Of all the patent medicines and elixirs that Baltimore inventiveness has given to the commercial marketplace, has any been as successful as Noxzema?
A long-overdue shrine to the Baltimore-born eczema cure opens this week at the Baltimore Museum of Industry on Key Highway. It is a re-creation of the circa-1911 front window of pharmacist George Bunting's North Avenue drug store where the nationally famous skin cream was initially sold.
Bunting, who developed Noxzema about 1911 (the name means "sure knocks eczema"), had a neighborhood drug store in the first block of West North Avenue. By 1917 there was a manufacturing plant and -- thanks to the magic of 1920s radio advertising -- the product found a national audience.
The company later went into shaving soap and Cover Girl cosmetics. It is now a division of Procter and Gamble.
The show, entitled "A Cure for What Ails You," is not all about the skin preparation made from oil of eucalyptus that was once sold in blue glass jars. It is a tribute to Baltimore's pharmaceutical industry as viewed through the corner drug store.
Look here for products such as Resinol or Hynson Wescott and Dunning's tincture known as Mercurochrome. Old-fashioned pharmacy cabinets hold the wares of Sharp and Dohme, Parke Davis, Muth Brothers, the Emerson Drug Company (makers of Bromo-Seltzer), Yaeger's liniment and, of course, a bottle of castor oil from Read's, "the drug store worthy of your confidence."
Some of the showcases were salvaged from the old J. Adolph Wager's pharmacy on Conkling Street at Eastern Avenue.
The museum has hired Larry Paul as guest curator to help give the show the pitch-perfect Baltimore accent. Mr. Paul, who is retired from the display department of Baltimore Gas and Electric, is a veteran collector of arcane Baltimore advertising and commercial wares. His specialty is locating items that just about everyone else thought had gone on the trash heap. After all, how many 1922 Noxzema jars are left?
There is a distinct connection between Noxzema and Bromo-Seltzer fortunes. The cobalt blue bottles for both products were made by the Maryland Glass Corp. in Southwest Baltimore.
Mr. Paul also is in charge of outfitting a classic 1920s soda fountain preserved from the Medical Arts Pharmacy in the Medical Arts Building, at Cathedral and Read streets in the Mount Vernon neighborhood. The pharmacy still operates; the soda fountain closed a few summers ago and made its way to the museum where it remained in storage until Bunting family philanthropic foundations funded this exhibit.
The Medical Arts soda fountain was quite an imposing tabernacle of the cola bean and strawberry syrup. Many Baltimoreans treated themselves to a milk shake or sundae here. As reconstructed, it remains a classy model of dark mahogany wood topped by a deeply veined green marble counter.
The museum is making a request of its patrons. It needs photos of local neighborhood drug store scenes. Donors should contact Virginia Remsberg at the Museum of Industry, 1415 Key Highway (727-4808).
Back to Noxzema. My grandfather, Edward Jacques Monaghan, was the senior member of a household where I was much the junior. At one time there were 12 of us under the same big roof.
Pop Monaghan believed in shaving soap, shaving brushes and shaving cups. He also liked to smooth on Noxzema.
Personal products left in the bathroom were likely to be tested liberally by other members of the household. Pop was generous and decided to beat the Noxzema samplers at their own game.
He went to the door of the old Noxzema factory in Hampden on Fallscliff Road and brought home the largest blue jar of Noxzema available. It looked like a small barrel.
It was too large to fit anywhere in the bathroom. It found a resting spot under the legs of a large chest of drawers in the bedroom shared by grandmother and him.
My grandparents' room became a popular gathering spot, especially after afternoons spent in the sun.
For years after his 1963 death, Pop's room smelled of oil of eucalyptus.