The Naughty List - Toro

Even if I had a lawn you'd never find a mower (or any other piece of yard care equipment) on my Christmas list...

The Christmas List - Kaywoodie Pipes

The pipe that's more than a pipe...especially after six decades when "woodie" has a whole new meaning. The picture says it all. "No, Don, I don't want to hold your Kaywoodie, now if you don't leave me along you'll be spending Christmas night on the couch."

The Christmas List - Philco Slender Seventeener

The Philco Seventeer, not sure if that means the screen is 17 inches or if it was geared toward 50's teens, but in an era of look-alike flat screens it's a pretty sweet looking set. Here's something Hitachi, think about making a faux alligator skin case for your flat screen sets.

Thanksgiving Feed - Sealtest Ice Cream

Here's another look from Sealtest. We've seen 'rip-roarin' cowboy Western Almond and now we're going for New York and Tiffany's. Today we would call this a "super premium" ice cream, but back in the 50's it was "Prestige". For me, Sealtest was a dinner table regular, it was a discount brand and showed up year-round, usually in Neapolitan. But, after Thanksgiving dinner, it wasn't unusual to have a scoop of it on top of a warm slice of pumpkin pie.

Malt and Barley

Few know Thurston J. Howell was a tennis star before the SS Minnow incident. Yes, he'd play a set or two at the club in the afternoon and then the servants would serve up the beverage that connected him with his homies back in the hood - malt liquor. One for the homies, Lovie, one for the homies...

Bob Hope's Favorite Star Kist Tuna Dish

1959 and Bob Hope is a spokesperson for Star Kist Tuna? Huh, didn't figure that one. I mean ham, yes, but tuna?

Regardless, there apparently was an entire series of star's favorite Star Kist tuna recipes including Macaroni Loaf.

You know, if there's one thing you don't want in a loaf it's tuna. If there's another  thing you don't want in a loaf is macaroni. So a loaf that's both tuna and macaroni, well...

Still, if you're interested in giving it a try, well the recipe's enlarged below.

TWA Travel

1950 and the skies are open for travel, at least to western Europe. In the background you can see one of the most iconic aircraft of the fifties. The Lockheed Constellation was the first big time airliner. It crossed the Atlantic to Paris and London carrying 95 passengers, a number that would make the big airlines of today squeal and want to charge $500 a bag for carry on luggage. Ah, but this was a different time, a time before the "shut up and sit down" model practiced by the airlines today. It was a time when TSA wouldn't tazer you into submission for approaching the fence separating the tarmac from the public parts of the airport. A simpler, more civil time and a perfect kickoff for travel season.

The Christmas List - Royal Portable Typewriter

Before hipster irony, carrying a portable typewriter was simply how you did word processing. Your dictionary came from Webster, your thesauruses from Funk and Wagnalls, and your research from Encyclopedia Britannica and the way your ideas for a term paper got recorded was on clean white paper via the impact of little, hammer-like letters. Well, enough of the old coot routine.

Nothing to see by the typical 50's hyperbole and stereotypes here. Brad's a sports star, Susan's an English major (because she's not going to ever need skills that will make her employable as anything more than a school teacher, you know), mom's into education, pop's on a business trip, and twirly-mustache granddad is just a crazy coot writing letters to Washington that would get him sent up on terrorism charges nowadays.

(Not On) The Christmas List - Fruitcake

Ah, the horror that is fruitcake. It's probably not fair for me to complain about a cake made of fruit, because I really don't like any desert made of fruit. I'd much rather have ice cream or plain old chocolate cake than a fancy preserved fruit laced ring of foam rubber that's best used as a door stop or cudgel. S and W makes a holiday, not a happy holiday...just a holiday.

Gibson Christmas Cards

Until 1999 Gibson was the biggest competitor to American Greetings, forty seven years earlier their pop-up Santa campaign wasn't winning any fans. In my book, Santa ranks second to clowns in terms of scary costumed people.

Thanksgiving Dinner - Planters Nuts

Planters, a part of every holiday I can remember. In the early years it was mainly Spanish Peanuts, the kind with the papery, red skins still attached. Later we had mixed nuts and cashews, the cashews never lasted and the mixed nuts always were whittled down to nothing but Brazil nuts by the end of the evening. Too bad I didn't learn to like those until big family holiday gatherings were a thing of the past. I guess we don't always grow into ourselves in time, do we?

59 Pontiac Bonneville, Star Chief, and Catalina

Something bad is happening here. I get the feeling the guy in the Pontiac Catalina just picked up the blond in the passenger seat and they're heading to a seedy motel where something untoward will occur. It'll be the sort of thing that can only be fully told in a film noir feature. Someone will kill someone by the end of the second reel and the bad guy (or girl) will get away, or will they? After all, do any of us ever really get away? Can we really escape our conscience, karma, or fate? No, this all will end in tears...tears fill the dirty gutters of the big city, they mix with the rain and pour down the storm drains and nobody cares.

Thanksgiving Dinner - Mince Meat Pie

Many times I've heard about mince meat pie, but I never really knew what it was. Now that I do, I don't think I want to know any more. Nothing like a nice fruit pie that includes chopped beef and suet. Yep, I said suet, the same stuff you put in your bird feeder. The first place I'm reducing the amount of fat I eat during the Thanksgiving season is cutting out suet.

Halloween Candy - Post Cereals?

Yeah, I'm trying to imagine the house that handed out corn flakes to trick or treaters. I'm guessing they had a lot of soaped windows and toilet paper in their trees. No wonder they're covering their faces in the ad.

Halloween Candy - Dubble Bubble

Dubble Bubble is a name from my childhood. The packaging had changed from the days of the 1950's ad. In my time they were end-wrapped in a yellow and red label, not packaged like their rival Bazooka Bubble Gum.

Apparently Dubble Bubble ran a series of these ads, I came across another one featuring the same style of artwork in another magazine of the same era. Actually I like the bowler-style hat and mask. Maybe an idea for my next Halloween costume!

Indy 500 - Life's Campaign Against the Indy 500

In June of 1959, Life Magazine ran another sensationalist article decrying the Indianapolis 500 as a virtual carnival of death and destruction. It gravely waned patrons of the ever-growing death toll, pronouncing a "growing case against the race" and calling it a "Roman holiday", an apparent indictment of the 20 thousand-strong crowd that flocked to the track to witness racing's spectacle.

Life feigned quoting a 1919 issue of Motor Age, saying that magazine had stated "the cars are getting too fast", but failing to mention that the gist of that article was a call for smaller cars at the track, not the abolition of the 500 as a ghoulish blood-fest.

In 1959, when the article ran, there had been 41 race-related deaths at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. That amounted to less than one death a year, a regrettable total, but hardly a bloodbath. Tilting at one of its favorite windmills, though, Life chose to make the Indy 500 out as a horrific festival of death in the American heartland, one worthy of denunciation in a national magazine.  At the same time, the magazine continued to take in revenue from ads featuring the race not to mention selling cigarettes which had been identified as a likely cause of cancer. But, we can stick to sports if we want. I don't have the statistics, but I'm sure more players had been killed playing baseball and football in the nation's gladiatorial arenas by 1959, but nothing appears on the subject in Life's pages. Then again, New York had its own football and baseball teams, it's always easier to tilt at someone else's windmill.

Happy Buzzard Day!

Yep, the Day of the Dead has nothing on March 15th, which is Buzzard Day in the township of Hinckley, Ohio. According to the Hinckley Township website, the vultures for which the area is known were supposedly drawn to the area by the carcasses and waste left behind after the Great Hinckley Hunt of 1818. The 1818 hunt was touted by organizers as "a war of extinction upon wolves and bears." Ah the early 19th century was such a gentle and civilized time!

Though this story has a morbid appeal, I like the idea that the citizens were visited by a plague of carrion birds after their bout of senseless killing, it's not likely the hunt drew vultures to Hinckley Township. It's equally unlikely that the alternate legend involving the local Wyandot tribe's hanging of a woman for witchcraft at the Big Bend of Rocky River created a supernatural beacon to which the undertakers of the bird-set hearkened. Anyone who lives in the Midwest, especially in areas where there are high bluffs or bodies of water around which thermal currents build, knows the buzzard is as much a part of the local fauna as the Sycamore tree is the flora. Though they may have been more noticable after the 1818 hunt, it's doubtless buzzards were living in Medina County around Hinckley Township long before settlers entered the area.

What would lead to March 15th being declared Buzzard Day, though, was an article that ran in the Cleveland Press on February 15,  1957. A Cleveland reporter had heard the local folklore that buzzards returned to Hinckley without fail every March 15th and he penned a piece on the subject. The story stoked the imaginations of local naturalists, ornithologists, and other reporters, beginning speculation on the predicted return of the big, black scavengers. When the birds made their appearance exactly as predicted about 9000 tourists headed for Hinckley.

Today you can celebrate the return of the vultures with a pancake breakfast hosted by the Hinckley Chamber of Commerce, see exhibits put on by the local elementary school, and buy crafts commemorating the return of the buzzards. Hey, Capistrano has its swallows, Ohio has its vultures.

What Were They Thinking? Operation Peace (1950)

Your government would never lie to you, would it? They'd never lead you into making a decision that could very well leave you dead in a foreign land, would they? Well, back in 1950, on the eve of the Korean War, they were selling the youth of America on the idea that signing up for the Army or Air Force meant hanging with your buddies, doing a little light office work, playing some basketball, and maybe doing a bit of hunting wild boar - just for the physicality of the whole thing, you know. No word about freezing to hold the commies at bay, rising life and limb, and all just to hold an imaginary line on a map. The good news, hey you'd be fighting in a forgotten war! It's just like it never happened! So sign up now!

Howard Johnson (1955)

Ah, HoJo's! I remember seeing the orange roof of Howard Johnson's from the backseat of my dad's Ford as we were bound for somewhere else. For some reason I always imagined that Howard Johnson's was a hotel, that there was a restaurant in the front and rooms somewhere in the back. Don't know why, nobody ever told me there were, it was just one of those things I assumed because we never went there. It wasn't until I started doing research for this blog post that I found I was right in my childhood assumption. Wikipedia describes HoJo as "a chain of hotels, motels, and restaurants located primarily throughout the United States and Canada..." Funny how instincts work sometimes.

Wollaston, Massachusetts resident Howard Johnson started the business back in 1925 with $2000 and an eye toward improving the profitability of the soda fountain he owned. He started by creating a new, high butter fat ice cream recipe which he parlayed into a line of 28 flavors, his trademark. Johnson started out selling ice cream, fries, and hot dogs from stands up and down the Massachusetts shoreline and eventually opened his first true restaurant in Quincy Square's Granite Trust Building in 1929. Apparently this establishment wasn't the highway-side, orange roof, that you might think of nowadays. A History of Howard Johnson's: How a Massachusetts Soda Fountain Became an American Icon describes it as "an elegantly appointed restaurant that served traditional New England fare throughout the day, with daily specials that attracted business people at lunchtime, diners in the evening as well as families." HoJo's might have stayed a Massachusetts thing if not for a famous playwright and a clique of prudish Bostonians with political pull.

The same year the Quincy HoJo opened, the mayor of Boston and the New England Ward and Watch Society banned Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude from being produced in Boston. The Theater Guild moved the production to the Quincy Theater directly opposite the restaurant. If O'Neill's play is known for anything, it is it's remarkable length of five hours, so long as to include a scheduled dinner break during which theatergoers walked over to Howard Johnson's for $1 dinner plate specials.

With the success of his Quincy venture and word of mouth being provided by influential Boston patrons, Johnson soon became one of the first businessmen to successfully franchise his name. Thus, Howard Johnson became daddy to the modern chain restaurant. Sometime after 1929 came the characteristic orange roof with its dormer and cupola.

The ad reminds me of some of the hotel postcards you see at antique stores from time to time. Fifties-era conformists finding their way inside or departing after tanking-up on fried clams, finned cars parked in the lot, an indeterminate landscape seemingly devoid of evidence of human habitation stretching off to the horizon. Yes, you're on the road and you've arrived at HoJo's, god knows what else is out there so you better enjoy hospitality while you can. In '55 when this ad ran in Life Magazine there were only 500 Howard Johnson's nationwide, by the mid-seventies there'd be over a thousand.

I like the "grilled-in-butter frankfurter", okay I actually just like the fact they call it a "frankfurter" instead of a hot dog. It makes me thing Howard had a thing about the term "hot dog". I also like the bullet bra ice cream scoop. Ice cream (among other things) shouldn't come in a shape that could put an eye out. It's just wrong.

12 Smokes of Christmas

A pretty generic Pall Mall ad from 1953 - Christmas red, ribbons, holly, bow, and denial.