Short Stuff: Papasan Chairs

that you've never had a papasan or a futon. No, neither one. Same here. Good for us, Chuck. That's really like sticking it to the man, you know. Yeah, No, we're anti pappa foot. We're saying tech with you, society and popular culture. We're going to go our own way and use a normal mattress and box spring combination or a regular chair. Yeah that doesn't think it's a cereal bowl for sex. Is that what they're for? I don't know, but we should shout out the great, great website at

Las Obsecura. Uh. We both love that website and have for years. And this is a you know, when you're doing papas on research, look to one person and that's John Kelly. That was obscura because he really dug into it. Dude, he is the only person who did too. And if you find any other article on the web, including this how stuff works one, it's like, here's what John Kelly found. Like, this guy did all of the legwork in the research,

and he really did dig in. But the beautiful part of the whole thing is that he failed to fully solve the mystery. It's still a mystery, which it probably will be forever. Yeah, so there are a lot of mysteries about the papasan. Uh. You can start by going to papasan dot com, which will redirect to peer one imports,

which is pretty great. That is a little fishy and cool, but there are a lot of like like you can't get anything clear as to like the origin of the name or even of the chair originally came from or when people started selling it. Yeah, it's weird, but there are so John Kelly did turn up some tantalizing clues. He wasn't able to triangulate on a particular year and even necessarily a particular country. But there's some there's a lot of strong evidence that they emerged in the sixties,

probably in the Philippines. That's where I'm putting my money. That's where the popasan chair came from. Sixties Philippines. Yeah, and that would make sense because by nineteen sixty six was when we finally got the name pier One as a store which had been I guess what it was previously cost Plus, Yeah, which I guess split off and the cost Plus when I become World Market, which everybody knows well. Cost plus World Market is still on the sign,

which I think is interesting. Yeah. But weirdly, Peer one was cost Plus originally, and I think it was after they divided. And then, if you really want to get the mind boggling, it was the guys who started Radio Show who originally funded the guy who founded pier One. Yes, and the people who were Radio Check were originally the Tandy Corporation, which I remember that name. I think. Oh, I had a Tandy robot arm that moved left and right. You still do. It's attached to your body, that's right.

It's a new appendage on Stellar. But Stellarc God, I love just hearing that name. But nineteen sixty six Peer one. What they're doing is they found a good market in importing Asian goods very cheaply and then marking them up for a profit. But here's the deal. Even marked up in the United States, they were it was still like cheaper than other stuff that you would get here from America or Europe, so people bought the stuff. So Pier One is basically like the the place everybody says, no,

this is where America became enamored with papasan chairs. So people go to Pier One and say where do papasan chairs come from? And pier One says, we don't know, but we can tell you exactly when we started selling them. It was the mid seventies. And you say, okay, great, So papasan chairs hit the U s and the mid seventies. But then if you talk to somebody else to Pure One, they might tell you that no, actually pure One sold them until the sixties. They just didn't blow up until

the seventies. So that remains a tantalizing mystery as well. Yes, and what we do think we know is that the reason they blew up in the United States was because of the Vietnam War and Apparently Here's what happened. As the story goes, American g I s would go to Vietnam. They would go and serve in you know, the countries that surround Vietnam, and they would this is where it gets a little dodgy, perhaps visit red light districts in these areas, perhaps as you know, single soldiers with some

spare change. I guess sure, and they would, uh, this is where they would find the papasan chair. Is that these brothels and papason this is where they think the name comes from. Because it doesn't really make sense that the chair would be called the papasan chair if it comes from the Philippines, because that that's a nonsensical word in the Philippines. It's actually Japanese meaning like father or

esteemed older man. Or if you're an American g I in the Vietnam War, papasan meant pimp and mamison meant madam. There you have it, So it's possible. According to John Kelly's research, this is a theory. It's a pretty pretty good one that American g I s started calling these chairs papasan chairs rather than just calling them straight up pimp chairs because that's who they'd seen lounging around in them in brothels. That's right. Uh, I think this part

is fairly interesting. Uh. In nineteen seventy seven there was and I guess in the surrounding years, but this is when this issue came out. But there was, I guess a magazine called MAC Flyer m a C Capital m AC Flyer, and it was issued by the Military Airlift Command Safety Office US, and there was a character, Major cr Terror, who was a pilot, fictional pilot obviously, and it was all about his crew and their antics and

stuff like that. And there was one issue in seventy seven that said this, uh, and this is this is the guy's like, doesn't know where to get his wife for Christmas. That's the setup. So he gets her everything and he says this, she's got that wombat skin coat.

I brought her back from Athens, the Honda Goldwing from Tokyo, candlesticks from Bangkok, a giant brass table from Iran, two camel saddles from Turkey, a pair of elephants from Saigon, and a Papasan chair from Clark, which was Clark Air Base in the Philippines in the Philippines, right, So at least by the seventies in the military, and in joke that you would assume any military guy would know, is that that you would associate papasan chairs with the Philippines.

So that's pretty strong evidence for John Kelly's idea, right, And the joke replied back in the comic was sounds like her artman is decorated in contemporary military Should we take a break after that burner of a joke? Yes, all right, we'll be right back with more on the papasan Okay, Chuck. So here's where it's possible that Pier One already had popasan chairs, just no one was really

paying attention to him. Um. It was probably soldiers, American soldiers returning from Vietnam who had seen these chairs in brothels in the in Southeast Asia and we're like, holy cow, there's a pimp chair right there and they're selling them. I totally got to get one of those. Or people went over to military people's houses saw them in their houses and then also saw them at pure one and thought these are really cool. One way or another, they

just hit just the right nerve and definitely. By the mid seventies they were all the rage in the United States as far as home decor is concerned. Yeah, and it's occurring to me. We haven't even described one because I just assumed papaisans were so ubiquitous. If you grew up in the sixties, seventies or eighties, even hanging out in the nineties, probably that you know what one is. But you might hear it called a retan chair or

perhaps a bamboo or like a moon chair. And there were different models over the year, somewhere smaller and had four legs and like a smaller cushion the one. When I think of a papasan, I think of the almost comically large round saucer that is not attached to the round base. It just you can angle it and move it around. You can make it completely flat like a bowl of cereal, or you can tilt it up if you want to look like uh was Isaac Hayes. Yes,

although those chairs are different, and those are awesome too. Yeah, it's like a retan woven king chair throne from like prom pictures in Yeah, but that's what the papasan is. And the big fish bowl one that I associate with that word had a very very large cushion. A lot of times it was uh I had like flowers on it or palm trees or something like that. I just reminded myself of a p. F. Tompkins bit where he talks about how he used to work in a hat store and they had all sorts of hats and people

would come in. They'd be like, let me try on one of them king hats, and he would say, what's the matter with you? Like, you and I both know that that's called a crown a king hat. Why did you just call it king hat? He does it way better than me, but it kills, and I just called it a king chair chair and then you corrected me rightly. It's a throne, is what I meant. Oh, Paula Tompkins

the best, the best. So that's what I associate with the Papason, Although, like I said, there have been other models, and over the years they've evolved into like instead of bamboo, it would be like woven string and stuff like that

as the support base. Yeah, or metal. They're like a lot of people have said like no, no, no, you don't have to associate it with hippies, because they were definitely associated with hippies and um artsy chic and and definitely kind of like that whole like, um, I don't know what you call it, but the same people that had beads in their doorway probably exactly. And you could

buy that at Pier one two. Right. But now people are saying, well, wait a minute, if you get rid of the base, when you replace the base with something like with kind of thin tapered stick legs, like, it makes it suddenly mid century modern. You know. So people have rethought it and it's kind of made comebacks here there. But if you ask me that popas on chair that you you described, where you could move the bowl and be the cereal yourself, um, that is that's the all

time great one. But you just have to have the right room for it because it totally ruins everything else in the room. If you have a theme going that's not popasan themed, Yes, and be prepared to drink plenty of my ties. Nothing wrong with that. And John Kelly also found a bunch of people in here that he dug up through social media and stuff that had stories.

It was kind of cool. This one lady from Malaysia said in her native Malacca, it was a very big thing in the seventies to shoot, uh, studio portraits of your kids and the smaller versions of these, Yeah, which is when they think they started introducing cushions, which means people were sitting around to these things without cushions. Just the ratan part. It sounds pretty awful, Yeah, but that's

the Yeah. So they think that by the seventies for sure these things were commonplace in the Philippines and that they got picked up by then. And I assume so you can still buy these brand new, right, I mean, I know you can get them used online virtually any day of the year. Yeah, that's another You can find trampolines and papasan chairs and the classifiedes all the time. Um. But yeah, I think pure one like if you type in papasan chair dot com, it takes you to peer

one papas on page and they have them. I looked, and they're cheaper than you think. They're like fifty five bucks I think for the highest end one. Uh no, I'm seeing some look here, this one's one eight right, okay, I mean like the just the traditional good kind that you and I were talking about, like the wicker retan version. Yeah, the cool kind of like the hanging basket ones as well, those are very cool. Just make sure you hang it

on a sturdy buttress, everybody for sure. Well, since Chuck said sturdy buttress and we don't do listener mail, then that means that we are at the end of this short stuff. So short stuff Audio stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radios. How stuff works for more podcasts for my heart radio, is that the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H