The Lost Wax Process

The Lost Wax Process
© Thomas Wilson Shawcross 23 December 2000

In 1956, when I was in the fourth grade at Concord Elementary School, I won an art contest with a pencil drawing of Egyptian pyramids, palm trees, and cumulus clouds. Mrs. Lally, our Principal, drove the lucky contest winners from the third and fourth grades to the St. Louis Art Museum.

It was the first time I had been to the Art Museum. I was impressed with the large paintings, and I was a little surprised to find that the museum contained not just paintings and statues, but other exhibits as well. One of the display cases contained gold jewelry that had been made by the "lost wax process."

At the time, and for many years later, to tell the truth, I misinterpreted that to mean that the process that was used to make the jewelry had somehow been lost over the passage of time. It never occurred to me that it was the wax that was "lost" in the process of making the jewelry. Surely the process itself had been lost, and that's why these fine pieces were found only in museums! I figured it was like the lost secret process of how the pyramids were made, or maybe that "lost chord" that Jimmy Durante always looked for on his piano. If only someone had taken the time to write down the wax process for making jewelry, we could still be making jewelry as well as our ancestors had!

The next exhibit room contained an Egyptian Mummy. A Mummy in St Louis! I would never have thought it possible. Part of a blackened toe showed through the wrappings! I was transfixed. It was then that I began to understand the immense passage of time that had occurred before I was born. I began to wonder how many other secrets like the prized "lost wax process" had been lost under the swirling haze of the centuries.

Stonehenge, the statues of Easter Island, the Stradivarius violin, and how my Mom cooked hamburgers. All lost, lost, lost, like Atlantis, because no one had bothered to take pen in hand and record these things. Over the years, I have wondered how an insensate population could have failed to document its achievements.

Today, I discovered how this happens. I drove to Penelope's Bake Shop in Delray Beach to pick up some cakes. Entering Penelope's kitchen was like walking back through time. A delicious aroma that I had not experienced for thirty years greeted me. It was the heady smell of baked piecrust dough, sugar, and cinnamon.

Mom used to make pies from "scratch," a process that I have not witnessed for at least thirty years. As part of this process, one makes dough (I used to know how to do this - flour is involved somehow) and flattens it out to form the lower and upper crusts of the pie. There was always some dough left over, after trimming around the edge of the pie dish.

Having grown up in The Depression, Mom never wasted anything, so she took the inch-wide dough trimmings and laid them out flat and cut them in strips, about six inches in length. Then, she sprinkled them with a mixture of sugar and cinnamon. All that was left to do was to roll them up and cook them in their own little pie tin. I seem to remember them having butter on them. Mom put butter on everything, so they probably had butter on them. What heaven! These little rolled up treats were wonderful.

Now, one would think that I would not have forgotten them, but I had. Bit by bit, day by day, time had passed and suddenly the last time I had had these rolled up piedough delicacies was during the Kennedy administration. I didn't remember them, and I didn't even miss them. Probably a similar thing happened with the Egyptian pyramids.

I don't know if Mom even had a name for these treats. I have never discussed them with anyone until today. I told the lady at Penelope's that her kitchen smelled like the little rolled-up piedough things my Mom used to make, and she said, "Oh, yes. Everyone used to make them. These are fancier versions, with cream cheese fillings." She pointed to some tiny croissant-shaped piedough things spread out on a tray by the entrance.

Well, if everyone used to make those things, they should have had a name, and certainly they should not have been forgotten. Yet, I am certain that my children have never experienced them. Just as they don't know that a refrigerator is really an "icebox," and that waiting "until the cows come home" is an awfully long time. Just as they have never "canned" peaches, or hand-cranked ice cream, or done any of a myriad of things that I did as a prehistoric kid back in the olden days of black and white television.

I suppose it is the seemingly commonplace, ordinary features of daily life that are most likely to be forgotten. Things that at one time, everyone was familiar with, like the static crackle of an "am" radio broadcast that I would sometimes endure just to hear the play-by-play of a St. Louis Cardinals' baseball game on a stormy day. At one time, static noise on the radio was as widely recognized as that weird electronic warbling noise that we hear today when our computer modems connect online.

The US Civil War was the origin of a sound known as the "Rebel Yell." This was reportedly a blood-curdling sound produced by Confederate Army soldiers. Although there are many historical accounts of this yell, no one living today knows how it sounded. Just as my children would not recognize am radio static, and their children will not know the sound that modems made around the turn of the second millennium.

I wonder what I have forgotten to tell my children about because I no longer think about them - like piedough treats. Some things even now I recognize to be like lemmings moving to the edge of my memory cliff, but they are still there. Memories of Beanie and Cecil cartoons, the theme song from Bonomo Turkish Taffy ("B-O, N-O, M-O, Bonomo, Oh, Oh, Oh, it's Bonomo! Taffy!," Sid Caesar doing his German Professor impersonation on his tv show in 1954, Milton Berle getting pasted with a giant powder pillow when he cried for "makeup!," the Indian Chief test pattern on early television, Clove gum, Crusader Rabbit, the list goes on and on. These things I still vaguely remember, but how many others have slipped down the black hole, waiting to be brought back to life by an unexpected sight, sound, or scent? Why didn't I write these things down?