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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Bad odor used to be part of life It happened sometime in the early 1970s. A young couple settled into their seats in a large airliner and waited for their flight to get underway. They noticed that several of their fellow passengers were staring at them and whispering comments to other travelers. There was a hushed conference among the stewardesses at the galley at the rear of the plane, then one went forward to the cockpit area, careful to avert her gaze from the couple. She opened the door to the flight deck and disappeared inside. Minutes passed, then the door opened and out came the captain, the co-pilot, and the engineer, with the head stewardess behind them. The parade stopped at the seats occupied by the couple. The captain told the pair that they would have to return to the concourse. They got up and followed him to the terminal, where the money for their tickets was returned. What was the problem? The pair had strong, even overwhelming, body odor. Since then, I've never read of a similar situation of passengers being refunded their money because of old-fashioned B.O. But it could happen. As recently as 70 years ago, few people used deodorant, especially blue-collar workers, and the habit of daily bathing was not widely practiced. In fact, in the early years of this century, both in cities and in rural areas, times were so tough that the women had to make their own soap. In the back yard of one of the places we rented in the 1930s, there was a huge iron pot in which my mother made lye soap, using a wood fire to heat it. When the batch was finished, she took a long-bladed knife and sawed the yellow material into bars about 6 inches long and 3 inches wide. The lye soap was only used for boiling clothes _ it was too strong for bathing. Anyone born before this century knew all about bad smells, because the things that caused them were all around people. Farmers slaughtered animals right on the farm. Hog farms were notorious for their odors. Blacksmiths' shops produced their own set of smells. My wife, Nora, and I are inveterate readers, and like most people, our reading tastes have changed over the years. These days, we read a lot of history, because good history writers can make the past come alive. Take smell, for example. Being born and raised in this century, most of us are totally unaware of how smelly the world used to be. You can make a case that true civilization did not arrive in America and in Europe until the twin innovations of bathtubs and deodorant. Making a living before that was mostly smelly work. Last week, Nora was reading, "The First Salute," a Pulitzer-prize-winning history by Barbara Tuchman (Knopf, 1988) about how America was able to win the Revolutionary War by trading with the Dutch and French in the West Indies in the South Atlantic. Tuchman wrote about "the foul conditions on a sailing vessel with its reek of rotten meat and putrefied cheese, damp clothes, bilge water. Open vats of urine in which the men were instructed to relieve themselves, on the theory that it would be used to retard fire, plus the smell of five or six hundred unwashed bodies packed for sleep in their hammocks below deck. The stench of a ship wafted by an inshore breeze could often tell of its approach before it reached port." The same type of smell was common in the wagon trains that brought people out to settle the West in the last century. While the train might stop for two or three days at a major stream to allow washing of clothes and bodies, a day or two of further walking alongside a wagon on a dusty trail would erase all the cleansing effects. A little later, when packs of men from the East came to "hunt" the buffalo, their real goal was to wipe out what they considered "nuisance animals." Books about the buffalo hunts are illustrated with pictures of railheads, such as Dodge City, Kansas, where buffalo bones were piled as high as 30 feet, and other piles of buffalo pelts were almost as tall. Can you imagine the stench of such piles that must have smelled for miles? CORRECTION : In last week's column about George Foreman, I made the mistake of relying on my memory for the last name of the director of the Grants Pass Job Corps. He was Jim Stoop, and not the name I called him. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Prime Times front page Mail Tribune front page Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA