Finally got the stray spayed. Now she just acts like a stealthy hunter
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My dad used Old Spice.
Not sure I am seeing this; 
or should I say smelling this?
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So did mine. And I’m in my seventies.
Old Spice is so old it’s about time it was fashionable again. If only ironically.
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Though there’s at least a 20 year difference in our ages, our dad’s were likely about the same age. Personally, I like the scent of Old Spice. Reminds me of the days when I felt secure and cared for.
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Wait…has Old Spice ever not been fashionable?
I don’t remember there ever being an era where they were not running prominent ad campaigns…the kind that cost a lot of money and say “we are jockeying for a top market share” not “we are just hanging on here.”
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And mine.
I still have a bottle that I occasionally take a nostagia laden wiff of. Its amazing how a scent can bring back a flood of memories. 
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Before the 1960s working men laboured and sweated - and generally only bathed once a week. Nobody owned a shower. There was clearly a market (mostly amongst the women who lived with them) for something that would make them smell better.
The trouble was, men were manly, and perfume was effeminate. Going to the pub wearing cologne was liable to get your teeth punched out. The fraagrance marketing people needed another strategy.
Their answer was after-shave lotion. Yes, it smelled good - but it was also painful. It supposedly tightened the skin after shaving, thus preventing small infections, and closing little nicks. To do this, it contained astringets and irritants, and it stung like hell - but that was OK, because as long as it hurt, it was manly.
Men’s cologne (the stuff that doesn’t hurt) didn’t come along until the sixties and seventies. Since then, it’s developed into “fragrance” - but even now, the manufacturers don’t dare call the men’s product “scent” or “perfume”.
I haven’t used Old Spice since the 1960s - but back then, it felt like someone set your face on fire.
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My dad had to bathe in a washtub behind the wood burning stove. It’s not surprising they didn’t bathe every day. Hauling in and heating up the water then dumping it bucket by bucket back outside had to be an incredible chore especially in the winter.
And with no AC, you were going to sweat all night in the summer anyway.
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My view of the world is so skewed by growing up in California. In the 1960s about 40,000 people lived in this valley, and every one of them owned a shower because there was not a single house that was more than ten years old. Looking with logic I can see that in most places a shower would be something that had to be slowly retrofitted into houses before it became commonplace, but experientially it is hard for me to grasp.
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To be clear, when my dad was bathing behind the wood stove, it was around 1928 and in a farmhouse (if you could call it that) surrounded by farm land. The nearest town was 30 miles away. The only water was from the well outside the house. The outhouse was never considered a bathroom.
By 1960, he had married, had 3 kids and built a nice brick home with all the amenities. He lived in Mendocino for a few years then back to Arkansas and married my mother a few years later.
I never lived in a house without a shower.
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I’m a little older…and my brother and sister are a little older yet. I never lived in a house without a shower, but they did.
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I said in my post “before the 1960s”. I was talking about the 1940s and 1950s - the period into which Old Spice was born. I don’t remember the 1940s, but I recall 1950s and 1960s England very well.
Much of the housing stock, particularrly in working-class areas, was more than 100 years old, and did not have a bathroom. Those people relied on a tin bath that was dragged into the kitchen once a week on bath night, and was ffilled with hot water from kettles. The whole family would share the same bath water.
Even in those houses that did have a bath, the water was heated from a coal fire via a back boiler. It was expensive, and took hours. You couldn’t just have a bath whenever you wanted one - it had to be planned - and because of the cost, people limited how often they did it. There was no central heating, and nobody had a shower - those things only started appearing in the sixties and seventies.
We had a different concept of personal freshness.
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I have some Old Spice in the shelf, but it mostly just sits there.
I do find that putting a few drops on a folded toilet tissue gives a “water closet” a much nicer aroma. 
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I know an older man named WC. It doesn’t stand for anything. His parents just wrote WC on his birth certificate. He often tells people his parents must have seen WC on a water closet door and chose it as his name.
He doesn’t use Old Spice.
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My house is a very old & somewhat rustic timber farmhouse. It originally had no electricity & relied on tank water fed via gravity.
Nightime was lit by kerosene lanterns & personal cleansing was via a gravity fed bathtub.
The laundry was basic concrete tubs in a tacked on extension with an outside clothesline.
Very basic.
During the 1960’s electricity was run to the property & the house was retrofit with plumbing to suit, however the closest it had to a shower was an attachment to the plumbing of the bathtub tap that you held while sitting in the bathtub.
It wasnt until I undertook extensive renovations about 20 years ago did it finally get a modern level tiled bathroom with a real shower.
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Many years ago, I read a (supposedly true) story of a guy whose parents named him “R. B. Williamson”. No given names, just the initials.
Things worked out OK until he got to 18, and had to fill in his first tax return. He filled in his name, just as it had been given to him, and sent off the form.
Of course, the tax authorities returned it to him, explaining that he had to state his full names, not just his initials. He filled in a new form, pointing out that it was R only B only - that was all there was.
In due course, his tax return was accepted, and confirmation was sent back to him - addressed to Mr Ronly Bonly Williamson.
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In the US that “started appearing” was in the great suburbia boom of the fifties, which is why my views are skewed…because I live in a place that literally didn’t exist before that boom. I understand the stories though. Before he transferred to California my dad was stationed in England, where my parents lived off base; “down the village.” Their house was over a hundred years old then, which is how my brother and sister got the “doesn’t have a shower,” or much of anything else of normal modern convenience. My parents actually set the place on fire by overloading the fireplace, which was the only source of heat.
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And I have never lived in a place big enough to have anything considered a suburb. Here it is called living in “the country”. The house I live in was built in the 50’s with central heat and air and a microwave but no bathrooms. They continued using the one in the small shop they lived in while building the house.
They added on a mother-in-law apartment in the 60’s and finally carved out room for bathrooms.
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Growing up in rural New England, we had well water pumped from a shallow well across the street and down a bit. Pipes ran under the road, originally a dirt one, then oiled dirt, then finally asphalt.
My Dad rented out a “little house” next to use … served from the same well. He often complained about the water consumed by the woman next door who bathed (tub) every night. We, OTOH, had a weekly bath and “sponge baths” in between.
Of course, when the occasional squirrel would somehow find its way into the well and die, the water odor was nauseating. Dad would grab the Clorox and dump a bunch into the well. Everyone had to wait for the chlorine to do its thing and then dissipate. Ah, the memories. 
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