A medical school professor joked about how all the university lecture hall seats had ashtrays on the back, for the convenience of the dude sitting behind you. (Like airplanes.)
Before my time. But I distinctly remember making crafts at school, at a time when art budgets allowed for the making of useless gifts. And I distinctly remember my seven year old hands moulding a pottery ashtray and using my finger to make a spot where one might rest a smoke. The perfect gift for any parent.
I’m guessing this is no longer a thing. But it can hardly have been just me…
Not an ashtray, but I made a cooking spoon rest for my mother, glazed in ugly shades of tomato red and murky green. She continued to use it until she died, and now I have it back. I was in second grade at the time, so also seven years old.
Oh yeah. I made at least two, maybe even 4 of those at school as a 5-10yo kid. Mom had at least one of those out and being used for years after. I think my younger brothers made at least one as well, but the youngest was almost too young; his were little kid quality gifts, not big kid quality gifts.
I remember making ashtrays as a small child. But though my parents were both smokers, I don’t remember them ever using one of my lovingly crafted ashtrays. I guess my parents treasured my ashtrays so much as works of art, they were loath to sully them by using them for their intended purpose. Yeeeah, that must be the reason.
Our High School had a designated smoking area, although tobacco use was strictly forbidden.
“Bongs” were a popular shop class project, another frowned upon contraband item. I made a hammer, casting projects included ashtrays, though cast stylized federal eagles were maybe the most popular.
I made quite possibly the ugliest orange ashtray ever when I was in elementary school. When I got older I was embarrassed to have made something so hideous, but my mother insisted on keeping it since I had made it.
Imagine clay molded by a child with no clay working skills whatsoever. It was lumpy and vaguely ashtray-shaped. And it had my initials in the bottom, and a jagged line around it that I scraped into the side with a toothpick.
The teacher fired the clay for us. We weren’t allowed anywhere near that part.
I made an ash tray in second grade by (a) finding a big maple leaf, (b) pressing it into a sheet of clay, (c) cutting around it, (d) freeing the cutout and peeling off the leaf, (e) curling up the “arms” of the clay leaf, (f) painting it with glaze stuff, and (g) giving it to the teacher to be fired.
My stepfather was a smoker, so yep. It was hideous, vaguely rectangular in shape, and painted a lovely hue of green. And yellow. And pink. Possibly others.
I tried to make a clay horse for my mother, but it ended up being a pretty good hippopotamus.
Our class actually went down to the shores of Cook Inlet and dug our own clay out of the hillside.
I can’t remember if I ever made one in school. We did make a lot if crafty things over the years, though.
But I did “make” an ashtray to commemorate my trip to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. You put your dime (or whatever it was) in the machine and watch as it takes an aluminum disk and stamps it into the correct shape. You got a demonstration of modern metal working, and a souvenir.
I never smoked, but I still have the ashtray. I suspect they don’t have that machine in the museum anymore.
I went to a small Baptist elementary school. All of our arts and crafts were done with paper. In junior high, I took a ceramics class, but didn’t make an ash tray. I still have at least one clay trivet decorated with impressions from a carved bit of plaster of Paris.
I don’t know what impression I was trying to make, but when I look at it now the impressions look like stylized baseball mitts. The glaze is a nice warm dark brown, though.
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