The Fly

“THE HISTORY OF THE ZIPPER?” (BY Robert Friedel, Summer 1994) brought to mind my first experience with a zipper, just before the summer of 1940. I opened a law office in 1938, and in the spring of 1940 I bought a new suit, with a zipper, for $59.50. Connecticut’s blue laws forbade the sale of liquor after 9:00 P.M. on Sunday, and to attract diners, the Seven Gables in Milford, the premier nightclub in the area, had a Sunday dinner from six to nine for one dollar. Still a bachelor, I invited a recent Smith College graduate for an afternoon ride in my new used Plymouth, followed by dinner and dancing at the Seven Gables.

In the late afternoon a car sped by us and slammed into a tree on a curve in the highway. My date and I helped to extricate four Yale students from their wrecked car (the struck tree bears a scar to this day). Eventually we arrived at the Seven Gables and dined and danced to the rhythms of a big band led by Frankie Carle, the composer of “Sunrise Serenade.” I went to the men’s room wearing my new suit. I pulled the zipper down. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t get the zipper back up again, even with soap or pencil lead applied to it. The men’s room attendant gave me two safety pins. The next day I had the zipper removed and went back to buttons.

Harold B. Yudkin
Derby, Conn.

The Fly

IT SURPRISED ME THAT ROBERT FRIEDEL’S article did not mention the Talon slide fastener. The Talon name was stamped on my memory at the early and impressionable age of five, in 1929, when my mother and I made a number of trips from Ohio to Meadville, Pennsylvania, to visit my sister there. I became aware that Talon, at least through the thirties, never used the word zipper . Since Mr. Friedel carries his narrative up to 1939, I am curious as to Talon’s place in the picture.

Robert C. Tompkins
Towson, Md.

Robert Friedel replies: Talon was indeed the most famous name in zippers for generations of Americans. The Hookless Fastener Company adopted the name for its product in 1928, when competitors began to chip away at Hookless’s hard-won markets. Talon also had the virtue of fitting easily on the pull-tab of the zipper. In 1937 the corporate name was changed to Talon, Inc. The word zipper was introduced when B. F. Goodrich began selling its galoshes by that name in 1923; the name, quickly extended to the fastener, proved far more durably popular than the boots themselves.

Talon is today part of a British conglomerate, Coats Viyella PLC, but today’s zippers are more likely to be marked YKK, the initials of the world’s biggest manufacturer of zippers, a Japanese giant that as of 1991 had 171 plants and offices in forty-two countries. YKK began challenging Talon for primacy in the American market in the 1970s, and today its Macon, Georgia, factory alone turns out several million zippers every day.

How To Freeze

I READ WITH DELIGHT RUDI VOLTI’S article “How We Got Frozen Food” (Spring 1994). In 1949 I was offered a summer job by the International Harvester Company as a home economist to travel around a specific district teaching people how to preserve foods through freezing and properly care for commercially frozen products. This turned into a year-round position, and I left teaching and became committed to corporate home economics. Later I became regional home economist of the northwest territory for the company, supervising seventeen or eighteen district home economists. We had frozen-food demonstrations in dealers’ showrooms, schools, church basements, city auditoriums—almost any place with space to seat a crowd comfortably and access to a range or a hot plate. Many, many funny episodes occurred, but overall we gave people necessary instructions and played a meaningful part in making frozen-food storage available anywhere.

Geraldine Jurisson
Elgin, Ill.

How To Freeze

I WAS A MEMBER OF A CREW THAT IN stalled a sprinkler system at General Sea Foods in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1947. Most of the time I was there they were processing a “junk” fish under four different brand names. The only difference among them was that the Birds Eye brand had to be packed a certain way. The fish was just called red fish and had usually been thrown out, since it had no market around here. Someone renamed it ocean perch and shipped it frozen to the Midwest where they could not stock it fast enough. By 1947 it was even showing up in our neck of the woods, and local fishermen had a new product they could sell thanks to the flash-freezing process.

Clement J. Hogan
Somerville, Mass.

Plane Speaking

CONCERNING THE ARTICLE “HOW THEY Got Planes on Ships” (by T. A. Heppenheimer, Summer 1994), the caption for the opening photograph is correct—but not wholly correct. Half the airplanes in the photo are not Dauntless dive bombers (made by Douglas) but are Hellcats plus one Avenger (both made by Grumman).

Warren M. Lane
Greenlawn, N.Y.