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Vintage Toronto Ads: Re-Discover Old Dutch Cleanser!
Source: Maclean’s, February 15, 1952.
Mrs. Bishop found so many uses for Old Dutch cleanser that she spent a little too much time inhaling the fragrant cleaning product. That the Old Dutch girl is running off the can is not a touch of artistic whimsy; it’s the first symptom of the hallucinations Mrs. Bishop experienced three hours into her cleaning chores. We hope that the cleanser’s mascot didn’t slip on the freshly scrubbed floor in her haste to hug Mrs. Bishop.
We also suspect that Mrs. Bishop and her lovely home were invented by the ad writer. We flipped through our bedside copy of MapArt’s Toronto & Area street atlas and couldn’t find any road in the GTA named “The Oaks.” Google Maps points us to Four Oaks Gate, a residential street near Don Mills Road and O’Connor. The closest current address we could find is an apartment in the Bain Co-op complex (known as Riverdale Courts when this ad was published). If this ad was reaching out to one of Canada’s earliest social housing complexes, we applaud Old Dutch, but we suspect Mrs. Bishop was living in a tonier neighbourhood.
As for the address to which Mrs. Bishop would have sent her Old Dutch labels to purchase the beautiful hostess set, it is now a vacant lot north of the footbridge that links Dundas Street West to the upper end of the Junction Triangle.