What kind of salt?

The "salty" salt. You should put it on things! Like French fries. Because if we didn't tell you to, you'd never think to do it on your own.

Also, I'm guessing, this salt is un-iodized, given the size of the goiter on their sailor/mascot.

A bewildering array of salt brands duked it out in the pages of women's magazines in the late forties and early fifties. In addition to Sterling, you had Morton's, of course, and Ivory Salt, and Diamond Crystal Salt, and confusingly, Morton's Ivory Salt, an ad for which appears in the same magazine as an ad for Morton's, so I don't know what was going on there.

I can't remember the last time I saw an ad for salt, even Morton's. I guess once they ran Salty and his fellows out of business, Morton's didn't need to advertise any more.

The all-American puddle of goo

Who knew that bread and gravy was America's "favorite dish"?

Or that March was once National Bread and Gravy month? (For all I know, it still is, though Google seems never to have heard the phrase.)

That crusty old guy for once isn't the revered founder of the company (Wilson & Co.); he's George Rector, their "food consultant," and his "recipe" tells you how to make gravy by, basically, making gravy, and then adding Wilson & Co.'s product, B-V.

I'm guessing B-V is short for "Beef-Vegetable," since the fine print reassures us that B-V is a delicious blend of concentrated meat extract and selected vegetable flavors. The label, however, cautions "artificially flavored."

Wilson & Co. also produced Mor, which, like Treet, was routed from the canned meat-like substance field by Spam. But I like the legend (which I've just realized I cropped out of this scan) "The Wilson label protects your table" (in almost illegible cursive at the bottom). All the cans look like a little aluminum army ready to defend Good Old Bread and Gravy from the yellow peril of fresh vegetables and lean fish.

The virtue of simplicity

The copy for this ad seems to me to have been written by someone not quite at home in the English language. Maybe it's the repetitious quality: For pancakes yes! (Against pancakes no?)

But if you feel an ad slogan ought to accurately describe the product, you have to admit they hit this one out of the park: "Sweetose--It's really sweet!"
Really?
Really!

How sweet?
Sweet enough to do things with!

What it is, is corn syrup. Which already existed in 1947, but not like this! This was sweeter.

I know that last bit is true not because the ad says so, but because I looked up the A.E. Staley Mfg. Co. listed in tiny tiny type at the bottom of the ad, and learned that it's the same A. E. Staley who founded the Chicago Bears, and you can read all about him and Sweetose in this book called The Kernel and the Bean.

Donuts!

Woah, check out the vegan donuts for sale via the Google ad I just caught on the site!

And they also sell Dan Piraro's artwork.

Another 21st-century triumph

Since 1947, we've vanquished polio, TB, malaria, and Communism--and we've also (thank God) conquered that catastrophic fat shortage:

You do have to wonder, how did we become so adept at manufacturing fat in the last sixty years? What do we know about fat that Dwight Eisenhower didn't know? Was it something that came out of Los Alamos? Did we steal fat-creating technology from the Nazis? Do we import it from Asia?

Just got a new batch of 1947-1951 Family Circles. Good times ahead.

Have a Pepsi, scoliosis victims!

OK, as a still-in-student-loan-debt holder of a B.A.A. in Studio Art, I once again call No Way:



Her spine is bad enough--now look at her foot.

That's supposed to be her right foot.

So, then . . . is that her right knee sticking out toward the back? Is she kneeling on her left knee, and that's her left foot causing the right-angle bulge at the rear of her skirt? No, that doesn't work either, unless her right thigh is twice as long as her left, or the foot belongs to an otherwise unseen third party.

Did this couple honeymoon in Las Vegas and fall prey to a disreputable magician who sawed the lady apart and didn't put her back together correctly? And perhaps he made it up to them by granting them the power to magically levitate bench- and table-tops?

Or did the artist just patch together two sketches from two completely different poses?

Perhaps people in 1957 got so thin from drinking "today's Pepsi-Cola, reduced in calories" that their bones snapped like candy cigarettes.

I had not realized that Americans were worried about "staying slim" as early as December 1957. But if their preferred method for doing this was to drink lots of soda, I can see why obesity is an even bigger problem today.