I had a famous great-great-great-uncle. Well, fame is all relative I suppose. No pun intended. Relative.
Anyway, his name was Alfonso Dearth Wourms. I know. It is a terrible name. The Wourms part is German. At some point, they came out of the city of Worms in the southern part of Germany. It is south of Frankfurt, sort of. And then, there is his middle moniker. Dearth was his mother’s maiden name. I guess she insisted. He was a middle child, and none of the others were Dearth. Alfonso drew the short straw, you see. Dearth Wourms? Ugh. Dirty earthworms.
Back to the story. The family came here to the United States during the early 1830s. And they were of all things, a bunch of German dirt farmers up there in Mercer County. I can’t remember his exact age when they took the boat. But he was still a child when they settled in this region. As the story goes, either he didn’t know what poison ivy was, or it looked different in his homeland. He got into a patch when they were clearing land, and the boy was covered in it. A scratch a minute.
The experience stayed with him into adulthood, it would seem. When he was 22, he started experimenting with different herbs mixed in with his mother’s cold cream. And, after a year or two of trying this and that, he came up with a concoction called Aunt Katie’s No More Itch Cream. I’m not sure how he named the stuff. He had a daughter named Katherine, so perhaps that was the connection.
At any rate, he started selling the stuff to the local grocers and pharmacies in that area. First Mercer County, then Auglaize and Darke. Before long, he couldn’t keep up with the demand. To make a long story short, he knew a friend who knew a friend named James Gamble. This Gamble fellow was just starting a company with another guy name William Procter. Yes, Procter and Gamble. They bought the itch cream from Alfonso, and he made a big chunk of change back then.
Enough that they moved to Columbus, he and his wife and kids. He opened his own store, where he made other creams and remedies. He never had to be the dirt farmer again, that guy, Alfonso Dearth Wourms. And that’s how it went.
But that old uncle of mine?
He built his entire itch-cream business from scratch.
From scratch.
Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about my cousin Erwin, the priest.
But he had another job on the side.
He made Holy Water.
Yeah.
He boiled the hell out of it.
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I Renamed my iPod The Titanic, so when I plug it in, it says “The Titanic is syncing.”
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Will glass coffins be a success? Remains to be seen.
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What’s the difference between a hippo and a zippo? One is really heavy and the other is a little lighter.
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