Another image from yesterday's festival of incorrectly colored Gotham, just for fun, and because I don't feel like putting up another rote autumn image.
One more still that haunts me, in a way.
The space between them. The broad and empty street. Her face.
I’ve been working on the Sixties TV section for reasons I cannot possibly begin to express, because there aren’t any. Perhaps it’s because a search for “Sixties TV” turns up nothing but lists. The Five Most Influential Shows! The Best and Worst! You know it’ll all be familiar.
If you grew up in the '60s, your parents, like mine, must have thought it was a challenging time to raise kids. Even though our parents grew up during the Second World War, they must have thought those were simpler times than the 1960s. After all, in the '60s there were hippies, drugs, rock 'n roll, and protests; there was counterculture. Our parents didn't grow up with any of that, and it must have seemed like a different world to them.
That’s the latter half. The first was different. Yes, it all had its challenges, but prosperity was much more widespread, people had homes and cars and TVs. Yes, there was counterculture, but as I keep saying, it was named thus because it was not the dominant culture.
The site ranks, as its worst of 30 shows, Green Acres. It is worse than My Favorite Martian or I Dream of Jeanie. Okay. Goodbye.
I’m more interested in middle-America Sixties than the mud of Woodstock or the deep white shag of Leonard Bernstein’s apartment. (Lennie’s output is another matter.) And so I found this artifact absolutely fascinating - from the score, especially the chic jazz that kicks it off - to the fashions and mores and marvelously ordinariness of it all.
It’s a hamburger commercial. I’ve sharpened it up a bit and worked on the colors.
This was Wichita, Kansas. If you wander up and down the street where it was located, you still find fast-food places in abundance, but they all have the same rote boxy shape. There’s nothing like the exuberant style of that Sandy’s. We’re all the poorer for it.
The question is whether this was inevitable. We expect and demand! newness in our styles, and so the vanguard becomes the shopworn. There wasn’t anywhere this style could go without looking like more of the same - lots of glass, angled windows, googie-fueled details, bright hard interiors. It lost to warmer spaces with wood and ferns. You know, the natural things, because we’re getting back to the embrace of Mother Earth.
Now we have boxes. They are black and grey and white, the upscale colors. The vibrant old Taco Bells now look like they used the palette from Restoration Hardware. It’s more grown-up, I suppose. The clean technological future is here, now! The suburban streets will no longer be a messy jumble of disparate embassies, but refined and serene. True. They also look like tiny little server farms, boxes for thinking boxes, with no hint of flavor.
Not to say it was all good. Of all the chains, this one inflicted more blight than any other. Today in the street where the Sandy's stood:
Oh, you know it.
For the rest of the week we'll do some seasonal Halloween stuff from Days of Yore.
The Mystery Record!
IT’S A JUKE SPOOK
Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? I know I was curious: what the hell was Cudahy, a meat-packing company, doing in the record biz? Same firm, or just the same name for different orgs?
Well. Turns out Chord was owned by Michael Cudahy, grandson of the meat-packing company founder. He’s 97 now. Went on to found Marquette Electronics, and made a pile.
Oh, the song?
Monty Python would use the same technique for an album.
It’s 1918.
That’s an eye-catching ad, no?
The geekiest dang account of Novo can be found here. It’s astonishing how much detail we have on things like this.
Obviously this is not a magazine for the general trade.
Founded in 1851; gone by 1962, due to “competition from plastics and synthetics.”
There have to be descendants still alive. Do they know what their forebears did?
In 3 years a Paige car would set a record, going 102 MPH.
Founded in 1908.
The wikipedia entry ends with its 1930 models. You can probably guess why.
It was touted as the “scientific” headlight.”
The company that made these bulbs would, decades later, make the glass for the iPhone.
If your car can’t make the hill, the eagle will get you!
San-Tox!
But what does it do?
Tooth powder, Foot power, Cold Cream, Soap, Pine Balsam.
Hercules, Inc., was a chemical and munitions manufacturing company based in Wilmington, Delaware, incorporated in 1912 as the Hercules Powder Company following the breakup of the Du Pont explosives monopoly by the U.S. Circuit Court in 1911.
Hercules Powder Company became Hercules, Inc. in 1966, operating under this name until 2008, when it was merged into Ashland Inc.
Ah, the ol’ Du Pont explosives monopoly.
Anyway, Hercules had an explosion in 1940:
At 1:30 PM on September 12, 1940 over 297,000 pounds of gunpowder blew up in a series of explosions and fires, leveling over 20 buildings. The explosions shook the area so forcefully that cars were bounced off the roads, most windows in homes miles away were broken and articles flew off shelves and walls.
Fifty-one died. Was it Nazis? Still a question for some.
A grand old building and a fine American name.
Still with us:
It suffered from the rehab mania after WW2.
Will it be completely restored, or just have the damage mitigated? Stay tuned.
Why did I say that? It's not like I'm going to run back and check. Sorry.
That will have to do; now, Gluyas 1941 advertising work, and I don't say that often.
