By Wesley Harris
“What fancies we weave, what dreams we dream over a piece of homely old china!”—Alice Morse Earle
A kitchen cabinet in our home is full of old glassware we rarely use. With a second cabinet full of larger beverage containers—insulated cups, plasticware, fruit jars, and two full sets of nicer drinking glasses—there’s no need.
The seldom-opened cabinet contains all manner of glassware my grandmother collected through 84 years of life. No, it’s not some priceless collection of princely crystal. Rather, it’s a hodgepodge of jars-turned-drinking-glasses and cheap, mass-produced glass from the Great Depression to the 1960s.
My grandmother’s fine china came from an oatmeal box.
Most of Grandmother’s glassware was collected as purchase incentives. Buy a big box of oatmeal and you might find a juice glass buried deep in the oats; the next time, perhaps a coaster or saucer or sherbet bowl. She wasn’t about to buy a set of dishes as she raised three kids alone or later in life when Social Security only went so far.
I remember the tiny oatmeal box juice glass of orange juice Grandmother poured when I had breakfast after an overnight stay. She offered a big glass of milk drawn from her own cow, but I always passed. I believe it was the smell of fermenting buttermilk in the kitchen churn that turned off my interest in milk.
Instead, I wanted orange juice in that big glass. I had to grow up to realize little cost came with those gallons of milk, but orange juice was an expensive luxury.
Depression glass was cheap mass-produced glass made during the Great Depression of the 1930s. A type of pressed glass of humble origin, depression glass came in a variety of appealing patterns, shapes, and colors. Manufactured in large sets between 1920 and 1940, it was inexpensively produced by several companies like Anchor Hocking, the maker of tons of “oatmeal” glass.
For decades, some companies placed a glass item in with the goods to encourage purchases. Quaker Oats bought trainloads of glass to include with its product. Duz Detergent by Proctor & Gamble offered an array of tableware one piece at a time. Each time a box was purchased, a hand dug dig into the soap to retrieve a coffee cup or a soup bowl.
Other enterprises got in on the promotional gimmick. Movie theatres gave glassware or dishes away at the door; grocery store chains provided a single dish weekly to get shoppers in the door. Larger pieces like platters or gravy bowls could be purchased to round out a complete table
setting. I remember my mother getting the weekly free dish at the Piggly Wiggly, but she never bought the more expensive pieces.
These low-cost mass production items have become modern-day collectibles. The attraction lies in the humble beginnings of the glassware. It was given away, meaning much of it was discarded in more prosperous times. Some of the draw is nostalgic charm. Items of an earlier time like butter dishes, lemon squeezers, and juice glasses reflect memories of family, of times when penny-pinching frugality was the norm, of gatherings around the dinner table.
I collect “old stuff” but not glassware or pottery and the like. Never had an interest. But when I open that cabinet, I don’t see a bunch of glass.
I see my grandmother.
