02nd May 2008
When it rains, it pours…
For years as a child, I didn’t really understand the Morton Salt slogan, “When it rains, it pours.” I thought it was a strange reference to the familiar idiom: after a long spell of nothing happening, then everything happens at once. What this had to do with table salt, who knows.
However, looking at some of their old ads today made me realize they were saying “when it’s raining outside [or just humid], your Morton Salt will still pour from the shaker.” That was one of those “OHHHHhhhh…” moments… followed closely by a “well, duh” moment.
One of their 1926 ads (see left) brought home another weird point: goiters. Most children who manage to stay awake through elementary school health class learn that very small quantities of iodine are vital to the health of the thyroid gland; without it, it will swell and you’ll have a big goiter in your neck. To the modern student, this is weird and strange. But in the 1920’s, goiters were a lot more common, and Morton’s inclusion of iodine was a pretty good innovation.
(On a related note, I always considered gout to be one of those diseases gone by the wayside, back in the age of Ben Franklin — but a few guys in the factory here have it. Weird!)
We’ll probably be visiting Chicago in the next couple months, and we’ll get to drive by the big MORTON SALT factory with the famous girl-under-umbrella spilling her salt all over the place. Poor kid, she’ll get home and Mother will be furious that the salt is all gone and now the family will all get goiters because the iodized salt is all over the street…
I never realized that was what the slogan was about. Of course, I don’t know why you would worry about salt getting sticky/clumpy in wet weather. It seems like NaCl is so water-soluble that it just dissolves instantly in any moisture.