You thought selling GRIT was tough? Try peddling White Cloverine Salve.

“Salve” isn’t something that you hear about much any more, though it’s still sold, and indeed, many of the myriad skin ailments in alleviates — dry skin, chapped lips, etc. — have products aimed at them that we all know by rote, and are pretty much the same thing by different names. “Salve” as part of a brand name has gone the way of bicarbonate of soda and castor oil, though. Tinctures. Poultices. That sort of thing, like what the Three Stooges would cure themselves with in a 1930s short.

And children selling salve door to door? That’s another matter entirely. When’s the last time that a kid knocked on a door trying to interest a domicile’s occupants in the healing wonders of White Cloverine Salve? Did they ever? Did Captain O and his Olympic scammers learn at White Cloverine’s knee? Kids must have once lugged around boxes of the stuff to justify a back page ad like this one — which seems to imply that selling it would get you not only the finest toys that the mid-1950s had to offer, but a delightfully retro rocketship. I can be George Jetson (even though the Jetsons haven’t been dreamed up yet)? Where do I sign?

You can still get White Cloverine Salve, by the way. Still comes in a nice old-timey container. Give your awful skin a present. (And maybe call it Wolverine Salve, just to make it a little more fun.)