I haven’t been around quite that long, but I have been here since the Great Depression, through wars, peace time, good times, crazy times and on to a world where new technology grows faster than grassburrs. One morning last week I began noticing things that are now so common we take them for granted but which didn’t exist in my early years. Such things as microwaves, drip coffee makers, band aids, facial tissue, frozen dinners, car heaters and air conditioners, weatherized homes, shopping malls, electric razors and hair dryers, contact lenses, white-out, and the list continues.

How happy this kid with the perpetually skinned knees would have been with a band aid, even colored ones, much prettier than peach-seed like scabs. It was in 1920 that Earle Dickson invented the little sticky patches(but later than that when they found the Fitzgerald medicine chest). His newly-wed Josephine was forever cutting her finger, or wounding herself in some fashion in the unfamiliar chores of home keeping. Every day when he got home from work she would need a bandage or two—but they kept slipping no matter how securely and lovingly he applied them.

So Earle, driven by necessity, sat down at the kitchen table, spread out a length of surgical tape, sticky side up, and some gauze. He folded the gauze into a narrow strip and placed it down the middle of the tape. Then covering the whole thing with crinoline, he rolled it up tight. Now, when he got home, he merely cut the necessary length for Josephine’s wounds and-- Presto! Band-aid. Luckily, Earle worked for Johnson and Johnson Company. He didn’t have to go far to find a market.

I hesitate to mention the unmentionable, but toilet paper did replace Sears catalogue in the outhouse and the spick and span indoor bathrooms in the cities in the 1920s. That was a difficult product to sell. As long as privies were the norm, and they were in rural America all through the Depression years and into the 1940s, few people were willing to spend money on "medicated paper," as the stuff was called. Even when indoor plumbing became common, there was the embarrassing moment when the shopper had to ask the grocer for a package of that unmentionable tissue. It was usually kept hidden under the counter in packages, not rolls.

Advertising for toilet tissue was not an acceptable thing to do in most papers and magazines for quite some time. Then Scott Paper Company hit upon a neat phrase, "Just ask for Scott’s tissues." Even pictures of rolls—another new idea, those rolls—were soon accepted. A school teacher’s practice of tearing off squares for children’s noses led to Scott Tissue Towels.

Yes, it happened in the kitchen, so a woman invented the drip coffee-maker. Melitta Bentz invented it and showed it at the fair. Tired of tying coffee grounds in cloth bags, she used blotter paper from her son’s schoolbook and sticking it into the bottom of a brass pot that she had poked full of holes, put in the coffee and poured boiling water over it. It made much better coffee. Her husband hired a tinsmith to make pots based on her idea and they sold 1,200 coffee makers at the fair. After that they were off and dripping.

Liquid Paper Company had its beginnings in Dallas, Texas where a typist for Texas Bank and Trust, Bette Claire Nesmith, mixed tempera waterbase paint with water to cover her typing mistakes. Soon everyone in the office was borrowing her stuff. She played with the mixture, perfecting it before applying for a patent in 1956. First she offered her idea to IBM, but they rejected it, so she turned her garage into a bottling company and began with selling about 100 bottles per month. She was fired from her job. In 1968 Liquid Paper Co. sold more than 10,000 bottles a day and grossed more than a million dollars.