Slide Soap

Lava is a heavy-duty hand cleaner in soap bar developed in 1893 by the William Waltke Company of St. Louis, Missouri. Procter & Gamble acquired the Lava and Oxydol brands in 1927. In 1995, P&G sold the Lava brand to the Block Drug Company, a pharmaceutical company based in Jersey City, New Jersey, that specialized in dental care products. Its two most popular products included Polident denture cleanser and Poli-Grip denture adhesive. By 1999, the WD-40 Company bought the Lava brand from Block Drug.

Unlike typical soap bars, Lava contained ground pumice, which gave the soap its name. The soap and pumice combination is intended to scour tar, engine grease, paint, dirt, grime, filth, and similar substances from the skin. The original beige-colored Lava bar soap, without moisturizers, is no longer manufactured.

Note: The word lava comes from Italian and is likely derived from the Latin word labes, which typically refers to a disaster, downfall, landslip, or slide.

Acting for Beans

Below are four Hollywood personalities (and one dummy) who served as spokespersons for four popular coffee brands from the 1930s through the 1970s.

Virginia Christine

San Francisco's Pioneer Steam Coffee and Spice Mills was the original name behind Folgers of 1850. Employed as a teenager, James A. Folger eventually became a full partner in the company by 1865. By 1972, Folger bought out the partners and renamed the company, J.A. Folger & Co. Skipping ahead about a century, supporting actress Virginia Christine played "Mrs. Olson," a Swedish neighbor who recommended a cup of Folgers coffee as a break from the character's hectic day in television commercials. Beginning in 1965, she played the character for twenty-one years. In 1971, Christine's hometown of Stanton, Iowa, honored her by transforming the city water tower to resemble a giant Swedish-style coffee pot.

Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy

Chase & Sanborn Coffee was created by the coffee roasting and tea and coffee importing company of the same name in 1864 in Boston, Massachusetts. Named for Caleb Chase (1831-1908) and James Sanborn (1835-1903). They were the first to sell ground coffee in sealed cans. When Standard Brands was formed in 1929, it acquired Chase & Sanborn until 1981 when the company merged into Nabisco. Nabisco sold Chase & Sanborn to Colombian, Alberto Duque in 1982. The Chase & Sanborn Hour/Program was a radio variety show that featured ventriloquist pioneer Edgar Bergen and sidekick Charlie McCarthy. Though their contract was not renewed after a decade on the program, their radio career continued until 1956 before breaking into television.

Margaret Hamilton
Introduced in 1892 by wholesale grocer Joel Cheek, Maxwell House Coffee was named in honor of the Maxwell House Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, its first major customer. The blended coffee was so well-received, it became the hotel's house brew. In 1915, Cheek and Partner began advertising with the now-famous "Good to the last drop" slogan. Along this timeline, Maxwell House introduced its iconic coffee cans to seal in freshness. A 1970s campaign for Maxwell House featured actress Margaret Hamilton, famous for her role in the original, The Wizard of Oz. She played Cora, the general store owner who proudly announced that Maxwell House was the only brand she sold. 

John Zaremba
Hills Bros. has its origins with the two sons of a Maine shipbuilder, Austin Hills and Reuben Hills, aka R.J. Hills. In 1898, Edward Norton, of New York, used his United States patent on a vacuum process for canning foods, which was subsequently applied to coffee. By 1900, Hills Brothers of San Francisco were the first to pack roast coffee in vacuum-sealed cans. Late in his career, character actor John Zaremba was the primary spokesperson for Hills Bros. in the 1970s and 1980s. His character was a fictional, senior globe-hoping coffee bean buyer, hardly recognizable to those who knew him from the 1950s. But the voice was unmistakable. Zaremba was a busy actor, noted for science fiction films, but television made up the bulk of his career with numerous supporting roles. He may be best remembered as a doctor in the 1960s series, Ben Casey, and for thirty episodes as a scientist on Time Tunnel.