Button, Button, Who's Got The Button

Did you ever play 'Button, button, who's got the button'? I remember playing it in grade school but had forgotten all about it until searching for buttons to photograph for another memory of our 1953 trip to Davenport.

There was no Interstate 80 then. To cross Southern Iowa we traveled U.S. Highway 34. The distance from Corning to Davenport is around 265 miles. The family sedan then was a 1949 Plymouth. I remember there being an extra passenger at least part of the trip because we gave a ride to an older gentleman. I always thought we took him as far as Washington, Iowa but maybe that is where we picked him up. (The man was someone my folks knew - a former neighbor or relative of that neighbor - not a hitchhiker.)

 He was still with us by the time we got to Muscatine and first saw the Mississippi River because he teased my sister and me: "You girls look! Do you see those boys out there in the river?" We were mystified because there were no boys in the water. Of course he was pointing at the buoys. He thought that was a good joke.

This is when I learned that Muscatine was The Pearl Button Capital of the World also known as Pearl City. This is when I also learned the word nacre (and have never forgotten it) and mother-of-pearl. Those fasteners we called pearl buttons were more accurately mother of pearl.

I was impressed that Iowa held the title as pearl button capital of the world and that something as necessary as a button could come from an ordinary clam shell.

I just knew that somewhere I still had some of those mother of pearl buttons. I found the four on the left in a drawer in Grandmother Bessie's treadle sewing machine. For comparison, the four on the right are made from plastic. As you can see, one of the problems with the shell buttons was that they chipped and broke easily.

(More can be found about Muscatine's pearl button history here: http://www.iptv.org/iowapathways/mypath/pearl-button-story )