The Joy of a new Zippo

[Briar Lee]

In 1975 a brand new Storm King lighter was a $1.98 and a geniune Zippo was $3.45 at the R&S Truck Stop at Collins, Missouri.

There was not a thing wrong with a Storm King. Except they were made of aluminum and weren’t a Zippo.



I hit a really good lick one day and my hay hauling crew hauled just over a thousand bales at a quarter a bale and by the time I’d paid for labor and gas and truck rent I’d cleared well over a hundred dollars, enough to take my crew to R&S and feed them and buy all three a new Zippo and myself one too. I also bought four cans of lighter fluid and four packs of flints. It came to less than $20, plus the meals and tip.

I still went home, with a hundred dollar bill.

Life is too short to not buy the real Zippo.

They last until you lose them.

I keep a Zippo with a package of six flints under the flap every place I may need one and have several in reserve, maybe that one from 1975 at the farm somewhere.

I just bought a new one. For less than $25 you can smile like you were a 17 year old kid again, with money to burn.



We hauled about 80,000 pounds of hay worth about a thousand dollars thaf day in 1975.

Today one guy running a tractor spears 50 big round bales that are worth $5,000 at $100 a bale.

500 pound steer feeder calves then brought maybe 60 cents a pound, the same calf today over $3 a pound.

 

[Chasing Embers]

Go to the Zippo site, they have sales all of the time. They had a 20% off site wide back in February, and the Black Friday sale was between 20 and 50% off. This one was just $16 during Black Friday.

 

[Briar Lee]

The only ones I remember for sale at R&S that night were the traditional brushed chrome standard Zippos.

The inflation calculator says $3.45 in 1975 should be $19.90 today. Instead on sale it’s $14.95.

I will say, that Zippo has vastly improved the hinge and hinge pin in the last fifty years, or maybe I wore out hinges and pins more when I used just one Zippo every day.

It wasn’t very long at all before I had to send my Zippo to Bradford to repair the hinge.

Maybe thirty years ago, the hinges and pins seem to last a lifetime.

 

[DesertDan]

We sell Zippo lighters and supplies where I work, and I get a very good discount.
Needless to say, my collection is growing. A brushed brass Zippo is my EDC.
I retrofitted the cotton stopper with a rubber one, it has been a good improvement so I will probably do that to all of them.

 

[Chasing Embers]

The inflation calculator

It's not always accurate. Standard Zippos sell at the local Walmart for $11.95.

 

[Briar Lee]

It's not always accurate. Standard Zippos sell at the local Walmart for $11.95.

So true!

Raymond and Selby Crawford owned R&S and they leased the restaurant to a man and his wife named Rains.

Rains paid probably a dollar for every Storm King and maybe two dollars for the $$3.45 Zippos. Rains sold them retail.

In 1975 Walmart might have sold a Zippo for what Rains paid for them wholesale. That’s likely still true today.

In Humansville today there is no shortage of teen aged boys willing to work, nor any shortage of twenty year old two ton farm trucks.

But the big round baler, that bales up twenty square bales at once, and that bale sits in the field until the farmer spears it and hauls it someplace else, has destroyed the summer hay hauling crews.

Those that haven’t done it cannot imagine how hard work hay hauling was.

That hay, could not get wet. I got paid when that last bale was stacked dry, in the barn, not before.

Not one drop ever fell on one bale of any of my contracts.

I made $255 that day in 1975, cash money, to haul 1,020 bales from the field to the barn and stack it right, perfect.

Today that would be about $1,470.

My truck rent and driver pay was a penny a bale each.

Rains sold me gas on a tab, it was less than ten dollars.

The restaurant also ran me a tab. I’d feed my crew anything they wanted.

I paid 4 cents each to my haulers that day, a penny more than market.

When I was all done I still had a hundred dollar bill in my wallet the farmer paid, plus a few dollars left over.


Today that hundred would be worth $575.

But to a 17 year old boy it was worth a lot more, you know?

On the way home from R&S the rain (I’d been dreading for hours) just poured down while my man Johnny Rodriquez sang to me.

 

[anotherbob]

Go to the Zippo site, they have sales all of the time. They had a 20% off site wide back in February, and the Black Friday sale was between 20 and 50% off. This one was just $16 during Black Friday.

View attachment 298769

they're one of the few companies that their e-mail notifications are awesome. Or less hyperbolically put, I open their e-mails and at worst find seeing what new art they have interesting.

 

[burleybreath]

I love Zippos. I buy a new one once in a while if I see one that's interesting, then stash it in a drawer, but I'm not a collector. Let's just say I'll never run out of new Zippos in my lifetime. Reminds me of knives. Always good to have a few extra knives on hand, just in case of Armageddon or something. I find the polished brass, such as yours above, or the polished chrome, to have the most appeal. Their museum, btw, in Bradford is worth the stop.

 

[Briar Lee]

My act of largesse in buying four Zippo lighters, fluid and flints that night in 1975 didn’t go unnoticed. When my mother found out she was happy, but not so much, my girlfriend.

(Inflation and fashions are never constant but human nature is. Adam would have never in a million years took a bite out of that apple, if Eve had have been some waddling old flat footed woman. )


So in order to get out of the doghouse I was in (more for tipping the waitress five dollars than wasting money on lighters) I took my girlfriend out and tried buying her a watch but she didn’t like any of them, for less than my entire $100.

But she did suggest ones I should buy for myself (in order to accompany her I suppose).


Instead of the fifty five dollar Quartz Timex I only shelled out twenty two for the self winder. It looked about the same. It lasted until my next girlfriend gave me a thirty dollar Timex.

Inflation calculators are always estimates. (The lighter fluid and flints were ridiculously cheap then. R&S probably sold truckers those items at cost.)

They say whatever something was in 1975 multiply by almost six.

I just bought this incredibly cool Timex Expedition Quartz 100 meter Indiglo for $31.


There is no way any watch at all sold for five dollars in 1975 except maybe a Scotty “dollar watch”.



But a teenage girl would still get mad at another girl (and her boyfriend) if her boyfriend left her a tip worth thirty dollars.

I own a 1973 Sears Wish Book. Except for tools and finer jewelry there’s hardly one item that could be competitive today at any price, except maybe some work clothes, if they were natural fibers and not polyester.

And today, there are counterfeits of real products I don’t think had any market at all fifty years ago.

https://www.zippo.com/pages/product-infringement-notice#:~:text=Look%20for%20signs%20of%20Zippo's,(if%20any)%20is%20accurate.

 

[Searock Fan]

Back when I had my own smoke shop I used to snicker to myself when the macho men from the sporting goods store next door would come in and want to buy a Zippo. They would look around and almost always choose one of the various camo styles. Seems this was prefect to complete their ensem. What amused me was that they wanted it for when they went "huntin". Can you imagine dropping it in the woods and then trying to find it again? Among the leaves and brush it is almost invisible. So, right after hunting season many would be back to buy another Zippo... camo, just like the first one. Some people never smarten up.


How about a round of "Where's Zippy"?

 

[Old Smokey]

I love my zippo. I have a pipe insert in it and it has Sherlock Holmes on it.

 

[FLDRD]

I lost my Zippo last week and had no idea where is went. I found it in the bottom of my laundry basket after gathering clothes that had gone through both the washer & dryer.

It lit right up first spin. ?

Pipe insert with a rubber gasket addition on the bottom...

 

[Old Smokey]

I lost my Zippo last week and had no idea where is went. I found it in the bottom of my laundry basket after gathering clothes that had gone through both the washer & dryer.

It lit right up first spin. ?

Pipe insert with a rubber gasket addition on the bottom...

ZIPPO

 

[didimauw]

I will be a zippo fan untill I die. I have a brass armor zippo, my daughters birthyear that I carried for almost 8 years straight. Had the hinge replaced twice by warranty over the years.

Then I decided I would give it to my daughter when she's older and I bought a plain Street Chrome one, I think Jan of 2021 and its been in my pocket ever since.


They certainly get their use with me, However for pipes, I still prefer my Old Boy.

I also have 2 more for backups, a black crackle, and a more shiny chrome one. and 4 that I bought just to collect, that just hang on my wall.

I have enough Zippos.

 

[Zeno Marx]

Love to hear about baling hay. I grew up in a small, rural farm town (pop.2000, no street lights, one bank, 2 grocery stores, brick roads), and it was my very first job. Turned out to be my best paying job for years too, which was a rude awakening for a bit there. Chewed leaf tobacco, so no use for a lighter.

 

[Old Smokey]

Love to hear about baling hay. I grew up in a small, rural farm town (pop.2000, no street lights, one bank, 2 grocery stores, brick roads), and it was my very first job. Turned out to be my best paying job for years too, which was a rude awakening for a bit there. Chewed leaf tobacco, so no use for a lighter.

I jumped into a square baler when I was younger and came out in an amazing fashion. I was a walking bale. Had a terrible case of hay rash after in places you dont want a hay rash.

 

[Pipeoff]

I live close to the Zippo factory. They have a large museam of early lighters. Stay away from the new butane inserts, real blow torches ! They even let you watch the gals working on guaranty repair’s.

 

[LOREN]

I lost my Zippo last week and had no idea where is went. I found it in the bottom of my laundry basket after gathering clothes that had gone through both the washer & dryer.

It lit right up first spin. ?

Pipe insert with a rubber gasket addition on the bottom...

How does the rubber gasket work?

 

[FLDRD]

How does the rubber gasket work?

Goes in the bottom of the insert with the purpose of reducing evaporation of fluid.
Honestly, I have no idea how it went through the wash and performed immediately after, the dryer must have helped...
But the gaskets were mentioned by others many times and I finally got a pack of them off Amazon or similar and it seems to make a significant difference.
It utilizes the little "storage" tube in the original liner as the filling hole when installed. There's a tab that flips up from the gasket to do so, then snaps right back down.

 

[LOREN]

Goes in the bottom of the insert with the purpose of reducing evaporation of fluid.
Honestly, I have no idea how it went through the wash and performed immediately after, the dryer must have helped...
But the gaskets were mentioned by others many times and I finally got a pack of them off Amazon or similar and it seems to make a significant difference.
It utilizes the little "storage" tube in the original liner as the filling hole when installed. There's a tab that flips up from the gasket to do so, then snaps right back down.

Thanks, I will look those up.