What Did You Use MIR Dish Soap For?

Dan Sparling
November 27 at 4:32 PM  · 

My toy bottle in 1965!

I hated MIR dish washing soap. It wasn’t because it was a bad soap; it probably was very good at what it was advertised for. What I could not stand was sitting at my Grandmother’s tiny kitchen table eating lunch or dinner and staring at the Yellow bottle ( it came in a few colours) while I ate as it stood as a loan sentinel on the side of the sink caked in dry soap. My Grandmother always the dishes done and the stove stoked but she never seemed to clean off that bottle– and that bottle looked like a wax candle after a week.

However I had no idea now or way back then that women used dish soap to get rid of greasy hair. Apparently, it has been going on since Little House on the Prairie.

Wild Poppy—Oh…do I remember this! And the same way my mother pronounced “mirror.”

Darlene MacDonaldThis was the best shampoo ever!

Linda Seccaspina— shampoo????? really? My grandmother used it to wash dishes.. tell me more..

Darlene MacDonaldLinda Seccaspina Yes this was our everyday dish washing liquid soap. When shampoo was scarce we used this as well. 

Dawn JonesDarlene MacDonald yep. Made your hair clean! And no conditioner in those days!

Peggy ByrneTwo to a package – was a deal

Karen SmithDarlene MacDonald I can barely remember it, jeez so long ago.

Wild PoppyDawn Jones still remember the nice smell of Mir.

Sandra HoustonMy Nanny used this dish soap

Kathy DevlinIn a house of 4 females we often ran out of shampoo and used sunlight dish soap. No greasy hair in our house but lots of shine!

Darlene MacDonaldLila Leach-James It was dish detergent. We used it as both 

Bev FergussonDarlene MacDonald so did we when needed. Those were days of making do with what you had!

Brenda BridgewaterYes dish soap Lila you don’t remember guess you didn’t do dishes !!!!

Lila Leach-JamesBrenda Bridgewater oh Jesus and had to bring the water up from the pump house! Glad those days are behind me! Yes, I guess we used it for shampoo also

Donna SmithMy mom used this didnt care for the smell myself

Kayla GleesonI remember these, my mom made crafts with them

Kayla GleesonLinda Seccaspina I remember them with doll heads on them??

Russ ThompsonTasted like crap lol

D Christopher VaughanYou shouldn’t have said that word then.

I will Wash Your Mouth Out with Soap!

Remember Halo Shampoo?

Peter McCallum — From Brown and Wylie Mill Employee to The King of Mack’s No Rub Laundry Soap

What the Heck was Electric Soap? Chatterton House Hotel Registrar

As the World Turns in Carleton Place — Soap and Ground Beef

Who was Cody the Kid in Carleton Place? — Soap Box Memories

As the Cell Phone Turns – a Soap Opera

How Many Times Should You Bathe?

When Everything Else Fails…

Linda Seccaspina
November 16, 2021  · 




From Stuart McIntosh this morning.
My Aunt Ethel McIntosh Ramsbottom recalled helping her grandmother making soap. “ They saved hardwood ashes in a barrel in the winter and in the spring the barrel was set on a base so that the edge was out over it. A hole was bored in the side of the barrel near the bottom and an iron pot set on the ground under the barrel. The boys and I carried water and put it on the ashes, and as it leached the ashes, the lye collected in the iron pot.
This was put in an iron cooler along with water and grease, and boiled over a fire most of the day. It had to be stirred often, a tedious job as the cooler was set on a stone foundation with a hollow under the fire. We used a stick(often a broom handle for stirring the soap.
When it was cooled enough, we put out the fire and put salt and water in the soap and left it till the next morning. At that time it would be firm enough to cut into bars and these would be set out on boards in the shed to harden.

From Jane Stewart

I will Wash Your Mouth Out with Soap!

Remember  when Mom made the bar of soap wet, and rubbed it in our mouths, and then to make it worse you had to had to bite on it?

Then I once watched my friend’s mother stand him on a chair in the centre of the room for 30 minutes while he held a big bar of soap in my mouth.  He was just covered in slobber down the front of his shirt by the time it was over.

My Grandmother was in on this punishment too, and grabbed my arm, marched me into the bathroom, picked up a bar of plain white soap, and literally cleaned my mouth with it.  Sometimes I wondered what brand of soap was most used for washing out mouths?

One of my readers Clorise Anderson remembered her mom would squirt MIR dish soap in our mouths.  I remember MIR very well but cannot find a darn thing about it on the internet. But, I had no idea about the history of liquid soap. So I looked it up.

The first liquid soap was patented in 1865, by William Shepphard. He’s often credited for inventing it, but considering his patent was officially listed as “Improved Liquid Soap,” it seems clear there was liquid soap around already.

In his patent, Shepphard announced he’d discovered that adding “small quantities of common soap to a large quantity of spirits of ammonia or hartshorn” produced a thickened liquid comparable in consistency to molasses.

Much of the liquid soap that preceded Sheppard’s patent was used for industrial purposes, and much that followed it was as well, with hospitals and public places included in
where you could find it.

Despite its popularity throughout the early to middle 1900’s, it wasn’t until 1980 that liquid soap became mass-produced for domestic use. The Minnetonka Corporation of Minnesota released Softsoap in 1980, and their product benefited greatly from being first.

It took some doing, though, for Minnetonka to get the jump on its larger competitors. Colgate, makers of Irish Spring, and Proctor & Gamble, makers of Ivory, were both positioned to release a liquid soap and take advantage of the wide-open market opportunity.

The key to success was the dispenser. Without a suitable pump – and suitable pumps were made by only a few factories in the U.S. – any liquid soap efforts would fail, regardless of how big the company was.

Minnetonka’s strategy for beating its competitors was to buy up all the plastic pump dispensers in the country. Their strategy worked. Minnetonka enjoyed a virtual monopoly on liquid soap until they were bought by Colgate-Palmolive in 1987. Minnetonka’s strategy is still mentioned in business publications as a model of smart, calculated risk taking. For its part, Colgate-Palmolive has continued to produce Softsoap since it purchased Minnetonka.

Photo-Donna Mcfarlane

The Happy Gang was a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio lunchtime variety show that ran from 1937 to 1959. During the Golden Age of Radio and well into the 1950s, it was one of Canada’s most popular programs. In its heyday, it had about two million listeners a day.The show was known for its “spontaneous humor, music, and corny jokes.” 

The Happy Gang debuted on June 14, 1937 on station CRCT, a CBC affiliate in Toronto, later known as CBL. Originally intended as just a summer fill-in, it gained a following, and was moved to the CBC network four months later. The Happy Gang ran for 22 years, totalling nearly 4900 broadcasts, until it was finally cancelled in late August 1959. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, the series also served as the template for CBC’s French language service, Les Joyeux Troubadours, which was broadcast in Quebec from 1941 to 1977.

You can listen to the show right here—http://www.cbc.ca/radio/rewind/the-happy-gang-1.2801259