Texasware Texas Ware Dallasware Melmac Tech Giant of It's Day Plastics Mfg Co

 

A look inside a boxed set of Texasware Melamine Dinnerware from a set I had.

Gary Joy wrote me on February 14, 2015 saying, "My grandfather started Plastics Mfg. Co. in Dallas in the late 40s - my father ran the company until his death in 83. For many years it was the largest manufacturer of melamine dinnerware in the world, as well as the only plastic dinnerware sold at Neiman-Marcus! I worked in the outlet store while in college in the early 70s ..."

As I was reviewing his correspondence I never thought for a minute that they meaning the PMC molding company could have been the largest manufacturer in the world of melamine dinnerware back in their day, but this sure explains why there is so much of it.  If we compared this company to the "Big Tech Giants of Today" the only thing we could say is Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter.  

On one of my first podcasts I talk about the beginning of Melmac brand, and soon that manufacturers like PMC got wise and made their own powders/molding resins and what essentially happened is you had molders selling melamine dishes not having to buy the powders from American Cyanamid. 

Small attentions to detail in the design of packaging, and brochures involved were often overlooked by the unboxing process, but these things took time to design. 

So essentially the giant PMC company had a huge army of employees doing this :

Making Powders

Design Concepts of Dinnerware

(this part would be mold making I wonder if they did?)

Molding Dishes

Designing Boxes and Packaging Materials, Pamphlets and Store Signs

Quality Control

Marketing and Distribution

A start to finish conglomerate if you will.  Even if they did not have a machine shop to make their own molds, then still they cut out so many middlemen by doing the marketing, molding, and distribution themselves.   

Design and placement was key.

Kudos!

Imagine the accomplishment back then of getting your plastic dishes into Neiman Marcus! Competing with mid century modern ceramic and china designers like Eva Ziesal, Bauer's Art Pottery, Homer Laughlin and even the ceramic designs of Russel Wright.  If that high end department store housed only Texas Ware melamine that is saying something. 

Others have written me about their "seconds" factory store which was right down / across the street.  It seems they had so many they had to open a store for it.  Not to mention millions of pieces of Texasware and Dallasware are still in existence today. 

Do you love Texasware or Dallasware? 

See my post on Texas Ware Factory Tour Here. 

listen to my vintage podcast here.

find out more

Brookpark Melmac Fantasy Line Joan Luntz Five Facts You Should Know

Old Brookpark Melmac Ad.

Today I was fully prepared to write a post on Russian melmac when I became sidetracked by a listing for Fantasy Brookpark by Joan Luntz.

Let me explain to you that when I write this post I write with full respect and awe, that Joan Luntz accomplished so much in her day and have written much on her before.

She was a working mother of six (yes six) children, and married to George Goulder,  (so she really was Joan Luntz Goulder).  After WW2 George purchased a plastics company, being President of the International Molding Company he would partner with Joan who designed Brookpark melmac dinnerware.

I cannot say enough about what a contribution Joan made to design, or the melamine history!  I think she was amazing in that she did so much as a woman in her day.  If you recollect the era, circa 1950's  women were still fighting to find adequate places in a predominantly male workforce.  And doing that while raising six children?  A huge accomplishment.

Lastly, but more importantly as it relates to this blog, her contribution to melmac dinnerware and her deigns were timeless, chic, and pretty. She won  many awards, received much publicity,  and many museums inducted her creations such as the Modern Museum of Art.

Photo of Fantasy Melmac Line is actually shown in her Obituary ! 

Refer to article / Obituary on Joan here in the Cleveland Jewish News. 

I recently came across her obituary, which I encourage you to click on the photo or link above to be taken to the Cleveland Jewish News and read.  I am a little bit sad to know she passed on Christmas day.  I for one learned some interesting things reading it.

Fantasy Pattern : Five Facts You Should Know

So with this post I write respectfully about Brookpark and in particular the line called Fantasy.

1. It's Rare.

In my years of collecting Fantasy has been somewhat hard to find and I consider it rare.  I can only tell you from being a plastics collector and researcher since the 90's I have been unable to ever see or find a complete set.  There may be several reasons for this, but if you collect it, covet it! I am not for sure if this is because it was a low production run or the fact that the plates seem to be white with design (and perhaps over time this white became stained and ended up not surviving.)

2. It's hard to identify as the Backstamps Are Most Likely Washed Away. 

Another plausible possibility is maybe no one knows what to call it if they do find it, since it's usually unmarked (and unless they really do their research. )The plates themselves were white with outlines designs reminiscent of leaves, herbs, apothecary.  The accompanying pieces were blue, solid turquoise. Most of these pieces maybe have been umarked or ink-stamped.

This picture proves my theory as shown in Thifty Doodads Etsy Shop.

(* Brookpark was known to ink stamp in black ink some of their pieces, which made it difficult when trying to identify lines thirty to sixty years later.  I actually washed a set of Pink Hyacinth by Brookpark (from the same timeframe) and washed the backstamps clean off!)   I confirmed this by actually finding a lot of Fantasy, and checking out the backstamps above.  They were definitely inked!

The leafy saucers of Fantasy by Brookpark Pic/Buy them at ThriftyDoodads

3. It's Quite Possibly A Very Small Production Run.

I found it in May 1956 Magazine, up until 1959.  I have not been able to find out the exact dates of production, but this gives a three year run.  That's not a whole heck of a lot of pieces.   Additionally, it was up against other lines being introduced around the same time. For instance,  Pink Hycianth, which was in my opinion more popular and more desirable (it was pink and white and if you look in the ad on top this post you'll see how pretty, oh so pretty....)   I have found much of this pink and white in my travels and it is still easy to put together a complete set to this day.

Top Right: Bloodgood Japenese Maple leaf vs "Pot" leaf below right. Note that the leaves on the Fantasy line are freeform ferny style plant leaves.

4.  Some collectors mistook the leaves for pot leaves. ( ouch!) 

I hope if the family of Joan reads this they won't think I mean anything disrespectful to her, but I have gotten a lot of inquiries over the years "Hey, what's the pot leaf design on melmac name?" and wondered just what the reader was talking about. Now I see that that leaf structure on the plates does resemble a bit of Cannabis Sativa leaf.

If you note that the pattern of the largest leaf has a five top leaf spread and then two tiny bottom leaf patterns. This is exactly that of some photographs of hemp/Marijuana leaves.   Although I am unsure just what the leave was, I myself thought that it represented a tree that I grew up with, a cousin of the Japanese Maple---more in referred to as BLOODGOOD JAPANESE MAPLE.    I am unsure and if anyone from Joan's family reads this blog, maybe they can shed light on the leaf itself.  However, all look ferny and fantasy like with the mod dots behind them.

5. It comes in more than one color palette- look for brown hues and the blue hues. 

Although all my above talk above shows the blue on white design accompanied with solid blue pieces, I have posted an article before where the pieces were actually brown hues, with brown or tan solid pieces. Look for both in your travels.  To me, both are elusive.

See the brown pieces in my earlier post on Joan, Arrowhead, Brookpark and Fantasy here.

If you enjoy my blog, follow my Living Vintage podcasts! I'm listed in various podcasts under RetroChalet: Living a Vintage Life!  You can connect with me via Instagram or TikTok! Have a great day ! This post last updated 7.10.21

Russel Wright Residential Rarity : Two Tone Melmac

Pic: Retro Chalet Shop.

I've seen some oddities along the way in my Russel Wright collecting and research. The two tone sets have to be the strangest and the most exciting.  Needless to say, they do exist, and are quite rate. What they are is actually different than anything I've seen.  There are blues/whites, yellow/whites, and pinks/whites that I've seen. All are marked Residential. 

The issue here is that some pieces are solid, but the plates, saucers, and platters actually have one color molded on the bottom, and another color molded onto the top. You have to do a double take to look very closely to make sure this is not a factory mishap. Looking on the edge you will see that indeed, care was taken to form a color on top, and color on the bottom!  More proof that Wright, if experimenting with this sort of theme, was ahead of his time !

Two colors, chalk on top blue on base. Amazing!

Of course the colors I have found haven't really matched that of the existing Residential or Home Decorator lines, so they must have been their own creation.  There are some solid blue and pink pieces that are a hue off of the Home Decorators colors that these DO match, however oddly those blues and pinks were produced in solids also. So I assume, you could get your blue straight up, or on the rocks, with the chalky impact above.  Honestly, I am unsure if they were a test run of created as a special order for someone. Examples I own look mint and first runs, no imperfections which mean the factory must have perfected this process. 

There is no proof in Syracuse that Wright was experimenting with such colors, nor that such colors were approved at Northern Industrial Chemical Company, who molded this line for him.  There is evidence however, of Wright's ongoing experimentation with the plastics in general. Early examples housed there show him putting metallic pieces into the melmac, experimentating with mottled colors , and actually baking melmac (probably in his own oven) and putting notes on the plates to see at what temperature they would burn or melt.  Given that, I think Wright was experimenting with the two tone, but perhaps such a pain for the factory to make, that he didn't put it into mass production. In 20 years of collecting, I've only acquired a handful of examples.

Airline Melmac - Eastern Airlines

I just got these wee melmac shot glasses? in the mail from The Cottage Cheese on Etsy.  I adore them, as they are from Eastern Airlines, but it's not something I normally collect.  There is a reason however....

I can only imagine how many planes used melmac probably from the 40s to the 70s, (some still use it today) but how much of the vintage melamine actually survived.  Think about it, if they changed colors, what did they do with the old sets?  If it got scratchy, where did it go?  Theories are first class had china, the rest had melamine.  This makes it rare and hard to complete whole sets of early airline melamine.  Not to mention you have the "mel-maniacs" and the "airline-aholics" collecting it and so it appears to two different collecting circles.  I would think only airline stewardesses, pilots, and granny with her big purse were able to bring this into the collecting world. 

The reason I bought these wee cups were because I was hoping them to be part of the elusive Northern Industrial Chemical Company's pieces, when they were molding for airlines in the 40's.  I've been trying to find for years. I'll never know of course, because Northern did not mark their airline dishes and it is a proven fact that MANY manufacturers molded for the airlines. 

More on Northern in detail will be on my Russel Wright site soon, so check back.


Information about airline melmac and melamine is found on Christopher McPherson's wonderful site called "Plastic Living."  It is a proven fact that his favorite company, Watertown Lifetime Ware, did a lot of molding for the airlines   and the navy early on, and possibly even beat most if not all manufacturers to the table with melmac dish sets. 

Boontonware Melmac Dinnerware and Melmac LIVES says Matthew Huisman....read this

Boontonware + Good Design = Melmac Love. 

Good Design obvious at the DollyP shop on Etsy, full of cool Boontonware.

So after I took my Boonton, NJ Tour a few years back after my friend Derek Schultz passed away. His records stopped when Boontonware was being distributed by "English and English" in Boonton, NJ... I really wondered what ever happened to all the wonderful dish molds, where did they go? To the scrap yard?  To the recycling plant?  So sad.....or so I thought.   

Then along came Matthew Huisman for the Star-Ledger with this great article that says Boontonware is alive and well.....and molded in OHIO....what the heck?

Find it in his archives!

In the meantime, you can read more about Boontonware by visiting my factory tour:  http://retrochalet.blogspot.com/2014/01/boonton-melmac-factory-tour-stop-one.html
and seeing these great examples of boontonware!

Boontonware Butter Dishes, Etsy shop RetroChalet

Jadeite Bootonware.  Pic: Etsy shop RetroChalet

Boonton tumblers made in "glass tic"  plastic to look like glass. Etsy shop: Retrochalet

read more about these tumblers here on this boontonware melmac post on my blog 

quality assurance checked 9.30.16