I grew up in Texas where the summers were 100 degree miseries unless you are outside or one of the rare few who had a basement to hole up in. My grandparents had a basement. Their house was built by a transplanted Yankee who didn't understand about Texas red clay soil and its deleterious effect on basements. The place always smelled of dirt because it was constantly sifting into the basement through the cracks in the block walls where the Texas earth shifted and bucked as the temperatures went from blistering hot to freezing cold when the Blue Northers swept down from Canada in winter.

I liked to go down there in summer. It was always cool down there with all the old furniture and stuff. There wasn't much down there, Honeymom's canning jars, cans of insecticide on a shelf, an old table she later gave me and some nondescript boxes I never dared to open. There was a laundry hamper and her washing machine down there as well. The hamper sat beneath a chute that dropped down from the bathroom. We were forbidden to drop rocks and sticks down the chute, but we did like to holler back and forth up it; one of us in the bathroom above and one by the hamper below. Adventures didn't take much to create back then.

Honeymama and Grandpa kept the TV upstairs so they could watch "As the World Turns" when he came home from the kitchen cabinet factory on his hour-long lunch break, so I seldom watched TV over there, though we did come over for my Grandpa's hamburgers and the annual showing of "The Wizard of Oz" for several years running. Other than that, we didn't see a lot of television, but spent our time running around down by the stock pond in the back pasture.

In bad weather. I almost always had a book going anyway. For more than half of my childhood, the TV was broken at my house and when it wasn't I, being an Adventist kid, couldn't watch Roy Rogers or Sky King because they came on the air on Saturday mornings. The only TV I got to see was Channel 11's Slam Bang Theater with Icky Twerp, a local program on an independent station in Ft. Worth, that came on every day after school. It was supposed to be a "kids" show featuring Popeye cartoons and the Three Stooges, a strange little man with a tiny hat and two guys in gorilla suits named Ajax and Delphinium. Modern parents would have been aghast. Someone got punched in the face in every episode of every cartoon or film that Slam Bang Theater offered. Between cartoons, Ajax and Delphinium would beat up on each other, Icky Twerp and any "guests" they had on the show. Other than that daily dose of mayhem and violence, the Ed Sullivan Show was pretty much it for family TV viewing, with a sprinkling of "Bewitched" and "Lassie" thrown in during my adolescence.

I started out on books almost as soon as I could read. I read Moby Dick in third grade. It took me six weeks and my biceps got bigger from carrying that massive book around with me. It was a bit over my head, but I soldiered on determined to finish what I started. I then found Captain Blood in the school library, a much more satisfying read than Melville and then finally discovered Captain Horatio Hornblower who was more satisfying yet. Then I discoverd the public library.

By this time, I was earning four or five bucks a week riding an after school and Sunday paper route for the Cleburne Times Review. Mom took us to the library one weekend because the television was broken and she wanted to lure my brother and I out of the tops of the oak trees in the backyard. It didn't work. I used to climb trees to read in private up among the leaves. Once, I got my library card, I was hooked. Because we had to save the $2 worth of gas so that my step-dad could get back and forth to work, going to the library wasn't an option. Besides, if my folks took me in, I didn't have nearly as much time as I wanted to roam about among the stacks. So, I would take off on my own on weekends and pedal my Schwinn Stingray bicycle the five plus miles into nearby Cleburne (named for Confederate General Pat Cleburne) to the Carnegie library where I would check out books by CS Forester, Rafael Sabatini, Lester Del Rey, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Andre Norton until I'd read every swashbuckler, adventure and sci-fi novel in the place. I carried home four or five books a week (all they would allow me to take) then pedal back the next weekend to return them.

Then, I discovered the Sci-Fi book club from which I got two volumes a month for $3, which was most of a week's wages from my paper route. My room, a converted back porch my step-dad built on, had a long shelf of books I read over and over. We had a post office box, so I'd have to go into the post office to pick up my packages there when I picked up the newspapers every day off the afternoon mail truck. I'd tuck my new books into my paper route bag and carry it home with me to read after I got in off my route that evening. I went through two books a week minimum - often three or four. 

When we would go over to Honeymama's on rainy days and we couldn't go down into the pasture, I used to sneak down to the dark and musty basement to read. Much more scope for the imagination down there, reading under a single naked lightbulb suspended from the floor joists above. It was kind of an adventure all by itself.

I'm still collecting books off eBay that I read from the library back then or had on my shelf and then lost. I have the exact same edition of "Captain Blood" and Lester Del Rey's "Step to the Stars" and the entire Hornblower series that I borrowed from the library back then. I've added more than three bookcases over the years and that's what's left after I was forced to reluctantly sell off over half my collection during a forced move several years ago. I've also collected a formidable library of theological tomes so God gets a good deal of my attention, especially these days.

Since I've been writing for a living, I haven't had as much time to read for fun much anymore, but my Kindle library already holds hundreds of books in readiness for the end of the world, when I'll be holed up in my end-of-the-world bunker without an Internet connection. I'm working on a stationary bicycle that generates electricity for my computer while I ride it. I don't have much faith in the electrical grid, what with the current crop of folks closing in on their parties' nominations. It feels like choosing between Hitler and Stalin and I don't fancy we'll do well either way but I live in hope. But at least, I'll have plenty to read whatever fresh hell gets rained down on us.

And there will be bookshelves in my bunker. Of that you can be assured.

© 2016 by Tom King

Over the Garden Wall - My Debut Role as a Troll

Keene Public School's 1964 Production of "Over the Garden Wall"

It was 1964 and I was about to make my first appearance as an actor in a musical. The 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th grades were staging Keene Public School's musical production of "Over the Garden Wall", a play based loosely on Mother Goose stories and rhymes.

This picture takes me back. I can't identify everybody, but I do know a few of them.

The farmer types on the far left are Barney McClure (my cousin) and Elaine Ferguson as "Jack and Jill". Famous future Dentist, John Barroso is sitting on a ladder behind them starring as "The Sun". The first butterfly on the left is Amma Sue Johnson. Behind her to the right are the Washington brothers, Manuel and Phillip. Continuing right are Patsy Marshall and Wanda Davis (the first girl I ever had a date - it was a disaster, don't ask). The bluebird was, I think, David Carver. And last but not least in this rogues gallery is the white-beared dude dressed all in black - Tom King my own self, as Mother Goose's hit troll. My character abruptly enters stage right and threatens to abduct Jack and Jill and take them to a dark cave. I think they needed to end the play and couldn't figure out how since it didn't have much in the way of a plot. So the writer apparently decide, "I know. Let's send in a troll!"

And to make matters even more weird, I was a singing troll. I sang my threats to the children - ominously, as I had been told by Mrs. Webb, the fifth and sixth grade teacher and director of the play.

You'd never get a character like that troll in a children's play these days. Too creepy! I was like this really short pervert troll enforcer for Mother Goose. What's weirder, if you can believe it is that I can still sing the stupid song to this day.

I missed most of the play myself because I was hiding backstage in utter terror and praying to God for strength to go out there and sing in front of all those people (I was in 3rd grade and terribly shy). 
But I did it:

Naughty, naughty children
Go home and go do bed,
Or I will quickly take you
To caverns dark and dread.
Mother Goose is looking
For you every where.
So beware..............BEEEEEEEWAAAAAAAAAAARE!

See, I told you I still remembered the stupid song. I ought to. I sat in an oak tree for two days memorizing that song because I was so scared I'd forget the lines. I could do it better now, because I have a deeper voice. Sounded more like a Munchkin than a dangerous troll back in 3rd grade.

Later when I became a teacher, I remembered that moment of stage fright when doing school productions with my own students and tried to remember how traumatizing that first acting job was.

Two years later I played Pinocchio in our 6th grade play. Star of the show I was, what with being Mrs. Webb's favorite actor and all. It gave me a big head. Seriously, I have a head the size of a watermelon.

One of the miscellaneous children in the Pinocchio play was my childhood neighbor, Steve Wilhite, who had one big line - something about "Look there's a star!" He was supposed to point toward the back of the room as he said it. Steve argued with Mrs. Webb that we should hang a star back there because everyone would turn around and look for one.

She apparently didn't have a lot of faith in Steve's acting ability and told him dismissively, "No one's going to turn around and look for a star."

Steve's judgment was later vindicated during the actual production when he delivered his big line, pointed and EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE AUDIENCE TURNED AROUND TO LOOK FOR THE STAR (including Mrs. Webb and Mr. Pauly, the principal, who later was overheard to say, "They should have put a star back there on the wall or something.")! I don't know about Steve, but I'd have felt pretty good about my acting skills right at that moment.

Later I went on to play Merlin in a community theater production of Camelot and nearly got blown up by a special effect. I said an unfortunate word, which the microphone I was wearing picked up and delivered clearly to the audience. That word was NOT in the original Lehrner and Lowe script. The Cleburne Times Review entertainment writer who was there that night was overheard to say, "Was that in the script?"

It is the moment my wife likes to remind me of whenever I get the acting bug and start talking about doing community theater again.

Ah, well. At my age, one must be content with past glories.


© 2014 by Tom King