Kevin Curran recently emailed me:
"Gianni, I have two jpegs of the orange/amber plexi lighter that Phil was trying to sell by the car trunk during our B'ham days. I hope that you can post them to the site. I should probably write something about them but I am drawing a blank. Any ideas?"
He told me it is the only thing of Phil's aside from letters he still possesses. He sent along a couple of photos...
As it turns out, when I first met Phil, he was hawking these plastic lighters. . .he had literally cases of them. He would sell them to you for a buck (I think it was) and you could easily sell them again for $2.50 or $3. I bought a bunch from him, sold them, and then bought more. . .but I had saturated my market. No one I knew needed another Paramount Plastics lighter. Over the years, the couple dozen I had drifted away. And now, Kevin turns up with one he got from Phil. And it sounds like Phil was still trying to unload them at college four or five years later!
I'm sure the K sisters can fill in this part of the story--but I vaguely remember this. Phil's dad designed, or bought the design, for a lucite lighter. This was probably about 1968. Lucite was still a mysterious and kind of weird material. The lighters looked cool. . .you could see the entire works inside. I seem to recall, however, they weren't exactly stellar performers in the flamethrowing arena. They emitted a pretty anemic little flare of light, and since they had no chimney, the faintest riffle of a wind would blow it out. But they made up for all that in cool.
Unfortunately, I believe the lighter was a commercial flop (?), and lord knows how many were left in boxes or crates at Paramount Plastics. In any case, for a period of at least five years, I remember Phil having tons of these around. After I hadn't thought about them for thirty years, here they are once again. I wouldn't be surprised if someone in the family doesn't have a box or two squirreled away somewhere. . .
---o0o---
6 comments:
Wow, great post, Jack and thanks for getting the pics up too. I need to clarify one thing though. The only Phil memento in my possession is the lighter. Phil wrote me a couple of cards as he traveled and perhaps one letter before he left London, but they are all long gone.
Kevin & Jack,
Thanks for the pics of the lighter and your remembrances, and for keeping this blog fresh. That was just like Phil to be enterprising. I remember he sold some other "stuff", as well, although not exactly legal. Someplace in our boxes and suitcases full of family memorabilia I have the original drawing specs for the lighter. I am foggy on whether my dad designed it, although I think he just manufactured it. I still have a couple of them stashed away, and my husband actually tried to use one once but they didn't work very well for a number of reasons; the mechanism for making the spark was sticky, there was no protection from the wind, not to mention the fluid slowly leaked out onto your pants pocket. They certainly were about the coolest looking thing, though.
BTW, Kev, still waiting for some more memories. :)
Becky, I have some memories that I am stewing over because they include some of the enterprises you suggest in your note. I wonder how frank to get here even though the statue of limitations have lapsed in every instance.
the statue "has" lapsed, dagnabbit.
It was so nice to see another post. Not a day goes by when I don’t think of Phil, but this brought up a subject that I knew very little about and have very little memory of. The fact that he was selling the lighters was kept hush-hush in our family and I didn’t know the extent to which he was selling the lighters until I read this. My vague memory is an impression, really, and had you not brought it up, I don’t think I would have remembered it at all. My impression -- and I know that memory tends to distort reality -- but my impression was that I may have asked Philip what he was doing with the lighters, and he may have told me that he was selling them. I may have seemed a little annoyed or perturbed -- don’t ask me why; maybe the lighters were like a sacred thing in our house -- but I know that I never heard anything about it again. He may have tried to keep it from me because of my reaction, or maybe the whole family, I don’t know. Becky, did you know he was selling the lighters?
I don’t know about having boxes of them. I think each one of us probably has at least one lighter. I think I have a blue one somewhere. Remember they came in different colors? I don’t know what I thought we were saving them for but I know that I did not look favorably upon him selling them. Maybe because he wasn’t sharing the profits? He saw something in those lighters, knew it would be a hot item, and his friends could also make money. He was entrepreneurial. Thanks for the post, Jack and Kevin.
Kevin, I meant to comment earlier but for some reason my comment window wasn't opening up. Frustrating! It's working today, so I will tell you not to worry about making any references to those earlier nefarious enterprises. Everyone who could be hurt by it is not reading, and you're right, the statute has long expired. Philip was no stranger to danger. Did I ask you guys if he ever told you about his encounter with the cab driver he ditched without paying?
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