When I was a lad back in the Boy Scouts one of our affectations was to walk around with a match in our mouths, much like a toothpick (though we didn’t use it to pick our teeth, and as I remember, we rarely even brushed our teeth on camp outs). It had to be a strike-anywhere match too because you never knew when you might need to call forth fire (which humans had only recently mastered, this being so long ago). If you were really cool at the time you didn’t carry around a red strike-anywhere match in your mouth; you had a blue one. And Ohio Blue Tip match. I can still remember the dubious look my mother gave me when I insisted that she needed to buy me a whole box of Ohio Blue Tip matches.

Ohio Blue Tip matches are long gone, though the town that once manufactured them holds a festival each year in celebration of the heritage. I’ve heard vague and conflicting assertions that strike-anywhere matches are now illegal, though I wonder how true that is. I can still find and buy red strike-anywhere matches at odd places (like the gas station convenience store on the way to my woods). These don’t seem to be as robust as the matches of my tender youth though. I’m guessing that the strike-anywhere matches of today are a dumbed-down, civilian version of the vigorous matches of yore. Perhaps whatever contraband the original matches contained has been removed from these newer versions.

Anyway . . . at some point I must have mentioned aloud my fondness for strike-anywhere matches, and my daughter-in-law Amber must have been listening because she presented me with three boxes of them as a holiday gift recently. They weren’t blue tips though. They weren’t even red tips. They were green tips, as you see above. I’ve never seen those before, and I imagine that had I carried one of those around in my mouth back in the day, I would have been king of the camp outs among my Scouting peers. Amber’s mother had found these for me and bought the three pack. What nice people!

So now the cabin is stocked with its match need fulfilled for several decades. Resplendently fulfilled I’ll add.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013 at 12:02 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.