The daily revenge of Stinky Pete

The world can be a very smelly place, and humans don’t always improve the situation. If anyone I happen to describe in the following story sounds familiar, keep in mind that the names have been changed to protect the odorous.

One can only imagine what our caveman ancestors smelled like. They may have bailed in the water once in a while to choke a salamander for dinner, but bathing would never have occurred to them.

If Anthropologists are to be believed, the worse their cave-stink was, the less appetizing they would have smelled to a predator. Talk about a defense mechanism. Rotting fish may have been the Right Guard of the day, for repulsive would have rated right up there with strong and brainy as far as avoiding becoming a snack.

As mankind stunk his way through the ages, the Egyptians finally decided that enough was enough with the stench thing already. They invented the perfumed bath, and liberally applied perfume to any potentially odorous parts. I don’t know about you, but it kind of makes my crotch burn to think of it.

The women put blobs of scented wax on top of their heads, so that it would slowly melt throughout the day and mask any unpleasant smells that might pop up. Undoubtedly messy, it seems to me that a waxless but less perfumed female would be more appealing, stink or no stink.

The Greeks and Romans took it even further when they hit the stinkfree trail. They doused their guests, their clothes, their horses and their household pets in perfume. It makes me gag to think of it. Somebody with too much perfume is almost as bad as someone with B.O. in my book, depending of course on the level of intensity. You have to be able to breathe in either case.

Thanks to the church, the Middle Ages took a turn for the stank. It became pretty much a church crime to be naked, even in a bath, so people just stopped cleaning themselves. The upper class relied heavily on perfumed handkerchiefs applied to the nose until well into the 19th century, while the rest just sucked it up and reeked.

The first trademarked deodorant paste, Mum, came out in 1888, which was also the year their magazine advertisement arrived to partially put a stop to the “I’ll take one bath a year whether I need it or not” mentality. The ad showed a man getting on an elevator with the little stink lines drawn in over his head, and all the folks on the elevator were recoiling away from his stench in horror.

Some call this ad “The birth of Body Odor”, though of course man had been reeking for centuries. In fact, ad or no ad, many continue to stink to this day. The ad did begin to make the public think, at the very least, about whether to stink or not to stink.

Shortly after Mum arrived, Everdry hit the market, It was aluminum chloride, dabbed on with a swab, and it not only took forever to dry, it was messy and had a nasty habit of stinging the user and eating through clothes. By George, your burning pits stayed dry though.

The term B.O. was coined in 1919 by, you guessed it, the ad agency for Odo-Ro-No, a deodorant for women. They didn’t want to be so rude as to mention Body Odor by name, but instead of suggesting that they could foster daintiness and sweetness like other deodorants, they bluntly dared potential customers to take the “Armhole Odor Test”.

It was all downhill from there, as far as advertising companies taking the high road, and one after another stressed that social success hinged on eliminating B.O. They haven’t changed much in the 93 years since then, and to a large extent they are correct. Stink is bad, and is highly unlikely to improve your social standing, if such is your aim.

Supposedly 95 percent of Americans use some form of deodorant, though there are no numbers about how many are trying to prevent B.O. and how many are merely masking the smell of an unwashed body. For the record, I have to use gel, because stick deodorants make my pits itch something fierce.

In the mid 70's the bustling taverns of Boundary County saw a lot of regular faces. Some of these were accompanied by what can only be called industrial strength body odor. One of these regulars shall be dubbed Stinky Pete, who despite having numerous people tell him that he needed a bath, like three years ago, remained odorous to the end.

He was a loner, no surprise, who liked to hang out on the fringes, watching, listening and smelling. Rarely did he utter a word. The only saving grace was that he had long ago reached the apex of his stinkery, so he couldn't get any worse.

My theory is that his life was miserable, so he was paying the world back, one nostril at a time. I'm not sure where his soul went when he passed on, but I'm sure it left a trail behind it.      

I still run into newer versions of Stinky Pete here and there, usually in the grocery store, but never in the deodorant aisle.

Thankfully, my sense of smell seems to dwindle a bit every year. I still have enough nose left to give myself the “Armhole Odor Test” though.

If that sense happens to fail, I still have my wife.

Like most women, she could smell a fly toot from fifty feet away.