.SO! After maybe a year or so of deploying various software enhanced digital images of the ominous HAL 9000 to grace the face of this blog and also my accounts at Twitter and Twaudio, I decided to change my avatar from HAL to "Bubbles", a truly esoteric cartoon character that possibly one in a million may actually recall seeing somewhere on a bright and shiny kitchen counter in the mid 1950's.
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If you were living, breathing and sentient around back then, you may have seen Bubbles on a brilliant green can of Bab-O Cleanser. I can, only at the very vaguest, remember watching this cute Madison Avenue creation in a Bab-O commercial over a black and white television screen zipping around an animated cartoon kitchen cleaning things up. I couldn't even tell you if this was a he or a she or whether it even spoke or sang but I do know that by 1958 Bubbles was no longer on the container.
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Bab-O Cleanser was once an extremely well known and popular household scouring powder made mostly of sand and manufactured by B.T. Babbitt, Inc. The company had it's executive offices in Manhattan but actually had a production plant based here locally down near the Port of Albany. In fact, one of the main buildings had a pair of silos painted to look like a giant can of Bab-O and a huge container of Glim, a liquid detergent, which at one time you could see driving across the Dunne Memorial Bridge into Albany from the City of Rensselaer. This derelict structure somehow remains standing to this day, airbase to wings of pigeons, crows and ravens, home base to the homeless with a rusted and corroded "for sale" sign still flapping in the bone-chilling winter night air.
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In addition to Glim, B.T. Babbitt manufactured Cameo Copper and Aluminum powders and sold a spray starch, an all-purpose ammonia cleaner and soap pads under the Bab-O label. The company also made Quickee waterless hand soaps and at one point, owned the Charles Antell cosmetics line and the Curley Company. Based in Camden, New Jersey. the Curley Company produced a fleet of private label household cleaning products. There was also an institutional division that used the company's copyrighted labels as monikers for their industrial strength product analogs.
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Bab-O had it's heyday in the 1930's and 1940's but by the 50's began to face serious competition from Colgate Palmolive Peet with Ajax The Foaming Cleanser and Proctor and Gamble with their equally bright green cans of Comet. But by then, B.T. Babbitt was suffering to the point where any stockholders who held stock with Babbitt had assets in name that could yield no dividends. Finally, by the mid 1960's, the deal was done and the company's registered trademarks were summarily sold to other players. I do recall that Bab-O Cleanser and Bab-O 4-In-1 Spray Starch were sold to the Purex Corporation, which subsequently fell prey to some other company gobbling conglomerate who's name I do not know.
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I recently came across a good visual of Bubbles and decided put him to use as a profile photo on Facebook and then extended the image here at the Random Access Thought Blog, the Random Access File shadow blog, Twitter and Twaudio. SO! One could call it a blast from the past...so far in the past...I was still on the floor in my Doctor Dentons playing with my little wooden Fisher Price Puffy 444! But that of course is another story.
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