Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone, may your frog-opened bottles of hooch contain horse shoes and magic mushrooms!

The Funnies - Goodbye Christmas (1909)

Fletcherizing - Considerations for Your New Year's Resolutions

Whatever your opinion of modern medicine, you can always find something crazier in the past. Take this little comic from an August 1909 issue of Punch Magazine.

Fletcherism
The Disciple - Now, waiter, you may bring me the fish.

Fletcherism or "The Chewing Diet" got its name not from a doctor, but from a San Francisco art dealer who purportedly lost more than 40 pounds through chewing his food until it became liquefied and the spitting out what was left. He also advised chewing not only solids, but liquids...so masticate that coffee, fella. And he believed you should only eat (if that's what you call chewing stuff up and spitting it out) when "good and hungry", angry, or sad...personally, being made to chew my tea only to spit it out would make me both angry and sad.

Fletcher saw the machine as an analog for the human body. He compared food to fuel, blood to steam, the pulse to a steam gauge, the heart to an engine, and waste to ash. It was the ash that seemed to fascinate him most, though. He advocated teaching children to examine their own waste, claiming if they were healthy it wouldn't smell and would have no evidence of bacteria.

Nine years after this cartoon ran, Fletcher died of bronchitis, or as he might see it a bad air filter. By that time calorie counting had already started replacing Fletcherizing. I never thought I'd be glad to count calories.

Merry Christmas

As 2017 draws to an end here's wishing you and yours a Merry Christmas...and I'm also hoping you're not confronted by a pudding monster anytime in the near future. If you're inclined toward the Victorian, you might consider making a traditional Christmas pudding yourself.

The Funnies Prohibition Special: The Catch of the Season (1920)

"She seems to have a great many admirers."

"My dear Ethel, she's the catch of the season. Her father left her the best-stocked cellar in this country."

The Judge Magazine, July 1920

In honor of the second day of the House of Representative's ratification of Prohibition.

The Funnies Special Prohibition Edition: Columbia's Sweetheart (1920)

Columbia's Sweetheart

The Judge Magazine, July 1920

The now defunct three-mile limit refers to what used to be the limits of international waters, back in a day when how far a country's territorial claims was linked to how far a cannon could fire. Even in the 20's when this cartoon came out, military hardware had probably exceeded a range of three miles. The point, though, is that America's prohibition on liquor extended only as far as its waters and three miles out you could enjoy a cool drink without fear of arrest. So, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the House of Representatives ratifying the constitutional amendment prohibiting the sale or consumption of liquor, I give you a time when candy was, indeed, dandy.

The Years Without a Santa Clause: Soft Lite Lenses (1944)

What says Christmas more than a pair of drugstore cheaters? Yep, buy cheap non-prescription glasses for granny, that'll go over like a sack of coal. Apparently they were big once, they had offices in New York, Toronto, and London and now they're gone from the face of the Earth. Maybe they only serve elves?

The Years Without a Santa: BVD Pajamas (1943)

1943 and Santa's disposed with the jeeps and army helmets, stopped mentioning the war, and started selling underwear. Things are grim folks. Still, I dig the paisley jammies. The guy in tan looks like a Star Trek extra.

The Years Without a Santa - Big Yank (1944)

Now Santa's gone all lumberjack. It's like the guy on the Brawny paper towel package put on a Santa mask and hat. And the message, well nothing to do with the holiday. No product pimping. No encouragement to buy. Just...the war - always the war.

I've started to miss those Whitman ads. Chocolate fell victim to rationing along with bacon, rubber, gasoline, and new cars. Everything became preserve, reuses, and recycle. Everything was channeling into the war effort.

The Years without a Santa: Camel Cigarettes (1943)

Prince Albert in a Can? Santa's back to selling monkeys for your back. Now in the nice gingerbread cancer ward style.

The Funnies - That Old Frazzled Sofa that Wrecked a Home (1909)

The Years Without a Santa: Pennsylvania Railroad (1943)

Before the war the rich could board a Constellation or Clipper for exotic locals but for the average Joe and Jane it was trains and automobiles and the occasional ocean liner. War changed all that. The skies (and seas for that fact) weren't friendly and even if they were wartime rationing would have curtailed non-military travel.

Still, a the December 1943 issue of Life Magazine Pennsylvania Railroad ran this ad touting its war-effort tonnage. I've started calling this sort of ad "patriotism banking", the hope that touting a company's patriotism would equal dollars in the post-war economy.

So this Christmas, while Aunt Martha is alone on the coast instead of safe in the bosom of her family, just think of all those tanks that made the trip she couldn't.

The Years Without a Santa: Stromberg-Carlson (1943)

1943 and reality has come home for Christmas. This realization is shown eloquently in this ad for Stromberg-Carlson radios, morphing from pre-war ignorant bliss to early days "we're going to show 'em how it's done" bravado, to the long bloody trail to the war's end. It is interesting that Stromberg-Calrson hasn't de-German-ed their name, though.

The Years Without a Santa: Whitman Sampler (1942)

A spot of color from 1942! While pouring over ads from that year, this one practically screams at you for its use of color. No black-and-white and grim Santa Clause, just a box of chocolates and some holly. In fact the only mention of the war is the admonition not to forget those in the service. Apparently the war hadn't come home to the Whitman company. That would change when sugar rationing hit the US. But, for the moment, they still were selling their samplers in the same way they'd always sold them.

The Years Without a Santa: Old Gold (1942)

Another wartime Santa, this time riding a jeep through the sky in spite of gasoline and rubber rationing. Jeep Santa distributes Old Gold Cigarettes and...books...as he flies through the sky. Bad being beaned by a carton of smokes, worse by a dictionary.

The Years Without a Santa: Roadmaster Bicycles (1942)

I had a Roadmaster bike as a kid. It was what hipsters would call a 'fixie' - no gears and pedal brakes. I rode that bike all over, it was my first means of freedom. I would have been out of luck in 1942, though, because The Cleveland Welding Company, makers of Roadmaster bikes, was a vital war industry and had switched production. A decade after the war they'd be bought out by AMF and eventually become known for shoddy, low-quality bicycles.

The ad features a somewhat less war-mad Santa. He's not shoving cigarettes or bayonets into the kid's hands. I guess that makes him more the jolly old elf we know nowadays.

A Wartime Santa

Remember when a carton of cigarettes was a good Christmas gift? Me either. I certainly remember a lot of smoking during the holidays. I remember coming home with smoker's cough from a long Christmas Eve at the grandparents' house at the age of nine. I can remember lying on my back by the Christmas tree, breathing the cool, clear air, and staring up at the fog-bank of second-hand smoke that hung just a few feet above where I lay. It was like being in an episode of Emergency, only without sirens or Randolph Mantooth.

Anyway, the ad's from 1942 - gasoline rationing had just started, the US had just bombed Italy, and there was a long and bloody road ahead before peace would return. But light up boys, you may be dead tomorrow so why worry about a little lung cancer?

Don't Call Long Distance - 1942

Santa Grinch would like to dissuade you from talking with your friends and loved ones at Christmas time. 1942 was a grim time, grim with war, grim with rationing, grim with ads that shamed you if you had any holiday cheer. Even Santa had turned to a boiled-faced shrew, chiding that the phone lines were too filled with the calls of people more important than you with better things to do that wish your 92 year old granny merry Christmas. Merry Christmas? Bah, any fool who calls to wish Merry Christmas should be buried with their ration book shoved down their throat.

Funny, now practically nobody makes long distance calls. The rise of the cell phone and national coverage plans has nearly eliminated the phrase from our lexicon along with operators and phone books. An entire hipster culture is waiting - the culture for hard-wired, dial telephones mounted in artisan booths with hand-crafted books of phone numbers. Maybe there'll be a Brooklyn eatery where you have to put a dime into a pay phone to call the operator who will connect you to the wait staff. One moment please...

So this year give the gift of a cold shoulder. Santa Phone is watching you and he knows if you're buying black market ration stamps or not.

The Funnies: World War I Santa (1917)

"What's the matter with having Santa Claus make his entrance in one of them tanks?"

An odd combination this Monday. Santa arriving on a tank is a byproduct of World War I and the emergence of all things mechanized. Nothing jolly about being a "tanker" in the Great War. Their insides were cramped, deafeningly loud, internal temperatures frequently rose above 120 degrees, and their armor wouldn't turn German artillery. Nothing merry about having a German '88 detonate your fuel and armaments while you're sealed inside, I'll wager.

Gifts for the Good Little Elves - The 1937 Zenith Long Distance Radio

It's amazing how time gets away. One moment it's spring and the next minute the candle of the year has burned down to a stub and the room is getting dark. It's been a tough and eventful summer for me and the unfortunate result is my ignoring my blog while I dealt with more pressing matters. Hopefully I'll have a little more time to post now and I can get back to posting regularly. And what better way to start than delving into the stacks of musty magazines for some time-worn tat that would make good gifts for the lover of all things vintage? The item on today's gift list is the ultra-modern Zenith Long Distance Radio from 1937.

Check out those Art Deco lines! As the Zephyr name suggests, this is a radio that looks like it's moving at 100 mph even when it's sitting in your living room. It's the embodiment of Art Deco's ethos of mass manufacturing as art - a piece of furniture that rolled out of a factory with style. Today every car looks pretty much like every other car, every toaster looks like every other toaster, and furniture has become practically disposable press-board cutouts.

I've come across a few similar radios in antique stores, but they're usually in really rough shape or unbelievably expensive (as of the writing of this  eBay had one listed at $2000+). Also it's interesting to know that, though Zenith's ad touts console radios as old and out, their Zephyr range included console radios. Maybe they were hedging their bet. Still, nothing add a certain flare to the study like a nice vintage radio end table sitting next to the Art Deco chair with a deco cradle phone nearby.