Here we go again

Anna and I have this nasty habit of telling ourselves that we won't buy anything we have to move because we are only living here in Saint Paul temporarily until I graduate from seminary.  The problem is we keep coming across stuff that is just kind of fun to have around!  For instance last weekend Anna was on a women's retreat with the women from Eden Prairie United Methodist Church where Kathy and John are members.  It was only a weekend away but I found myself missing her terribly!  All I did all weekend was wish she was home with me; that and fix the vacuum cleaner. 

The vacuum cleaner had broken its belt so I needed to go to the hardware store and get another one, and on the way to the hardware store I drove by the Goodwill Thrift Store.  I just thought, "Ah, what the heck; Anna is away on retreat and I've got some time to kill, might as well go inside and see if they have anything interesting."  So I stopped in to browse and found these sherbet bowls.  They are similar to the sherbet bowls I bought at Goodwill about two years ago, and there were plenty of them.  I got to thinking that they would make great tea-light candle holders because the pattern in the glass would reflect the light nicely as the candles burn in them.  The other sherbet bowls are packed away in storage because Anna and I wanted to unpack only the essentials since it is my last year of school, so they are not easily accessible, besides this is a different pattern that I have seen many times and I was curious about it already.  So I bought four, took them home (after I finished my mission to the hardware store and got the vacuum cleaner belt) and cleaned them up, put the tea-lights in them and got them set up for when Anna came home.  Then I fixed the vacuum cleaner and tested it to make sure it works by cleaning the living room. 

As I mentioned, I was already curious about these patterned sherbet bowls because they are similar to the Anchor Hocking Wexford ones that I had purchased previously, but the pattern in the glass is different.  I have seen plenty of these sherbet bowls before in thrift stores and antique stores, and since Anna and I have been collecting Wexford I have sort of ignored these.  But the price at Goodwill was really cheap; much less than I had seen them priced in the antique stores, so I figured I may as well pick them up and see what happens.  It also seems to me that I'm not sure if the old sherbet bowls we had when I was a child were the Wexford pattern or this one.  This prompted me to do a little research. 

What I found out is that these sherbet bowls are actually peanut butter jars.  They were sold as the peanut butter jars for the "Big-Top" peanut butter brand, and people were encouraged to keep the jars as dishes when  the peanut butter was gone, and of course to buy more peanut butter so that you could build a whole set of dishes.  Replacements Ltd, even lists these sherbet bowls with "Big-Top" as the manufacturer and Peanut Butter as the pattern, but that isn't really the whole story.  Since "Big-Top" is a brand of peanut butter they had the jars/dishes made by the Hazel-Atlas glass company in Wheeling, Virginia.  These bowls were made for "Big-Top" in what Hazel-Atlas called the "Gothic" pattern, but if you look on the Replacements, Ltd. web site you will discover that they have no entry called "Gothic" under the Hazel-Atlas brand name, so the pattern apparently was never released elsewhere. 

The pattern was discontinued in 1957 when Hazel-Atlas was taken over by the Continental Canning Company.  Why would Continental Can want Hazel-Atlas?  Well, you are probably familiar with Atlas canning jars, and Hazel-Atlas was the manufacturer of those.  Unfortunately, the Hazel-Atlas company didn't survive this takeover and the company went out of business in 1964.  Atlas brand canning jars are now produced by the Jarden corporation in New York.

Will we now collect the "Big-Top" peanut butter pattern?  I don't think so, we have too much Wexford as it is, but it is kind of fun to know the history of these things.  The more I think about it, the more I think we DID have these sherbet bowls when I was a kid in New Jersey, but I wonder if they came from my grandmother's house, because the pattern was discontinued in 1957 and I was born in 1958, and I don't think my parents stock-piled peanut butter just to get the dishes.  It is possible that they bought enough peanut butter to make a set, though, since they were married in 1955, they would have had two years to eat enough peanut butter to collect a set of dishes.  Did we have BOTH patterns, the Wexford and the Peanut Butter?  Anything is possible; maybe my parents collected the peanut butter glasses and the Wexford came from grandma's house.  I don't remember.  As far as these sherbet bowls go, Anna was delighted with them and enjoyed seeing the tea-lights sparkle in them just as much as I hoped she would.  After the tea-lights had burned out she turned to me and said, "I hope you don't mind, but I'll probably go ahead and use those as sherbet bowls."  Ah, sherbet; how romantic!  Blogged by Don