Finding my dad in a resale shop
It wasn’t on my wish list. But there it was, on display in all its vintage glory, set on a table among silver tree toppers and Santa mugs: cups and saucers, dinner plates, dessert cups, even a creamer and sugar bowl. I had poked my head in the resale shop to look for gently worn toddler jeans, but then stumbled onto a treasure.
Tied to an ochre cup was this handmade tag with a smiley sign: How happy are these dishes? So colorful! And then the words: Hazel Atlas.
I turned over each plate to discover a rainbow: butter yellow, chartreuse, forest green and coral and sky blue. The names were mine, but I imagine the marketing department of Hazel Atlas would have approved.
My nearly 70-year-old brain flashed synapses of recognition and then it hit me: my dad actually worked for this company. A chemical engineer with a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon, my dad’s resume was long at a time when workers stuck with the same company for most of their careers. Struggling with manic depression, he moved from job to job like a marker on a Monopoly board. He made bombs during the Viet Nam era at the Joliet Arsenal, and SOS pads at Miles Labs. But judging by the piles of dishes stacked in our pantry, he had a much longer tenure at Hazel Atlas Glass.
My three brothers and sister ate my mom’s Sunday roast beef from Hazel Atlas plates with scalloped pink edges. Matching pink mugs held a steaming cup of courage before my dad left for a job he felt certain to fail. On weekends we scooped vanilla ice cream topped with chocolate drizzle in matching pink bowls. And those bowls were big!
As a chemical engineer, my dad might have designed the mold that made the plates. Or calculated settings on an assembly line. Or checked the oxygen and oxygen tanks to ensure the line would run smoothly. He worked at a sprawling manufacturing site in Plainfield, Illinois, 30 acres large with its own railroad track to ship goods around the Midwest.
Born in a Clarksburg, West Virginia factory in 1902, Hazel Atlas was once the country’s largest glassware manufacturer. The set I purchased was a pattern called Platonize Ovid, dinnerware that began as milk glass but gradually became more opaque and featured colors.
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When I checked out, the cashier gently packed each piece in its own brown bag. Like memories, these dishes would need tender care ---washing by hand was suggested by a site selling vintage ware. My dad died at the age of 61 in an Illinois veterans’ hospital, 24 years ago today and two years before my youngest child was born. I never got to say good-bye since I was living in Boston at the time. When I reached his bedside he was already in a coma. Several days later, my siblings and I let him go when his systems had shut down like lights in a theater slowly turning dark.
Sometimes we need sensory reminders to awaken memories. In the Remembrance of Things Past, French author Marcel Proust famously used the dipping of madeleines in tea to unlock memories. For months after our dad’s death, my sister Eileen did not clean off the headrest on my dad’s recliner since its fibers held the unmistakable scent of Brylcreem. She was having a madeleine moment.
That evening I packed up my set of Costco dishes and replaced them with my new old set of dishware.
Just before dinner, I poured some fizzy water into a Hazel Atlas goblet the color of mulled Christmas wine. When I was finished, I washed the glass by hand, dried it with my softest kitchen towel, and carefully set it in my cupboard.
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