Believe it or not, I have a long running association with this product… and it began many years before I was blessed with a wife and four daughters.
It all began in 1952, when I was in the 5th grade at George School… My father was the manager of the then new Jitney-Jungle #19 in Mart 51 in Jackson, MS. It proved to be a very sucessful grocery store. The weekends always drew large crowds.
So Dad put me to work in the store, on Thursday and Friday afternoons after school, and all day Saturday. Jitney-Jungle was, as were 90+% of the merchants in Jackson in 1953, closed all day every Sunday.
My main job was to keep the grocery carts properly coraled, to keep the trash containers at the check-out stands emptied, and to run errands. Shortly, I was given another responsibility. Making the ‘sanitary napkins’ fit for public display.
Things were MUCH different in 1953 than they are today… on many fronts… especially things dealing with sexual/physical matters. Pregnancy was a very ‘private’ matter. Pregnancy outside of marriage was wrong… and a shameful matter. Items such as sanitary napkins were super-private, not spoken of or displayed among the general population.
So when a new shipment arrived, it was my job to ‘gift-wrap’ each and every package! I did this in the stockroom of the store. As instructed, I used brown kraft paper, and carefully wrapped each box as if it was a Christmas or birthday gift… less bow and ribbon. I then put these wrapped ‘presents’ on the store’s shelf.
The ladies knew what was in the wrapped packages, I knew what was in them, and no doubt all the other customers (male and female) also knew. But at least madam shopper, during ‘this time of the month,’ did not have to advertise it up and down every aisle of the store!
Fast forward to 2003. I was working as a teacher’s assistant in a local Middle School, in a special needs class. One of our favorite students was a lovable teenage boy, sadly with the mental/physical abilities of very young child. He wore a form of diaper that fit into his underwear, very much like a very large ‘sanitary napkin’. Now this was a large fellow, so it took two of us to lift him onto the changing table and get the job accomplished. My mind went back to 1953, and wrapping the Kotex packages… so I began calling his pads… Boytex! The name stuck for as long as he was in our classroom!
Like I said, Kotex and I go back a long way! (Oops, I actually said it!)
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Pen In Hand 