While spring cleaning, we found a cache of 1960’s era letters from Union Carbide.
The letters were from big shot execs in the mid-town Manhattan offices. All were perfectly individually typed with no errors ( whiteout probably did not yet exist ). While Don Draper was working on ads for mass marketing, the senior execs were incredibly creative by tying in first day of issue stamps to their new resins for the narrow nascent blown film industry.
Of course there were many things nostalgic and laughable – six cent stamps, new applications such as shrink film, juice packaging, frozen food packaging. Recycling ? Re-what ? Linear Low Density was over a decade in the future. In the First Man on the Moon issue, they bragged about their two billion pounds of capacity. They went to great lengths to show literally how far their resin would stretch – to the moon and back many times. There is at least 35 billion pounds of PE capacity coming on stream in the US in the next few years.
In the late 50’s the commercial feasibility of blown film was uncertain. Today there are over 27,000 known blown film shops.
Reminds me of when our founder used to line up his three martini lunches on successive days when he worked for USI Chemicals.
How times have changed.
Enjoy the gallery. ( Click the below the slide show for full screen ) Who knows ? Maybe the collection will appraise at $ 5 at the Antiques Road Show in the year 2100.
