Dry Cleaner Bags
In Ladies Room, Sally plays with a dry cleaner bag and Betty scolds her, not for unsafe play, but for (presumably) dumping Mommy’s dry cleaning on the floor. Ho ho, funny! We’re so safe with our kids nowadays and back then they weren’t. It kinda stuck in my craw, then, because I remember that, only five years later, my mother was warning me that dry cleaner bags were unsafe.
Stuck in my craw but then I forgot it, until Roberta brought it up in conversation. So I looked it up (emphasis added).
The Consumer Product Safety Commission has duly noted that a reminder of this type [about the danger of dry cleaning bags] is in order since two or three new generations of American parents have appeared since the late 1950s when dry cleaner bag suffocation deaths first became a “cause celebre.” The danger of misuse of ultra-thin dry cleaner bags has probably become as much a part of American child safety folklore as the proverbial warning to children not to touch a hot stove. Even so, it is best to take nothing for granted where the safety of our children is concerned so let’s make sure those warnings are on all dry cleaner bags – education is still the answer here!
In the late 1950s The Society of the Plastics Industry, Inc. (SPI) sponsored an intensive nation-wide educational program to inform the public that ultra-thin plastic bags, particularly the type used for packaging by dry cleaners, were made for one-time use only and should not be reused in ways that might present a hazard to children. This program, which employed mass media facilities, the distribution of pamphlets and, most importantly, labeling of dry cleaner bags, was prepared and conducted in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now the Department of Health and Human Services); the American Academy of Pediatrics; the American Academy of General Practice; the National Safety Council; and the National Institute of Dry Cleaning.
You know, it’s very rare to find a full-blown, hardcore anachronism on Mad Men, so I’m kinda proud of myself.
July 19th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
My husband was born in 1952 and I was telling him about the scene, which I find very funny (sorry about that) and he said he can remember wearing dry cleaning bags as a kid, too. He was from a very tiny town so I don’t know if all dry cleaners had warning signs on the bags by 1960 or not. I don’t think I ever played with them or not but a hazardous thing I do remember doing as a kid is standing up between my parents in the front seat of the car! Yes, standing. Yikes! It’s amazing that those of us born in the 50’s are still around with all the very unsafe things we did as kids.
July 19th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Does anyone know if Mad Men season 2 is going to be available on itunes?
July 19th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
I clearly remember playing with dry cleaning bags in the early sixties. In fact, one year – I think I was 9 or 10 – I was a “dry cleaning bag” for Halloween! It was the time when you would grab what was around and make a costume – my sister wore a sheet and she was a ghost. Ahhh, the simplicities of life back then.
July 19th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
Must be an American item, never saw one while growing up in France.
July 19th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Simone, we haven’t heard either way yet.
July 20th, 2008 at 10:07 am
I grew up in the seventies and parents were a lot less omni-present back then. At least that was my experience and what I witnessed around me. In summer, it was pretty common for kids to loose themselves on the world in the morning and not be seen at home until the streetlights came on.
I had to call home when I went to a new house to play, but that was a formality.
I don’t think parents worried about the day to day risks their children could potentially face, the world wasn’t childproofed. My elementary school’s playground had gravel, and I remember a kid falling flat on his face and spitting out a bloody mouthful of that gravel.
I would go to Northern MN on vacation and climb some serious rocks. One summer I spent climbing all over an abandoned, or at least temporarily unused, bulldozer. We went into neighbor’s houses without thinking about it.
While we did this, the adults inhabited their own world. The dry cleaning bag scene seems about right even for a childhood that took place in the next decade. If adults were together and talking, they didn’t really want to be disturbed, and they didn’t really believe a scenario where a child could smother in front of them.
My grandmother, who was a big presence in my childhood, regularly tells me how she watched me like a hawk, and seems to feel no sense of irony about then following up this observation with a story about one of the times I got lost, or got into some sort of mischief because, well, the supervision wasn’t really there. I have no doubt she loved me then and loves me now, but when she tells me she watched me like a hawk, I want to paraphrase Inigo Montoya in Princess Bride: You keep using that phrase. I do not think it means, what you think it means.
Today it’s unimaginable for most parents not to micromanage the the lives of their children. They’re more likely to be actively looking for dangers, predators, sharp edges, and the hazards of dry cleaner bags.
In Marriage of Figaro, we see a child’s birthday party that’s really two parties. The children are there, orbiting about the adult sphere, but only noticed when they run in the house or make too much noise. It’s clear that the children, being able to mimic the adults, are more aware of the adult world than vice versa.
I’m not making a judgment either way, merely saying that the things people take as commonsense parenting now were not considered that way in the past, and might not be in the future. While parents will always worry about their children, many of the things we consider to be requirements of good parenting are recent constructs.
Also, the previous episode is all about how people are being told that smoking is dangerous, and yet we see no real change in behavior yet, because people really, really liked to smoke. With their pregnant friends. While their children juggled knives.
July 20th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Right, kids really occupied another world. I have a massive scar on my right hand from playing unsupervised on a construction site with a group of neighborhood kids; that was 1966.
All I’m saying is, the specific alarm about dry cleaner bags started in the late 50s, and was all over the media. So for Sally to stand right in front of her mother and Betty to be oblivious is implausible.
July 20th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Betty and Francine. Just wanted to point out that it isn’t Betty-specific.
I’m with Deb; I think it’s a goof. Our mom said so when I first told her about the scene last year, that they knew better back then.
But the kids in a separate orbit is a way cool conversation.
July 20th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
I can accept it as a goof.
July 21st, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Me too, and good catch, Deborah. I was born in 1968, so by the mid-70s, the dangers of the dry-cleaning bag rhetoric was pure propaganda by that point!
The kids sphere versus the adults sphere is very interesting – it’s true, back then we as kids basically left the house in the morning and stayed out all day, unsupervised, with a quick stop for lunch, until being called for dinner. I can’t imagine that happening these days.
Good points, Glass Darkly, about the present-day parenting standards being relatively recent developments – I suppose there was an evolution of sorts, though for better or worse, who knows. Mostly for better, of course, but that’s a whole other thread, I’m sure.
July 21st, 2008 at 10:49 pm
A good part of my childhood was spent trekking to the store on behalf of my mother or grandmother so I could get them cigarettes. Like THAT would fly today.
January 5th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
Sorry, but I think I remember playing with dry cleaner bags at some point in my early childhood. (Born in 1950)
My mother was very child-centered (although we did “go out and play” for hours at a time unsupervised, and I also remember playing with the stove in one friend’s house (neat curved burns from putting my hand on an electric burner.)