My fiancée’s house was bequeathed to her by a childhood friend, who had inherited it from her parents, the original owners. Both women found better things to do with their time than empty the garage and storage areas of all the detritus of Commander and Mrs. Millers’ lives, so things turn up now and then. The thing that turned up most recently (and is the subject of this post) is a yardstick.
It is weathered with age, and darkened with fifty-plus years of exposure to Los Angeles basin smog and Cdr. Miller’s cigarette smoke. It’s also in two pieces, having snapped at the 13-inch point (I believe that the break occurred some time in the past week).
According to the advertising on it, it was probably a promotional item from a local chain of home improvement centers (purveyors of a no-longer existing brand of paint).
I placed the two pieces together to measure the stovetop my fiancées has installed in the peninsula in her kitchen, and that’s when I noticed it: this thing is only 35 inches long!
Why? Why would anyone deliberately create a 35-inch stick? Does someone have a patent on the yardstick that Ward and Harrington’s didn’t want to violate?
Reminds me of the closest my parents ever got to divorce. They were wallpapering a hallway, using 2 yardsticks, without realizing one was slightly shorter than the other. Hoo boy - that was a hot day!
Sounds like it’s within normal tolerances. Dunno man, strikes us as weird, but I suppose things in pre-1970 USA were less uptight in general, and it may have been accepted that some feet are longer or shorter than others by a bit, and that was okay. The house I grew up in was built in the 1910s, and I don’t think there was a single right angle in the place.
I own a 48" ‘yardstick’ I got from a landscape trade show. There’s no special reason why it would be 48" (some landscape standard, etc) but that’s the size they decided to make them. I still think of it as a yardstick and at least it’s cleared marked. Also, it’s some weird plastic-foamcore material so probably won’t shrink when my grandchildren inherit it.
That might be why he kept it all those years. “I built this house with a 35 inch yardstick, so if you’re ever going to make repairs to match, you’re gonna need this…”
Have you tried to measure the length of the yardstick with a tape measure? Because if may be that the numbers printed on the stick run from 1 to 35, but the end-to-end is 36". (If every number was printed, the one end would have a zero - wouldn’t it. And the other would have a 36.)
If it is 35", does the end look like it was trimmed? Is the 35 numeral cut in half? Maybe there was an accident that damaged one end, so someone trimmed the yardstick down to the next closest full inch.
Heh.That’s plausible (even though I know the house was built by a construction company), but it leaves open the question of why the hardware store had it made that way.
It did occur to me that maybe the stores were giving them out for free, and they made them short so as not to cut into their sales of actual yardsticks.
I think you’re onto something. On closer inspection, the “35” is cut off, and only shows the “3.” And when I turn it over, the first inch-mark is “2,” and the last one is “36.”
Gotta say, the apparent inchectomy looks expertly done.
No, no–it’s to sell more of the other stuff, like paint or concrete. See, if you measure with a shorter yardstick, you’ll conclude that your walls have more square feet than they really do, and buy more paint or whatever accordingly.
I also have a 48" wooden measuring rule. Many years ago - the local bank was handing them out when they opened a new branch. Printed on the stick is the bank name and “We go the extra distance for you”.
