Here’s the November 24, 1958 Life magazine. I really should have done this one last week, I know, but better late than never. This is a favorite: on the cover is the awesome Kim Novak with a cat, billboarding a story about Bell, Book and Candle. I love Kim Novak, I’m a cat mom, and Bell, Book and Candle is among my favorite movies (and sometimes the older of our cats, who tends to stay close to me like a familiar, gets called Pyewacket – but, as any cat parent knows, any cat accumulates about 50 names in addition to their official name). What’s not to love?

Well, okay…as we’ll see, there’s not much to the story about Bell, Book and Candle. But we can still have some fun with this issue. Let’s commence:

It’s 1958, so we’re going to see recurring themes. Remember, in this era America was under a constant cloud of cigarette smoke and floating on a sea of booze. Here you see the oft-forgotten Kool penguin mascot – in the first panel, the poor little one is in peril. If you can actually feel pity for a cigarette mascot, I do here.

Meanwhile, King Sano cigarettes – with the fancy new filter, because filters were the big new thing – has as its mascot former diplomat John S. Young. “Time and again, in today’s tense situations, I see important people under pressure lighting up this new ‘soft smoke’ cigarette,” the ad quotes Young as saying. Hey, we’re dealing with the H-Bomb and guided missiles, the new space race, the Middle East, Berlin, the Congo, Quemoy and Matsu, and this smoldering situation in Vietnam…but hey, if it means boom times for the coffin-nail business, it’s all for the good, right?

It’s after hours at the agency and the boys at Sterling Cooper are letting their crew cuts down! And not only did they get Hughes Rudd to stop by and tickle the ivories, but their piano has a gigantic hand emerging from it. I’m especially amused by the line “Clear Heads Agree Calvert Is Better,” when nobody’s head is going to be clear after a while.

(And any booze under the “Calvert” brand reminds me of what racer Buddy Shuman reportedly told a woman who wondered how he got the courage to drive a car so fast on track: “I take ‘er through the straights and Lord Calvert takes ‘er through the turns.”)

Get plenty of Planters Cocktail Peanuts for the holidays. That can remained more or less the same into the 1980s. I remember this because we always had a can in the snack cupboard. My dad ate them a lot, and they were the definition of store-bought peanuts when I was a kid. The first time I tried dry-roasted peanuts, on a visit to my grandfather’s summer home, I thought they were exotic.

The ability of flooring to hold up to high heels was an important selling point in the ’50s and ’60s. There’s one in particular I remember where it implied a woman was jumping up and down on the flooring, on the points of her heels. Which you can completely see happening. (And you wouldn’t at all see someone like that being taken away for their own safety.)

Reader’s Digest Condensed Books were such a staple for so long. My grandfather’s summer home was lined with them. He never read them, I don’t think, but he’d just pay for them when Reader’s Digest would send them for approval. Now, of course, you can’t give them away.

The dream/fantasy scenes in the Maidenform ads never fail to crack me up (and bring to mind the MAD Magazine version that mashed up a Maidenform ad with Nude Descending A Staircase). And, of course, once you’re back from your space-age makeover, get back to work in the kitchen with all your spiffy General Electric appliances. The man of the house is gonna need something to settle all that Calvert Reserve from the office party.

“I dreamed I got out of a Chrysler automobile in my Maidenform bra! The only hooter holster with The Forward Look!”

And a neat, space-age decanter for Old Forester, just in time for the holiday season. It reminds me of a Palmolive bottle for some reason. And once it’s drained (which, if your husband’s a Sterling Cooper employee, won’t take long) it would likely make a dandy vase for the happiest flowers in town. hic

Okay, there’s a ton of automobile ads in this issue. Which is appropriate, since the cars of that era are best measured in gross tonnage anyway. Let’s handle most (if not all) of them now:

Holy crap, were the Lincolns up to 1960 these massive ingots of automobile. I’ve been aboard aircraft carriers before and these give me the same impression of overwhelming size. And yet I am captivated by them. Of course, the real challenge if you own one of these monsters now is finding parts for it. (Contrast this with what the Lincoln Continental became for the first half of the 1960s: one of the most beautiful automobiles ever.)

If the USS Lincoln is beyond your means (or perhaps too spendy), there’s always Mercury. It’s interesting when you compare how cars looked in 1950, still trying to get accustomed to a postwar world, then to sort of a happy medium in the mid ’50s…only to become rolling Las Vegas by 1959.

By comparison, the 1959 Ford, which would seem like wild styling any other year, is positively sedate by comparison. Then again, you could always buy this heartbreaking work of automotive genius:

The “Olds sucking a lemon” look is toned down for 1959, but the E-Car is already suffering headwinds and has only a model year left after this one. Somebody in our hometown had a ’59 Edsel that, when he was done with it (or when it was done with him), he just parked it in his back yard. By the time I was of age, the weeds had started to grow up around it and the paint had oxidized and all that. One day when I was 9 or 10, I got to sit in it for a minute when nobody was home. I wanted so much to buy that car and fix it up. Obviously, it didn’t happen. (There were reportedly many offers made to him for it and he refused to sell. Eventually it was hauled away, and I have no idea where it ended up. I probably wouldn’t want to know, anyhow. But I’ve had a soft spot for the 1959 Edsel ever since.)

If all that’s going on at the House of Henry, then what’s the General up to?

Wide-Track Pontiac for 1959! The choice of my father’s father, who loved them big ol’ Pontiacs. Art Fitzpatrick and Van Kaufman became well-known for their Pontiac ads, which artistically enhanced the “wide track” effect and made Pontiacs seem four lanes wide.

Meanwhile, over at Chevrolet:

The famous “bat wing” Chevy for 1959. Cadillac’s fins went upward to their highest for 1959, but Chevrolet extended them outward. There’s a story – and I’m not sure how true it is – that the 1959 Chevy’s radical departure from the boxy 1958 design was because the Chevy designers found out about Chrysler’s “Forward Look” and this was their response. The outcome was a car whose looks you either love or hate. My maternal grandmother’s response was the latter. When my grandfather brought home the family’s new 1959 Biscayne sedan, she said, in a quote that has lived through the generations: “Hewie, that’s a biscuit and you’re gonna eat every bite of it!”

Oh, and on the adjoining page is a story about people learning how to hunt, sometimes with tragicomic results. It includes this picture:

Yep, some farmer had to paint COW on the side of a cow. Note that it’s in Pompano, Florida. I used to live a couple miles from there. There weren’t any cows there, let alone room for them. There’s probably rows and rows of houses there now.

Theme song for the article:

But the real action at GM is taking place in the GMC Truck Division, with Operation High Gear in full swing:

I’m having fun imagining a race like this at the then-new Daytona International Speedway. Especially with the high banks and everything. Wheeee!

There’s a GMC truck for every need! Pickups! Delivery vans! But this is the one I really like:

It looks like somebody who’s resigned themselves to having to wear braces, but they’re kind of philosophical about it. “Oh, well, it could be a lot worse,” sighs the new D860. Automotive designs of the ’50s were so expressive.

Meanwhile, here’s another word from the folks at Dodge:

It (and an ad that repeats claims that Listerine would eventually have to retract) is adjacent to part of a story about Brigitte Bardot’s sister, who has a beauty all her own:

And that is adjacent to a story about fashionable flooring from Johns-Manville! Asbestos is the wave of the future!

Back to what the folks at Chrysler are up to, though. The infestation of beetles from West Germany has disturbed the automakers enough to prompt countermeasures:

What’s not mentioned is that Chrysler had wanted to enter the European market, and did so by buying part of Ford’s share in Simca (which Henry Ford II, when he wasn’t fictionally sitting awkwardly in a race car, was said to have regretted). That, and the name instantly makes me think of Latka’s girlfriend on Taxi. I can’t see it without imagining Andy Kaufman pronouncing it.

Studebaker (whose motto is starting to become a more insistent “what have we got to lose? We’ve gotta try something!”) is thinking along similar lines, and brings us the cute little Lark:

The Lark (which was a reworking of some existing designs) sold well the first couple years. Unfortunately, when Ford (with the Falcon) and GM (with the Chevrolet Corvair and Pontiac Tempest) got in on the act, sales dropped. Soon after, so did Studebaker.

But if you really want to go places:

The Boeing 707 is here! And American Airlines invites you to fly on the big, fast new Jet Flagship! (This page has some history on this exact airframe, and you can see another image from the same photo shoot that yielded the picture in this ad. You’ll see that some retouching was involved. You’ll also find out about its unhappy ending.)

Boeing’s in on the act:

Given her expression, I can’t help wondering if he’s said something highly inappropriate. I also can’t help wondering if that’s his wife, or, ah, “his wife.” It’s the late ’50s, so…the odds are decent, on both counts. (That’s not a typo at the bottom, either: there was a Boeing 720, a slightly downsized 707 variant meant for airlines that wanted to serve shorter routes. It was a stopgap before something like the beloved workhorse 727 was ready.)

But this week Life also brings us the other side of aviation:

The fiery aftermath of an accident at New York’s Idlewild Airport (now John F. Kennedy International). A Super Constellation on a training flight became uncontrollable when a propeller malfunctioned during takeoff. The plane smashed into the empty Trans-Canada Viscount seen here, only about 10 minutes before passengers would have boarded. Believe it or not, nobody was killed. (Read more about it here.)

What else is in the news? The famous Boston political boss James Michael Curley died, and Life covered his sending-off. It was a big deal in Boston.

King Hussein of Jordan, 23 at the time, eluded an attempt by Syria to take him out. Given that my memories of King Hussein are of an older statesman trying to broker peace, it’s always jarring to see him as a young man.

The Hope Diamond was sent to the Smithsonian Institution…by registered mail, insured for $1 million (which came to fees of $145.29 for postage, registered mail service and insurance). Harry Winston, it was said, felt sending it by the post office would avoid the ballyhoo of armed guards, couriers and so forth.

There’s supposed to be a curse associated with the Hope Diamond. When I was at the museum a quarter-century ago, there was a long line waiting to look at it. I knew of the curse and, even if I’m not really superstitious, didn’t feel like waiting in line to tempt fate.

Holy cow, now there is a news flash! I really must stop wearing my monocle while reading these things.

Brief story about a leopard cub taken in by a family in Uganda. It was all fun and games and cuteness and sweetness until the leopard’s instincts started to come in, and the little cub wasn’t so cute any longer, so…off it went to a zoo. (Reminder: don’t mess with nature.)

The leopard’s story is in between a Botany 500 ad (yes! It did exist outside the game show universe!) and a Schick electric shaver ad. Where Remington famously shaved the fuzz off a peach in its commercials, Schick instead uses analogies to cactus quills and toy balloons, promising it can handle any kind of skin.

The Polaroid Land Camera! A miracle it was for the day: pictures in only 60 seconds. Now it seems so quaint.

Next to it is a piece about Amedeo Modigliani, who work was encountering a renaissance. There’s several of his works, but many of them are nudes, and although I don’t have an issue with that, we do try to be a family blog.

T. S. Eliot, now 70, has a new wife and a new play, The Elder Statesman. (Maybe he’s also got the Hotpoint 6-Cycle Washer, too!) They threw an afterparty, and given that I think of Eliot as writing rather heavy work, it’s odd to see him so happy:

In between material about The Elder Statesman, you can read about the exciting underwear that may get you a Love Letter. Or you can order the World Book Encyclopedia in time for Christmas. I’ll always insist one of the wisest things my parents ever did was buy a World Book set when my brother and I were really young. I grew up with World Book, seemed to always have a volume pulled down off the shelf, and it made me want to go out and learn more and see the world. So much that I have, so much that I have done with my life, I owe to that. I am grateful.

And you can’t have T.S. Eliot without having a cat around, as we see here. Around him, you can shop for a Sheaffer pen set (which is interesting, given that I’m a Parker 51/61 fan) and delicious Cracker Barrel cheese from Kraft. (That’s much better if you say it in the mellifluous voice of Ed Herlihy.)

It’s Beefaroni night! “Fixed just as Italian children might be eating it near Rome.” Yeah, I’m certain. Because you know that 11-year-olds are daydreaming about being on the Via Veneto.

Or you can always make them Plantation Ham with martinis made with Seagram’s Golden Gin. Notice how the ham is a pretext to make martinis. Heck, the entire decade seems like a pretext to make martinis.

An Alpha-Bits ad, which brings to mind two favorite gags:

1. “Brian! There’s a message in my Alpha-Bits! ‘Oooooooooo!'”
   “Peter, those are Cheerios.”
2. “Raymond…I could have eaten a box of Alpha-Bits and CRAPPED a better interview!”

Next door is the start of an article about Eileen Farrell, who had a long and versatile career and just seems like she was a really neat person.

The article about Bell, Book and Candle is…well, after the cover, it’s a letdown, though we do get some neat pictures. The one at the top right, with Gillian and Pyewacket, is a keeper. (“Witch and helper” might describe a picture of me and Smokey, who is often my Pyewacket.)

Another reason I love Bell, Book and Candle: Ernie Kovacs.

“S.O.S. Pads! See us at the Kitchen Debate next year!”

The Army’s big mirror was a big solar furnace done as an experiment, made of 356 mirrored sheets. That’s prospectively at least 2,492 years of bad luck if they break. eek.

And it’s helpful the Vitalis guy is also an underwater salvage expert, because, as it happens:

Life looks into the realm of people trying to cash in on underwater salvage. One of them has an idea to raise the wreck of the liner Andrea Doria, which had gone down a couple years before: just seal the portholes and pump air into the hull. He’s even got a proof-of-concept model, which he demonstrates for Life‘s inquiring eye:

Not only do I love the look on his face, but look at the model playing the part of Andrea Doria: it’s the flat-bottomed Revell model of s/s United States. (Note: if an “ingenious plan” has been rejected by a big salvage firm, there’s likely to be a reason. Maybe he didn’t use Vitalis?)

Now that we’ve handled much of the news, let’s have a drink! I miss the way advertisements used to have original art in them, but something like this ad is just so darn evocative:

Meanwhile, Carling’s Black Label gives the strong impression that the people who produce television programs are getting gassed while they’re doing it:

Maybe you’d prefer an entire stadium full of orange juice?

Or if you can’t come out and say “Honey, I need you to buy me a sewing machine” (because, after all, it’s 1958 and your full-time job is to stay home and tend house), here’s ways you can hint for it, like you’re a 9-year-old who leaves a Red Ryder BB gun ad inside your parents’ magazines:

Let’s have more booze! Here, it’s as if Roger Sterling was channeling Old Scratch at the end of The Devil and Daniel Webster.

Ancient Age always cracks me up, for the only alcohol in our house growing up was a small bottle of it kept at the very back of a cabinet, on a high shelf. It had been a gift from my dad’s boss, who usually gave everyone at the sawmill a bottle of booze for Christmas. Dad, being a strict teetotaler, almost always gave his to someone else. This one, he had kept. It was there for the sole purpose of making the cough medicine our old family doctor taught my parents to make (part bourbon, part honey). Many was the night my brother or I, having contracted some kind of horrible respiratory illness as we tended to in our young days, would be sleepless and sore, our throats raw from terrible persistent coughs. One treatment from the bottle of booze medicine would soothe our throats and get us to sleep.

Something delicious:

The thing I love most is how they really dolled Elsie up. Given that I grew up in the country and had many occasions to be around actual cows, it’s a hoot.

This looks like a nightmare in the ad, but, oh, would I be all over it like that little kid in the corner:

Alas, at my age, I now know I’d be in the same predicament that our Buster Keaton-esque mail carrier would be in here. But if I could meet Speedy, that would be nifty. (It’s a shame we lost Speedy when he fell off that fishing pier so many years ago.)

And you know that Patti Page is a stickler for perfect spark plugs! (She wrenches her own Oldsmobile, ya know. While wearing the gown. That’s why the car’s in the studio.)

Okay, it’s not the Carousel, but what can be?

“Can you bring me my Chap Stick? My lips hurt REAL BAD!”

“Children, in a time before Ikea, we had these things called furniture manufacturers! And they built furniture that was meant to be passed from generation to generation! But, then….”

And, in the spirit of the approaching holidays, we close with an appeal for you to give booze…

…and cigarettes. Because, after all, it’s 1958.

From time to time, I’ll dive into the archives, take a look at what was happening back then, and provide some commentary and recollections as appropriate. And for this first installment, let’s go back to 1979. As it happens, the 19th of November is a day I remember very vividly. Let’s go to my hometown paper from that afternoon.

Here’s the above-the-fold for the Greenwood Index-Journal from that afternoon 45 years ago. Yeah, there’s word about three of the American hostages freed from Tehran getting to Denmark; there’s a brouhaha about government officials going on trips; the SALT II treaty’s in jeopardy. But what I remember is that story in the center of the page. That morning, a C-54 cargo plane had crashed into a forest a few miles from my hometown. The two pilots were killed and the aircraft was destroyed.

As it happened, the airplane (which itself had a long and interesting history, far longer than is worth telling here) was full of dope. It had flown through the night from South America, staying low to escape detection, and was trying to land in a farmer’s field in the countryside. From what I’ve been able to piece together, they ran into fog and couldn’t land, and of course there was no way they could put down at a proper airport without risking their cover being blown. There are reports the airplane caught fire. Whatever happened, the airplane lost altitude and descended into a thickly-wooded area just off a county road. Its landing gear snagged a powerline by the road just before the crash, a few minutes after 6 a.m.

That afternoon, after my brother and I got home from grade school, Dad loaded us all into the truck and we drove over to the scene. Dad was assistant chief of the local volunteer fire department and a former magistrate, and knew just about everybody among the local authorities, so we were able to get right up to the scene. I’ll never forget the sight of that huge airplane sitting in the middle of a scorched stand of pines, everything forward of the wing box crumpled up and gone; the bulldozer moving things around, the various and sundry pieces of the airplane strewn around the ground (a stray bit of instrumentation; a shard of aluminum that one of my parents picked up, flexing it in amazement that this big airplane was made of such thin metal). The cargo had been rounded up and impounded, and the bodies had been taken away. All that was left was what was left of the poor airplane. (Much of the wreckage remained for years, tied up in legal and insurance haggling, until it was finally released. Most of the airplane was cut up and hauled away by a local scrap dealer who vowed never to cut up another airplane. The stuff that was left behind stayed a few more years. The trees finally grew back and now you can’t tell anything ever happened there.)

The other vivid memory was the smell. Plane crashes have a smell to them. It was the first time I’d encountered that smell: ground saturated with spilled aviation fuel, scorched foliage. I haven’t smelled it in a long time but it’s vivid in my memory. I smelled it again a few years later when a little Piper went down in the woods outside Bradley. It’s a smell that means death. I hope I never have to smell it again.

Let’s see what else was going on that day. Thanksgiving was coming up:

There’s too much about that layout to make me think it was an accident.

Oh, those nutty environmentalists! And so soon after Three Mile Island! (And why does everybody in this cartoon remind me of the Duke Brothers from Trading Places?)

If you were a kid attending a Greenwood-area school in the ’70s and ’80s, chances are your class got a visit from J.D. Ravencraft. He would bring this custom-built, padlocked wooden case with seized drugs and paraphernalia displayed inside and give talks about why drugs were bad. When he visited my kindergarten class, he gave us all a ride in the police van after his presentation. For some reason I’d get a little scared when he would show up. I don’t know why; he was always nice to us, but very serious about his work, and at my young age I couldn’t catch the subtleties.

The first visit to our many bygone merchants of yesteryear. Meyers/Arnold was one of those upscale retailers that seemed too ritzy for our working-class family, and looking at the ads I think I can kind of understand it. All that purposeful lowercase text says “your family can’t afford to shop here. go to k-mart and sky city and roses instead, you riff-raff. or to jcpenney if you’re feeling fancy.” Not to mention that artwork. The man in his robe looking away sternly, with his ideally sculpted hair; then there’s the gal next door in her underwear and that giant ’70s hair. Hmmm.

The big thing back then was department stores having portrait studios – or having mobile portrait studios show up for a few days. When we’d see a big RV in front of a store, my brother and I dreaded it because we knew we’d get dragged in for portraits. I hated it. Oh, sure, now they’re keepsakes in their weird color-faded glory, but six-year-old me hated having to wear my Sunday clothes and sit in this obviously phony setup while some man I’d never seen in my life coaxed me to smile when I didn’t feel like smiling. Grrr.

Instead, let’s let the soothing thought of Tom T. Hall bring us back to happiness. Tom T. was one of those presences I grew up with. I’ve always loved him. I miss him.

Greenwood had two movie theaters then: two screens at the Apollo on the 72 By-Pass, and the Auto Drive-In. The three-screen cinema at Crosscreek Mall had yet to open. It’s gone now, as is the Apollo. The Auto held on for a while, went under, but miraculously came back. It’s a treasure. I have so many memories of going there.

My folks went to see 10 at the movies about this time. I was six and had no idea what any of it meant, though I had seen the commercials for it. I only knew I rode Bus 10 to school and couldn’t figure it out.

The Greenwood Humane Society regularly submitted these pieces to the Index. They seldom failed to depress. If Sarah McLachlan music had existed at the time, you’d be hearing it.

The Index would often run pictures like this, letting the staff photographers show off little scenes they found. It’s a little bit of poetry amongst all the news. Some of these are particularly beautiful, as this one was.

McCormick was only a few miles from my hometown; it was where my dad worked, where our family doctor was, where the pharmacy and the dime store and the Red & White grocery store was. And once a year they’d hold Gold Rush Days, a festival premised around the gold mine near town. They’d have a thing set up where you could pan for gold, and somewhere back home I have a little vial with some tiny gold flakes in it from my attempt long ago.

Two big businesses from Uptown Greenwood: Winn’s Shoes and, across the vastness of Main Street, Toy Box. I only remember going into Toy Box once or twice, and I don’t recall going to Winn’s Shoes, although I was there the morning in 1994 when the sign from the now-closed store was craned down and donated to the Greenwood Museum. Toy Box was doomed after the Circus World toy store opened at the mall. Winn’s held on for a while but the inevitable happened, especially with the chain stores coming in.

Sky City’s your place to go for K-Tel! We somehow crammed 24 songs onto a single side of an LP! Buy now! Odd recollection: the restroom entrances at the Greenwood Sky City were down a shallow ramp. The Bi-Lo was next door. Many years later the Sky City building was demolished and a new Bi-Lo was built on the site. Go figure.

More shopping. Greenwood Supply was this huge brick building with building supplies, sporting goods, you name it. Near the back, next to a room that had range hoods and other appliances on display, was where the doorbells were on display. And they were functional. When you’re a kid, that’s catnip. John B. Lee was the big store for musical instruments and did big business to students who took music classes. (Although I think my brother’s guitar came from a discount showroom in Augusta.)

Cedric’s Fish and Chips was a popular chain around here for a while. I didn’t know the legend of Cedric back then, so I didn’t get the reference. I was amused by the name. We never ate there, though. If we were going out to eat, back then it was going to be at the Bonanza steakhouse (which later became the Bill Fuller Family Steakhouse).

Let’s now take a tour of long-gone supermarkets. They’re having big sales, what with Thanksgiving coming up. Here’s from the Big Star, in the K-Mart shopping center:

Community Cash, over on Montague:

The Winn-Dixie, which for some reason my parents thought was upscale (although it was where my grandparents shopped):

The Hoggly Woggly:

And the Bi-Lo, where we went. They used to have big plastic cows atop the facade, and kids used to try to steal them as a prank. I remember Mr. Harold letting me ride on the lower level of his bag cart when he’d take our bags out to the car; the Wometco vending machines along the back wall of the refrigerated food section, and I loved the soda machine that dropped the little cup down, filled it with ice, and shot your drink into it, and you’d retrieve it from the little sliding door. The kids these days will never know such pleasures. (And to add to the weirdness, Wometco owned the ABC station in Asheville, which we used to watch.)

The headline at the top is timely, since our younger cat has become very much a zaftig princess.

On to sports. The 1979 season ends with the King extending his reign (a story told in the great book He Crashed Me So I Crashed Him Back):

And this young up-and-comer served notice, too. I’d keep an eye on him for next year.

A little more shopping, and this is certainly a pretext for a sale. (I keep wondering about a seafood joint offering a Buddy Rich special.)

Heeeeere’s clothing!

The comics section. These three fascinated me as a child. The Born Loser resonated with the Rodney Dangerfield albums Dad played just loud enough for me and my brother to hear. Winthrop was…Winthrop. And Eek and Meek was just bizarre, which I think is why I kept coming back.

Then there was always They’ll Do It Every Time, which for some reason the Index often ran in the classified section:

Another moment of weirdly appropriate layout: a headline about a Mafia trial…below a picture of a group touring the Greenwood Packing Plant, where pigs came in one end as complete animals and exited the premises in Carolina Pride packaging.

An ad for the Midland-Ross facility in Greenwood. Just about every year there would be a little aviation show at the county airport and Midland-Ross would bring in its flying laboratory, a tricked-out Beech 18.

There’s dozens of these little houses in the mill villages around Greenwood, near the old textile plants (or, in some cases, where the plants were before they were knocked down). Look! It’s on the Old Duke Rate! Buy it now!

And what’s with these little gas-sipping cars from overseas? Ain’t got no room for nothin’ in them things. And no horsepower!

Not when I can get me a 1975 Caprice wagon for $2395! Yeah! It’s the car that thinks it’s a house!

The back page of the back section. I remember when these full-page cigarette ads were often on the back pages of newspaper sections. Probably brought in a good bit of ad revenue. That’s counterbalanced by how many people from my life are dead because of these damned coffin nails.

And that’s all for today. We return you now to your regularly-scheduled present.