70s artifact #1: Wild Country cologne

At some point in the late 1970s, I was given a bottle of Wild Country cologne (or as my father put it, some “smell-pretty”) for my birthday.

Wild Country was made by the then-ubiquitous Avon Corporation, which employed armies of women in the 70s who went door-to-door selling cheaply made beauty products. No doubt my mother killed two birds with one stone by adding this portion of my birthday gift to her normal order.

Slipping the bottle out of its box, I was amazed to discover it was made in the shape of a wild turkey. At the time, I was only interested in gifts that took batteries, but I remember thinking there was something decidedly grownup and cosmopolitan about a cologne bottle shaped like a wild animal! I reasoned that this was certainly a product only a technologically advanced culture could fabricate.

I twisted the turkey head off and doused a little bit of it on my finger. My sister advised me to put a splash on my “pulse points” on my wrist and neck. It smelled like something that could keep mosquitoes away— a deeply artificial scent that could have only been hatched by bald chemists in football field-sized laboratories, perhaps by the same guys who invented Agent Orange. In a pinch, my Dad could have probably run the lawn mower on the stuff.

I never ever let the stuff touch my skin again— it truly did remind me of bitterly scented paint thinner—but for years it sat on my headboard next to my buck knife: A testament to an idea of adult masculinity that never really took hold.