In Which I Finally Land My White Whale ... Sort Of
I finally found a long-sought item — or at least a representation of it. Plus still more stick figures, right-handed toilets, and more!
As you probably know by now, I love vintage advertising displays and have a lot of them. But there’s one I don’t have that has long haunted me.
It was about 20 years ago, and I was road-tripping somewhere in the middle of the country. I stopped at an antiques shop and was blown away by a vintage metal promotional display for plumbing supplies — or, more specifically, for the parts you’d use to repair a flush toilet mechanism. It would have been displayed at a hardware store or plumbing-supply shop.
It had a bold design and several moving parts — an excellent mix of the graphic and the industrial. I loved it and thought it would look great in my bathroom (I envisioned putting it atop my toilet tank), but it was pricey and I eventually decided not to buy it. I’ve been kicking myself for that decision ever since. Non-buyer’s remorse, you might say.
I’ve come to think of that display as the one that got away — my white whale. In the years since then, I’ve probably set the eBay record for the most lifetime searches on “vintage toilet display,” “vintage flush display,” and so on. Unfortunately, I’ve never encountered another example of the one I saw in that antiques shop.
Until now. Sort of.
I didn’t take a photo of the one I saw in the shop. But I’ve maintained a mental image of it, and I’m pretty sure it looked like the one shown on this page:
That page is from a 1938 plumbing catalog published by the Chicago-based Hibbard company. I recently stumbled across the page while poking around on eBay. My eyes practically popped out of my head, cartoon-style, when I saw it, because the display shown on the page is at least a close cousin — and maybe a twin — of the one I considered purchasing two decades ago.