Here's an idea. Take a room full of nine and ten year olds, hand each of them a bar of Ivory soap and a SHARP KNIFE, and tell them to come up with a miniature replica of Michaelangelo's "David." That's pretty much what happened in art classrooms across the nation in the late 50's and early 60's, when carving soap was in its heyday. How many children sacrificed fingers on the altar of Soap Sculpture will never be known, but it's a safe bet the company making Band-aids raked in as many bucks as the soap manufacturers.

"Children, this is a bar of soap. Can you say, soap? And look, when I accidentally chopped off my own pointer finger carving soap, I had it replaced with a prosthetic finger with a sharp knife attachment for handier carving. ***

I found this nifty brochure at some book sale recently, put out by a group called the National Soap Sculpture Committee, located on Fifth Avenue in New York, NY. Written by Marion Quin Dix, supervisor of art education in Elizabeth, New Jersey, it extols soap carving as meeting many of the needs of children in art education, including ....really!...serving their short attention spans.

Lobster-carvings are taboo. Bears are ok.***

As a former elementary art teacher, I found the book extremely entertaining if totally useless for present-day purposes, and couldn't resist synopsizing it for both those who remember the pain and blood and those who never got anything more dangerous to work in art with than plastic foam and wooden ice cream cup spoons.

First of all, children, you need big strong hands, like those of the grown up man shown in the picture.***

Of course 50s era photos are now so quaint-looking to our 21st Century eyes that the book's artwork alone is worth it.

Perusing "Soap Carving in the Classroom," it's not hard to imagine why the craft fell out of favor by sometime in the 60s (in most cases replaced by macaroni-gluing). The knife issue is probably the biggest thing. Followed by the fact that soap is not really that easy to carve. It has a tendency to fall apart, any appendages less than three inches in diameter will immediately crack off, and most finished "sculptures" end up about one inch in diameter and resembling a lakebed pebble. If the child's hands are sweaty, lathering will occur and greatly hamper the artistic process.

What they expect ***

On the other hand, it's a very clean medium, and the child's hands are well-sanitized before the deep knife gashes occur, facilitating stitches and bandaging. Also, children are fascinated with knives, and will probably come up with as many creative uses for the carving tool as they will for the soap. And if all the soap scraps are put in a bucket and soaked together, the "art material" can be recycled into lumpy gobs just right for school restroom use.

What you really get.***

In reality, this final illustration of the "Atomic Structure of Coal" sculpture is probably the most achievable. You take what's left of every kids' bar of soap by the time he or she has whittled on it for half an hour, put out the toothpicks and you have...Tinkertoys, another big hit of the 50s.

So the next time you look at the hands of an older Baby Boomer and notice missing fingertips and well-scarred thumb gouges, you can have a little sympathy. for these veterans of the post-war art class. They carved soap, and HANDLED KNIVES IN SCHOOL. They may not have been The Greatest Generation, but they were probably The Cleanest.

***Note, captions under pictures are the words of Linda Godfrey, not those of the excellent art educator Marion Quin Dix.

(New 1-9-05 - See letter and article from 1959 national winner!)