[Magdalen] If's Started.

[Jay Weigel]

One of our neighbors in Madison went to Illinois regularly to visit family,
and took orders around the neighborhood for margarine which she brought
back in the trunk of her car. Nobody thought anything of it.

There's a famous story from the 1960s of the loudest anti-margarine mouth
in the Wisconsin legislature, a fellow by the name of Sen. Gordon Roseleip
(known irreverently on campus as "Fatlip") who boasted that he could
*always* tell margarine from butter. He agreed to prove this publicly with
a taste test involving saltine crackers spread with, respectively, butter,
margarine, and something called "butterine" which was a combination of the
two. On tasting the first, he announced "that's margarine." The second, he
said, was butterine. When he tasted the third, he announced triumphantly,
"THAT is butter." The labels were then turned over.  The first was
butterine. The second was butter. The third was margarine. He never lived
it down. The law allowing colored margarine to be sold was passed not too
long after that.

On Friday, July 3, 2015, Cantor03--- via Magdalen <magdalen at herberthouse.org>
wrote:

>
> It's the USA 3 day Independence celebration.
>
>
> My dogs have started going crazy with the bangs and booms, and we  have
> it now for a full three days this year.  There will be the  development's
> fireworks
> tomorrow night, but the current noise is from mostly young boys and  their
> boyish fathers who get great delight from the noise.
>
> I'm sure, as usual, there will be a certain percentage of them who get
> some
> trauma from the fireworks.
>
> I remember in the olden days enduring far less of this kind of racket
> because fireworks were not sold in either Wisconsin or Minnesota.
> Those who wanted them had to pick them up in Iowa, Illinois, and
> Michigan, and bring them back like contraband in the trunk.
>
> And that reminds me of a kind of similar contraband running that
> was the rule for the many years (late 1940's and 1950's) against the
> usage/buying/selling yellow margarine.  Friends and relatives  would
> purchase, say, 100 pounds of colored margarine in Illinois, and
> then distribute it in my hometown 450 miles north.  It was all very  hush-
> hush, especially since my father was an elected official (county
> attorney).
> Mother had a cool basement room where our margarine stash was
> kept under lock and key and wrapped under a tarp.
>
> The use of margarine was not for nutritional purposes or better taste,  but
> rather because it was MUCH cheaper than butter at the time.
>
>
>
> David Strang.
>