Twizzle sticks5/29/2023 It was in an ivory hue rather than yellow like the ones she got from her mom, and she had to buy a group of 60 sticks to get it. The jewelry turned out to be replaceable, but Ashlund remained troubled by the loss of her cache of Skullys, so, eventually, in 2012, she headed online, where she found another Skully on eBay. “I treasured those swizzle sticks as a kind of family heirloom,” she writes, “so I kept them tucked away in a drawer with my jewelry.” Recently, Pam Ashlund organized a very small part of her collection into a mini-exhibition in her office at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.Īshlund returned to Southern California with several “Skully” swizzle sticks, as she calls them, but unfortunately all of them were stolen during a burglary in 2009. I didn’t know it then, but I had been bitten by the collector bug.” I asked if I could bring the stick home and she agreed. She remembered a Hall of Knights Armor and dancing until the wee hours. Mom told me about going on a double date there. The stick was from the Ivanhoe, which had been a medieval-themed restaurant (dining, dancing, and entertainment) in the 1950s in Chicago. It was among these pens and pencils that I came across my first swizzle stick: A pale yellow stick with a skull on one end and a bone on the other. Nothing was thrown out, especially rubber bands. “My mother grew up in the shadow of the Great Depression. She describes the encounter in her forthcoming book: The family cache of swizzle sticks was so unremarkable, Ashlund doesn’t even remember noticing them as a child, but when she was visiting her parents in 2007, the sticks captured her imagination. The swizzle-stick cup at Ashlund’s parent’s home in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago doubled as a pencil jar. People would keep them, and somewhere in the house they’d end up with a little cup full of swizzle sticks.” “In the 1950s,” Ashlund says, “when you went to a restaurant or bar, you’d bring home a swizzle stick as a memento, similar to collecting matchbooks picked up while on vacation. In fact, bars are the primary source for most of the world’s collectible swizzle sticks. The people who ran the Ivanhoe eventually made Skullys in numerous colors, three of which are shown here. Pam Ashlund’s first swizzle stick was a yellow Skully from the Ivanhoe, a famous restaurant and bar in Chicago, given to her by her mom. So he’s like, ‘Why would you ever want something that someone had put in their mouth?’ He’s never been able to get over that mental picture enough to even look at them.” “He remembers getting them in drinks in dive bars, and then chewing on them. As for her father, “he calls them ‘those sticks,’” Ashlund says. She’s currently writing a book on the subject, and she’d like to open a museum devoted to these diminutive utensils, from their history and means of manufacture to the stories of the places they came from, places where people used to enjoy just hanging out and sipping, as one swizzle-stick collector put it to Ashlund, “drinks with sticks in ’em.”Īshlund started collecting swizzle sticks because of her mother, although, she hastens to clarify when we speak over the phone, her mom was not, and is not, a swizzle-stick collector. That’s because she currently shares her home outside of Los Angeles with about 100 Tupperware containers, each of which is filled to the brim with plastic, wood, glass, and metal sticks designed to agitate alcohol and ice cubes. Pam Ashlund knows exactly where all 50,000 or so of her swizzle sticks are. “I treasured those swizzle sticks as a kind of family heirloom.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but inventorying your swizzle-stick collection could be as easy as tidying up a bit around the house. The bulk of your collection is probably hiding in the back of your junk drawer, and you might find one or two more sticks jammed amid the dry felt-tip pens in that jelly jar on the credenza, next to the spot where your landline used to be. Lots of people are swizzle-stick collectors but don’t even know it. Swizzle sticks organized by color, from the collection of Pam Ashlund.
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