Elbow Grease.

Every neighborhood has a worst house. 
It's usually mine.

When I was a boy, living under the leaky roof of my mother and father's tilted little house in Yonkers, New York, abutting the Bronx border, it was a very different world.

If someone wanted to watch TV, you had to warm up the black-and-white set. If they wanted to change channels, they had to leave their seat to turn the dial. Or yell at me to do it. And there were only seven channels, counting Channel 13 which was public television and no one watched.

No one reads John O'Hara today. 
They should.

Likewise the phone. 

We had phone exchanges then, like John O'Hara's "Butterfield 8," or "University 7," or "Yonkers 4." And we dialed the phone. And the phone was attached to the wall. And people used it to talk to other people. Not at all like we use phones today.

Most people don't know this anymore, but dialing was time-consuming. In fact, the original area codes were assigned to American cities based on their populations. New York, then as now was the biggest city. So it was easiest to dial. 2-1-2, five clicks. LA and Chicago were next, so, six clicks, 2-1-3 or 3-1-2.  Dallas, 2-1-4, seven clicks. Detroit 3-1-3, also seven clicks.
That's how it worked.

An early picture of my mother.
She carried a big stick. She didn't speak softly.

The thing I remember most about the old days is the thing I still use. Sure as shootin', my mother the harridan, wasn't Dutch, but she kept a spic-and-span house thanks to her propensity to kick the crap out of me and my older brother, Fred. We waxed the floors, mopped the floors, scrubbed the floors on our hands and knees and then scrubbed clean the scrub brushes.

I spent hours buffing floors.
I was full-time with parquet.

I was particularly expert at doing the dishes. I worked as a professional dishwasher one summer, but they fired me for being too fast. I made everyone else look bad. 

The thing I was best at, still am, is what in commercials they might have called "stubborn, baked-in stains." I took the word stubborn as a throw down. I'm stubbornerer than anyone, with the possible exception of Rich Siegel, of Round Seventeen fame.

My mother under the sink had an array of pads and rags and cleaners. Some of those were elite. Reserved for a certain kind of pot or pan. Some were the infantry of her OCD kitchen, the cannon fodder of her cleansing arsenal. They'd sacrifice their lives to keep her at a distance.

The operative words in all this scouring were "elbow grease." You had to apply elbow grease. If after ten minutes of using a scouring steel pad the size of a studio apartment, a pad that could take the varnish off of a vault at Fort Knox, the stain was still there, guess what? You had to use more elbow grease. I remember as a 10-year-old having tennis elbow induced by Farberware.

All this has an advertising point.

I wonder if elbow grease has disappeared from advertising. 

If scrubbing the scrubbed parts has vanished. Of standing there over the guilty pot and working it until it gleams is a thing of the past. It ain't in scope. And we'll make 27 more of 'em tomorrow.

My mother grew up poor during the Depression. On more than one occasion she came home from school to find their furniture out on her West Philadelphia street. The Freedmans were evicted with no place to go.

Wandering Jews is not news.

Even when my father started making money, she never threw anything out. She darned socks. Patched blue jeans. Handed-down hand-me-downs. 92% of our glasses and dishes were from gas station give-aways. 

Once we let the bananas go bad and she served us banana sandwiches. On stale bread. She refused to throw anything out.

You can sure as hell bet she'd have thrown me out for not getting the pan clean quicker than she'd toss the pan. I was easier to replace, even if it meant sleeping with my father. So, I scrubbed.

I'm not sure that advertising is better off today when we regard it as disposable and transitory. Not as permanent as my mother's kitchen gear. I'm not sure we wouldn't be better off working until the work was done. Until the puzzle was solved, until the stain was eradicated.

This post is not about my mother or pots and pans, of course. It's about elbow grease. An orientation to make things work and make things last. It's an old idea. Outdated. Foolish as a dinosaur and dumb. Especially when you can just get a new "anything" for 79-cents, less if you give them your cell-number. Then they'll give you 10% off your first ungratifying purchase.

These days, five years after being canned from Ogilvy for, in the asinine words of their ageist CEO Mark Read, harkening back to the 80s. I'm still harkening back. I'm busier than ever, probably making more money than all of Ogilvy because I harken back to my mother's kitchen. 

And I muster up my elbow grease.

And work.