coonskin caps (may 1955—december 1955)–—Children’s fad inspired by the Walt Disney television series Davy Crockett, about the Kentucky frontier hero who fought at the Alamo and “kilt a bar” at age three. Part of a larger merchandising fad that included bow-and-arrow sets, toy knives, toy rifles, fringed shirts, powder horns, lunchboxes, jigsaw puzzles, coloring books, pajamas, panties, and seventeen recorded versions of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” to which every child in America knew all the verses. As a result of the fad, a shortage of coonskins developed, and an earlier fad, the raccoon coat of the twenties, was ripped up to make caps. Some boys even got their hair cut in the shape of a coonskin cap. The fad collapsed right before Christmas of 1955, leaving merchandisers with hundreds of unwanted caps.
It occurred to me the next day while ransacking my lab for the clippings I’d given Flip to copy that Bennett’s remark about having already met her new assistant must mean she’d been assigned to Bio. But in the afternoon Gina, looking hunted, came in to say, “I don’t care what they say. I did the right thing hiring her. Shirl just printed out and collated twenty copies of an article I wrote. Correctly. I don’t care if I am breathing in second-secondhand smoke.
“Second-secondhand smoke?”
“That’s what Flip calls the air smokers breathe out But I don’t care. It’s worm it.”
“Shirl’s been assigned to you?” I said.
She nodded. “This morning she delivered my mail. My mail. You should get her assigned to you.”
“I will,” I said, but that was easier said than done. Now that Flip had an assistant, she (and my clippings) had disappeared off the face of the earth. I searched the entire building twice, including the cafeteria, where large NO SMOKING signs had been put on all the tables, and Supply, where Desiderata was trying to figure out what printer cartridges were, and found Flip finally in my lab, sitting at my computer and typing something in.
She deleted it before I could see what it was and leaped up. If she’d been capable of it, I would have said she looked guilty.
“You weren’t using it,” she said. “You weren’t even here” “Did you make copies of those clippings I gave you Monday?” I said.
She looked blank.
“There was a copy of the personal ads on top of them.”
She tossed her swag of hair. “Would you use the word elegant to describe me?”
She had added a hair wrap to her hank, a long thin strand of hair bound in bilious blue embroidery thread, and a band of duct tape across her forehead cut out to frame the i.
“No,” I said.
“Well, nobody expects you to be all of them,” she said, apropos of nothing. “Anyway, I don’t know why you’re so hooked on the personals. You’ve got that cowboy guy.”
“What?”
“Billy Boy Somebody,” she said, waving her hand at the phone. “He called and said he’s in town for some seminar and you’re supposed to meet him for dinner someplace. Tonight, I think. At the Nebraska Daisy or something. At seven o’clock.”
I went over to my phone message pad. It was blank. “Didn’t you write the message down?”
She sighed. “I can’t do everything. That’s why I was supposed to get an assistant, remember? So I wouldn’t have to work so hard, only since she’s a smoker, half the people I assigned her to don’t want her in their labs, so I still have to copy all this stuff and go all the way down to Bio and stuff. I think smokers should be forced to give up cigarettes.”
“Who all did you assign to her?”
“Bio and Product Development and Chem and Physics and Personnel and Payroll, and all the people who yell at me and make me do a lot of stuff. Or put in a camp or something where they couldn’t expose the rest of us to all that smoke.”
“Why don’t you assign her to me? I don’t mind that she smokes.”
She put her hands on the hips of her blue leather skirt. “It causes cancer, you know,” she said disapprovingly. “Besides, I’d never assign her to you. You’re the only one who’s halfway nice to me around here.”