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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.
.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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Back in February, I posted some historical information concerning B.T. BABBITT, INC, the company which was best known for manufacturing BAB-O, a once very popular household cleanser. B.T. BABBITT had a number of factories around the United States and there was one of those located here in upstate New York, just a few blocks north of the PORT OF ALBANY. The company folded in the 1960s, it's registered trademarks scooped by other former competitors. But the buildings remain, in various physical states. The following two stills are of the main factory, now derelict some five decades since.Given today's economy, this once thriving manufacturing center will remain so until the structure is finally condemned and demolished.
The next shot displays a twin silo, which most likely housed tons of sand, which is the principal inert ingredient in scouring power. Back in the 1960's, the silos were painted to look like an enormous can of BAB-O and a container of GLIM, a liquid detergent also produced by B.T.BABBITT. This section is currently used as a garage by TRAILWAYS, a nationwide bus service.
The following two images show the third building, once associated with Babbitt, now under the aegis of EAST GREENBUSH LABEL AND TAPE and the PORT INDUSTRIAL CENTER.
Since Zach and I were in the neighborhood, we drove through the PORT OF ALBANY and got some extra detail such as this dockside crane.
These two structures are owned and operated by CARGILL, a producer of grains and other industrial materials.
This last shot was taken at GRECO CONSTRUCTION, displaying an ambiguous but quite curious sign on a cargo bay door.
