Barbara Kahn (Tepper)

Barbara Kahn (Tepper)

Judy, Esther Price is still there and as far as I know, still the best. I haven't lived in Cincinnati since HS but my sister lives in Waynesville, OH, at least part of the year. She tells me Esther Price is still high quality. 

Philip Spiess

[Note to other readers:  Barbara's references to graduation gifts and The Golden Lamb Inn and my acquisition of a Regina Music Box refer to comments I sent to her in a private message.]  Barbara:  I really wanted to stay in the "Charles Dickens Room" at The Golden Lamb Inn in Lebanon, Ohio, because Dickens is my favorite author, and the bed in that room has fascinated me since I first saw it in childhood, but it was not to be -- that room was apparently booked, so Kathy and I were assigned to the "Cordell Hull Room" down the hall.  This was okay, because Cordell Hull was FDR's Secretary of State, and his Under Secretary of State was Sumner H. Welles, whose impressive mansion in Washinton, D. C., on Massachusetts Avenue, has now been, for many years, the home of Washington's most exclusive club, the "Cosmos Club," from which I was evicted by the doorman in 1968 (story later -- Oscar Wilde was evicted from Washington's Metropolitan Club in the 1880s, I believe), and in which I dined as the guest of a member ca. 1983, and in which I gave a speech in its banquet room ca. 1986 (to great acclaim), and in which I attended a memorial service for my well-respected and beloved boss at the Smithsonian Institution, Jane Glaser (Walnut Hills, Class of 1940).  (Washington is such fun, particularly if you're not at the top of the roost, which I haven't been since 1973 -- so I keep going!)

Jon Singer

the main brew pub of ester price is in a southern community of dayton. less than 20 feet off the road, the building looks very small. Between 10-15 years ago, I passed the place somewhere between 2 am to 4 am when I got off a late shift at the dayton children's emergency department on my way to sleep on my middle child's appartment(when he was a U.D law student) in kettering, Ohio.  Ester Price has a satellite facility in cincy on montgomery road not far from the kenwood mall. (Judy, as an aside, this mall is the thriving epicenter of my spouse's world).

 I can not accurately comment on the quality of ester price, but would eagerly challenge the favored californian's fascination with see's candy. Sweet dreams, Jon

Nancy Messer

This goes back many years but I loved Bissinger’s nut balls.  Anything from Bissinger’s was delicious. 

Judy Holtzer (Knopf)

Jon, Thanks ever so for your comment on the whereabouts of Esther Price candy. My cousin lives somewhere around Montgomery Road. I'll ask my brother who is more spry than I and visits Cincinnati every once in a while to look into buying me a box or two to bring back. Israeli chocolate is terribly disappointing, and most Israelis buy foreign chocolates from Europe. 

Judy Holtzer (Knopf)

Hi Barbara! So glad to hear from another Esther Price fan.

Barbara Kahn (Tepper)

Apologies Phil, I didn't realize the privacy issue. Since I couldn't turn my pictures around, Thanks Jerry, I guess I need more help than I thought I did. 

Do not divulge family secrets to me if I cannot tell the difference between public and private. 

Larry Klein

(Note to Phil) - Mr. history buff - what year was the below "Student Directory" printed.  Note that the phone numbers still had the letter codes.

Gail Weintraub (Stern)

Larry, this Student Directory is news to me. Never knew about it. Oh, well......

Philip Spiess

Larry:  Not only does the Directory have the old telephone exchanges, it also has the old postal codes; I know, for example, that "20" is "Clifton."  But I'm going to have to take a wild guess on the year -- I'll have to say it's our 7th-Grade year.  And I must have one of those directories myself buried somewhere in my files; I never throw anything out of that sort.

Same time frame:  In our 7th-Grade year the school (or Alumni Association, or someone) was still issuing a "Walnut Hils Songbook," which included the words (though not the music) to the "new" alma mater ("High on the Hill"), the "old" alma mater ("Semper Fidelis forever, forever loyal to Walnut Hills High," the alma mater when my mother was at Walnut Hills), the two "fight songs," played at football games ("Keep Fighting for Us, Blue and Gold" and "March On to Victory, We're the Team That Never Says 'Die'"), and who knows what else (or maybe the song words were part of an informational booklet for new students; I remember a page explaining "Effie" and "E-Flat" and the like; I probably have that booklet somewhere, too).  What the songbook most emphatically did not have was the parody words to "Pomp and Circumstance," sung at our Graduation rehearsal (for one thing, they had not been written yet; that was still six years -- and so many experiences -- off).

Barbara:  Not to worry:  there were no privacy issues involved (let alone family secrets!). I think most people know that the Edison phonograph that appears in one or two pictures of me on my Profile was my high school graduation present; I just didn't expect everyone to be as interested in the information I wished to share with you as I thought you might be, so I sent it as a "Private Message."  

Barbara Kahn (Tepper)

Phil: Consider me officially admonished. PS I'm not always serious. Some things are lost in the written word. This just makes me wish I had known you better when I had the chance. One thing this chat has done is to show me how much I missed at WHHS.

Barbara

Steven Levinson

Phil:  The directory can't have been put out before our eighth grade year, because my family didn't move to Rawson Woods Lane in Clifton until late August 1959.

Mary Vore (Iwamoto)

Jon:  I will gladly challenge you to a Sees candy competition!  My father was from California, and he and my mom lived in California in about 1945.  Mom became addicted as well, and I probably received my first exposure to Sees in utero.  We just received our 3 lb supplement of dark chocolate covered almonds, which we order regularly.  I have tried many US brands and have been disappointed; some European choclates are good, but I have been irreversibly imprinted with Sees. 

Philip Spiess

Okay, Steve, as you doubtlessly know as a lawyer, and I as an historian, the more facts (clues) we can add to the case, the more we can narrow down the likelihood of our surmises.  I have no idea who put together the Directory, but the use of old postal codes and old telephone exchanges seemed, well, dated to me, as my memory (which is certainly not infallible) keeps saying that one of those things was phased out the year I was in 6th Grade at Clifton School (i.e., 1957-1958).  However, your family's move pins it down a little more.

So, using the occult arts of divination and applying the principle of the dog that did not bark in the night, I have ascertained that, although the U. S. Post Office Department originated the concept of postal Zip Codes in 1943, it did not make their use uniform until 1963 (how like the Government!).  In similar fashion, although AT&T ("Ma Bell") developed the all-numerical system of telephone exchanges in 1947, and in 1955 required standardization of all exchange codes in its affiliated companies, it only completely phased out alpha-numerical exchange names over the 1960s, having phased in the all-numerical Area Codes in 1958.  However, this did not necessarily apply to the Cincinnati Bell Telephone Company (founded, under a different name two years before the telephone was invented), as AT&T only owned about one-third of the stock in Cincinnati Bell Telephone, and thus did not have a controlling interest (Cincinnati Bell was, and is, one of only two telephone companies in the U. S. that is independent of AT&T).  All of which is to say that I've not arrived at definitive dates on telephone exchange exchanges, nor on Postal Zones rezoning, let alone establishing the date of Larry Klein's Class Directory.

Mary:  In the "History of Food" section of my personal library, I have published histories of See's Chocolates, Baker's Chocolate, and the Hershey Company.  See's chocolates are also popular in New England, where they compete with Needhams, a candy consisting of a mashed potato, sugar, cocoanut, and vanilla-based interior dipped in a chocolate/paraffin coating for its exterior (yes, I have the recipe).  I also have in my files a recent shocking magazine article expose on European chocolate manufacturers, notably Cadbury's (but also others), that says they release to American distributors chocolate that is made with ingredients that are inferior to those used in their chocolates made for the European market.  Apparently the rationale for this is that Americans don't know the difference, so, although the price is the same, the profit margin is bigger.  How unsweet it is!

Dale Gieringer

I remember quite distinctly that all-digit dialing wasn't introduced until I was in college.  I protested by proclaiming that I would adopt all-letter dialing for my college phone, which became MONUBEX.

Steven Levinson

Phil:  Would you believe that, effective July 2018, Cincinnati Bell acquired Hawaiian Telcom?  That's an interesting marriage!

Philip Spiess

Yes, I did see that in my research.  It was announced in 2017 (makes no sense to me -- Hawaii is a long way off from Ohio -- like half-way around the world?).  As a Victorian, I really do not understand how these modern, comglomerate companies work (other than that they do) in a sort of "stacked" ownership (check out Nestle Foods, since we were speaking of chocolates above).  I was stunned a number of years ago to look at an Ivory Soap wrapper and discover that Procter & Gamble (now called simply "P&G") no longer (as near as I can tell) actually produces the soap -- it simply "distributes" it (this apparently occurred in 2014).  That caused me to look at other Procter & Gamble products, and I discovered that Prell Shampoo, etc., have followed the way of Ivory Soap and are merely "distributed" by P & G; it is unclear who actually manufactures them!  Evidently the company had grown too large in diversification.  I did discover that most of Procter and Gamble's food products, a major portion of the company, were sold off en bloc to Smuckers Foods of Ohio prior to 2012 -- "Pringles" was sold to Kellogg in 2012 -- (who knew? and why?).  It appears that Procter & Gamble is now just a financial or holding company, but I'm not sure.  (Subsequent research tonight has indicated that perhaps I will do a separete posting on the fate of P & G's major products in a future post.)

This would probably explain why, in recent years, a number of historic structures at "Ivorydale," the English-styled traditional Procter & Gamble headquarters factories along the Mill Creek on Spring Grove Avenue near St. Bernard, Ohio, have suddenly "disappeared" (i.e., been torn down) or been significantly altered in appearance (as seen from the street).  For those who want an historical description of "Ivorydale" in its prime, see my article on it in Spiess:  "The Industrial Archeology of Cincinnati, Ohio:  A Guide for S. I. A. Tourists, 1978" (I'll be glad to send you a copy if you want one).

Chuck Cole

Sometime after I moved to Cincinnati in 1955 and before all-digit dialing came in, all Cincinnati phone numbers were modified by inserting a 1 after the two letter exchange abbreviation.  Does anyone know what year that was and why that was done?

Steven Levinson

Selling Jiff Peanut Butter to Smuckers was one of the most unforgivable things P&G ever did.  I still own some P&G stock but wish I didn't.  I understand that it's devolved into a corporate basket case and appeers to be in free fall, as General Electric has been.

Nancy Messer

Phil - My neighbor is a Procter & Gamble retiree so I asked her about their products and showed her your post.  She named a bunch of their products and said to check their website.  I got a good list of products from Wikipedia.  You can see they still make a bunch of stuff and got rid of many products!

Philip Spiess

My responses, which follow, to the above inquiries are not, needless to say, from memory, but from some quick and dirty research:

Chuck:  I, too, remember the addition of the "1" to telephone numbers (my old number in Clifton, for example, became "UN-1-3092"); the reason was a stop-gap expansion measure as telephone systems began to convert to the eventual all-numeric number system (the "Area Code" system, which completed the expansion).  (AT&T recognized in 1947 that it would have to devise a system to expand the old six-digit alpha-numeric numbering system, and introduced the plan in 1951, beginning to augment the plan in 1955, and mostly finishing it in the mid-1960s, although Philadelphia held out to some degree until 1987.)  As I said above, Cincinnati Bell Telephone was pretty much independent of AT&T (and still is), so the history gets a bit cloudier; the best I can tell you from here is that the "1" was introduced into the Cincinnati telephone system sometime between 1958, when all-number calling was first phased in, and 1960, when much of the "area code" system had been adopted.  [Larry Klein, I'll bet you're having fun with this, aren't you?]

Steve and Nancy:  Procter & Gamble, founded in 1837 and long Cincinnati's premier industry, officially "streamlined" its product line in 2014 by dropping and/or selling off around 100 of its brands to "focus on its remaining 65 brands."  Here is the list of product categories which P & G says it still maintains:  "Dishwashing; Menstrual Hygiene; Haircare; Healthcare Products; Household [Products]; Laundry Detergents; Skin Care."  Among the popular products it sold off (some of which I didn't even know they made!) are these:  Aleve (sold to Bayer, the people who brought you Mustard Gas in 1915); Chloraseptic (Prestige Brands); Crisco [!] (Smucker); Duncan Hines (Aurora/Pinnacle); Duracell (Berkshire Hathaway [huh? Berkshire Hathaway?]); Folgers (Smucker); Hawaiian Punch (Dr. Pepper/7 Up); Iams Pet Foods (Mars Candy [huh?]); Jif (Smucker); Noxema (Alberto-Culver); Oxydol [!] (Redox); Prell (Prestige); Pringles (Kellogg); Spic & Span (Prestige); and Clairol, etc. (Coty).  Among the more well-known P & G products it has discontinued over the past 30 years or so are Fluffo; Gleem Toothpaste; and Ivory Flakes [!].  (My exclamation points in this list indicate my surprise at P & G's relinquishing some of its oldest, particularly soap, products.)

O Tempora, O Mores!

Barbara Kahn (Tepper)

Now you've got me wondering about the phone numbers. Maybe late 50s early 60s when we went to all numerical from the exchange names? We were Redwood and it went to RE 1 - 731. 

A bit of trivia nobody cares about is that I worked one year at P&G. One of our classmates had a dad who worked there and I interviewed with him. I am trying to remember who that was. Does anyone have a clue? 

David Buchholz

And now for something very different.  My mother graduated from WHHS when she was 16 years old in 1930.  In the year's last publication of The Gleam she wrote a short story called "The Ultra-Moderns" in which she envisioned a fictional theft in the distant future (1985).  For your amusement, here it is.  I'm sure that she would have been amused to know that eighty-eight years after she wrote it it would resurface in a WHHS website.

Jerry Ochs