They're good because they're bad for you!

Old Gold cigarettes employed many innovative advertising techniques, but by 1954 they were clearly ready to throw in the towel on health claims such as "Not a cough in a carload!"(which they employed in the 20's, along with, somewhat scandalously according to TIME, the endorsement of banker J.P. Morgan's sister).
This is the first, and least puzzling, of a series of ads Old Gold ran in the 50's that encourages customers to throw caution to the winds, double down, and smoke because you like to, damn it! Trust me, they get a hell of a lot weirder. As we shall see.























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These make me think of Easter

Py-O-My ads are all over the place in the 50's, and yet now you never see the brand. Yet it still exists, barely: Py-O-My/Kitchen Arts Foods was bought in 1968 by private label food manufacturer (i.e., generic/store label) Gilster-Mary Lee. The only Py-O-My product still available is the coffee cake mix, which G-ML sells online as a "Hard to Find" food item. I'm tempted to order it, just to see what the box looks like now, but you have to buy a case. The Internets offer no clues as to the meaning of "Py-O-My." They didn't sell pie crust mix, from what I can tell, so I'm stumped.

In addition to coffee cake and muffin mixes, Py-O-My also sold, in the 50's, brownie mix that came in its own disposable foil pan, and a "Puddin' Cake" mix (mix it, pour extra water over the top, and voila! It doesn't bake completely and you have goo at the bottom of the pan. Or, "pudding.").

What I find most striking about this image is the size of the muffins. Tiny by today's standards, this is what food looked like before America supersized itself. That's a normal muffin, folks; everything you see and eat today is too damn big.

On the other hand, candy bars have gotten a lot smaller over the years, so you can eat all of those you want. Happy Easter!

Good Friday thoughts

"Pall," in addition to being a verb that means "to become insipid or distasteful," is also a noun meaning "a heavy cloth draped over a coffin." It's a tenuous link to Good Friday, admittedly, but cigarettes and death are so inextricably linked that I think we can run with it. Why you'd use "pall" in the name of any product that produces smoke is beyond me, but these cigarettes have been around since 1899, so what do I know.

You really need to click this image and see it full size to appreciate what it's doing. Pall Malls were for a time the most popular cigarette in America, in part because they were longer than other brands. As niggling doubts about the health effects of smoking began to surface in the 50's, cigarette companies came up with increasingly ludicrous and implausible claims about the health benefits of their brand. Here, Pall Mall is telling us that its longer cigarettes are milder than others because the smoke is filtered through more tobacco before it hits your throat. They also claim that the way they pack the tobacco in their cigarettes filters the smoke better.

Wikipedia tells us that "Pall Mall" was pronounced "pell mell" in its earlier days, but when television ads were pronounced off-limits to tobacco products, people started pronouncing the name "pal mal," because that's what it looks like in print. This Family Circle ad ran in March of 1954; YouTube has a 1955 television ad that features the "pell mell" pronunciation. It also uses the bizarre phrasing "travels the smoke further" to explain how the length of the cigarettes is a benefit. And there's a bonus shot of a woman going slightly nuts after her gentleman friend lights up her Pall Mall for her. I recommend it. It's only 60 seconds out of your life and I doubt you were planning to go to Mass today anyway.

Swing dancing = bad; bicycle stunt riding = good

These little cartoons were featured in feminine hygiene pamphlets back in my day, and they really stuck with me. Partly because of the huge heads (I have a thing about oversized or disembodied heads), partly because of the contradictory messages. "Yes, it's OK to do normal girl things during your period! BUT NOT THAT!!!!"




So, it's a good idea to shower, but don't use hot water. Why not, I wonder? Too stimulating? Are we more likely to scald during that time of the month?

Dancing is fine, as long as no one appears to be enjoying it. Dancing that includes judo moves is out.

The bike riding cartoon really amuses me; can you imagine an image like that in any approved children's literature today? No hands, no helmet, feet off the pedals . . . don't even get me started on the difficulty of balancing that enormous head on such a tiny body.
























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The mysterious connection between brain and naughty bits

If there's one single image from all of the old "Now you are a woman! Smile, damn it!" pamphlets, it's this one. Purporting to somehow explain the link between pituitary activity and sexual development, all it really does is confuse the issue. Yes, the pituitary gland affects the development of sexual organs, but that's not really depicted here, is it? All they really show you is that the pituitary gland and your ovaries are waaaaay far apart, and that no girl with any decency would allow her face to be shown in an image containing ovaries. We surmise that there must be a connection, because they are both highlighted in the image, and nothing else is. But what is it? How do they communicate? How do my ovaries know what I'm thinking? It must be magic!

And would it be too much trouble to depict a girl's equipment without making it look like the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

The good old days of socially acceptable misogyny

They're still here!

I don't usually (OK, I never) post current events stuff on this blog, but if Charlotte Allen's dipshit essay in the Washington Post had you rolling your eyes this week, be sure to read Katha Pollitt's response today:

Allen claims that the misogynist canard is true: thanks to their superior visuospatial abilities, men (although maybe not gay men?) are better drivers, with 5.1 accidents per million miles compared to women's 5.7. "The only good news," she adds, is that because they take fewer risks, women's accidents are only a third as likely to be fatal. That's a very interesting definition of ability behind the wheel: the better drivers are the ones who take more risks and are three times as likely to end up dead.

Girls to the Home Ec. classroom, boys to the gym

Who remembers that movie? You know, the Walt Disney one called "The Story of Menstruation"? It was just part of the prolonged siege that girls underwent (and I suppose still do) when they got within shouting distance of puberty. The besiegers were a powerful alliance of social interests whose one goal was to convince all girls that they needed to 1) be happy about becoming fertile; 2) express their happiness through a determined display of female-coded behavioral markers, usually expressed with words like "dainty," "fresh," "cheerful," "sweet," "pretty," "radiant," "delightful," and "gay," (that last one only up until 1960), and 3) buy the feminine hygiene products produced by whichever company was sponsoring the movie (Modess, Scott, or Kimberley-Clark).

After you watched the movie (in pained silence heightened by the constant threat of hysterical giggles), you usually got a pep talk from either the girls' gym teacher or a middle-aged saleslady. You also got a booklet. Remember the booklet?



Oh yeah. My friend Karen recently sent me four of these gems dating from 1946-1961. One of them seems to be the same one my older sister brought home in the 70s--at least, the cartoons inside are the same. It's the one on the right in the image, titled "Very Personally Yours."

Now undoubtedly these presentations and booklets were a big improvement on the prior method of informing girls about menstruation, which as far as I can tell consisted of not telling them anything about it. But they still leave much to be desired. I'll have more in the next few days.

Bring me the head of Arthur Godfrey

There was just no way to make Arthur Godfrey look good, the poor schmo, but this caricature really pushes the envelope:

I mean, the artist really didn't care, did he? He didn't care that taking a pen-and-ink rendering of Godfrey's ubiquitous photograph head shot and pasting it on top of a clip art ukulele-playing body produced this freakish anomaly. He didn't care that the innocent consumer of Star Kist tuna might look at this ad and think, Holy cats, Arthur Godfrey wants me to win a trip to Hawaii, but what if I go there and sit under a coconut palm just like him, and a coconut falls on my head and my head swells up that big? Arthur Godfrey may have sufficient neck muscles to hold a 180-pound head upright, but I sure don't.

Folks, he just didn't care.







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