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From: wvhorn@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (William VanHorne) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban Subject: Re: Proctor & Gamble Satanists?? Date: 27 Jan 1994 13:43:28 GMT [ much about P&Gs "satanic" moon-and-stars symbol deleted ] BTW, if you are curious about the *real* origin of the Procter & Gamble symbol that caused such a fuss, the book "Corporate Cultures" has the whole story. Oh. You don't want to go look-up the book? You're too busy and important to waste your time on such trivia? Since I'm not busy or important, you want me to waste my time giving you a synopsis? Sure. Happy to. Back in the 1800s, P&G was famous for its candles rather than its soap, and they would ship their candles down the Ohio-Mississippi rivers to New Orleans, where jobbers would unload the river barges and ship the P&G candles worldwide. As part of the shipping process, the loading docks back in Cincinnnati had whole bunches of crate makers who would build the shipping crates right on the spot, by hand, and tailored to the size of the shipment, size of the ship, etc. Anyways, the crate makers were proud of their work, and invented their own marks that they would carve or burn into the crate they had just built. So, everything works fine, and some of the crate makers get real fancy and artistic with their marks, until one of the Big Bosses (I think it was Procter, but I forget) comes down to oversee a shipment, sees his crates covered by these here marks, throws a fit, orders the crate makers to stop with the .sigs already, and storms off. Sos anyway the P&G shipments go down river without the crate makers' marks on 'em and when the shipments hit New Orleans, the jobbers refuse to accept them, and a couple of shipments have to be hauled all the way back to Cincinnati before the home office can react to the situation. It seems that the middlemen in Louisiana relied on the fact that *real* P&G merchandise would be shipped in crates marked by the crate makers, and got to know the personal marks they would use, and so used those marks to tell the difference between real P&G stuff, and phony cheap replacements. Once P&G heard about the problem, they decided to allow the crate makers to mark their work, but wanted them to choose just one symbol that everybody would use. A contest was held, and the man-in-the-moon-with-stars symbol used by one guy was chosen the winner, and from that day all P&G shipping crates carried the m.i.t.m.w.s. mark. Over the years the crate maker's mark got added to all of P&Gs packaging and became an internationally famous trademark recognized worldwide, until the 1970s/1980s when P&G was forced to change the symbol due to a rapid rise in the population of the chronically brain-dead. And no one lived happily ever after except the wolf. ---Bill "and the storyteller" VanHorne