When ads were beautiful

 

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AUSTIN'S DOG BREAD: The WHOLE Story!

The Latest Improvement

SPRATTS PATENT

MEAT “FIBRINE” VEGETABLE

DOG CAKES
(WITH BEETROOT)
USED IN THE ROYAL KENNEL)

TO OUR CUSTOMERS
When ordering our DOG CAKES, please see that every Cake is stamped “SPRATT’S PATENT”, and a x, or they may be served with a Spurious Imitation, containing neither Meat, Dates, Beetroot, Oatmeal, nor the other costly ingredients that make the excellence of ours. These cheap biscuits, being made of unsound and cheap ingredients, the makers are enabled to offer them to the trader at considerably less than ours. Consequently, the trader has a very cogent reason for pushing them, in the increase of profit he thereby gains.

Austin’s Dog Bread.

Dog Food is whatever goes to the building up of the usages of the animal and enables it to perform its functions of life; the development of the muscular tissues depends upon the quality and nature of the blood, which in turn depends upon the nature and quality of the food. Austin’s Dog Bread as now manufactured is unquestionably the best dog food in the market. Its value as a nutrient, and ite effective development of muscle, can be readily seen after a short trial; the desire of the manufacturers to produce the very best dog food has been attained; we have a combination that is perfect; to insure satisfactory results we use only the best materials in its composition: DO NOT BE MISLED BY OTHERS WHO ARE CONSTANTLY EXPERIMENTING. THE AUSTIN DOG BREAD IS NO EXPERIMENT. It is the same bread, made from the same formula used by Austin & Graves for years: it is fed by kennel clubs and dog owners throughout the U. S. with the best results; look for Austin on every cake. Made only by AUSTIN, YOUNG & CO., BOSTON.

Old Brown Ads (with old brown attitudes)

 

This one simply terrifies me! It sounds like instructions to drown yourself: "To clean the nose: Put two or three drops of Sylpho-Nathal in a glass of warm water.  Pour a little in the palm of your hand and SNUFF IT UP THE NOSE" (emphasis mine). But this madness makes a bit more sense when you read the first paragraph: "Everybody - old and young - should do this. For the mucus membrane of the nose and throat of healthy persons may become contaminated with the infantile paralysis virus. Without falling ill themselves, they may infect others, chiefly children." The infantile paralysis is, of course, polio, and I doubt if snuffing medicated water up your nose would prevent it. But there are eerie echoes here of the weird and desperate things people did to try to cure or prevent COVID. This isn't quite as bad as drinking bleach, but I don't see how it could help, and Sylpho-Nathal is probably made of the same stuff as horse liniment.

"Grippe" is one of those old words, like quinsy or lumbago, that you just don't hear any more. I was going to do a whole post on this, but couldn't find enough words. Heebie-jeebies? (That was, I think, a psychiatric term.) These mysterious tablets are "simply remedies which fight off the poisons in your system, and enable you better to overcome the cold." The implication is that somehow this cold or grippe might morph into influenza, one of the most dreaded diseases of the early 20th century. I doubt if Cold & Grippe Tablets made much difference. And as usual, I wonder: what the hell was IN these things? This was in the days before consumer transparency.

I DO remember pepsin-flavored gum and Life Savers. I don't know if they're made any more, but I hope not, because just the name makes me quail. Pepsin, I later found out, is a digestive enzyme, something probably taken out of a cow's stomach. This stuff has the power to not only get rid of this geezer's tummy-ache, it "purifies breath and whitens teeth" in the bargain! Clean, pure, healthful, and full of sugar and cow bile/vomit.

Though it's a little hard to make out the text of this VERY brown old ad, I think I get the gist of it: FASTABS is a miracle "vegetable substance" that you take before meals, along with a LOT of water. The ingredient is methylcellulose, an indigestible material that soaks up water like a sponge, creating a large squishy mass which supposedly takes up all the room in your tummy so you won't want to eat. Probably you COULDN'T eat with that heaving slime in your gut. 

Oh my goodness - WHAT is "smoker's fag"? I thought a fag WAS a cigarette, at least in olden times in Britain. But you can also be "fagged out", a quaint expression meaning that you're tired. But this is just so bizarre! The ad is for Phillips' Milk of Magnesia, a digestive remedy also used to relieve constipation. This poor old bugger is sitting there with a "fag" dangling out of his mouth, and he'd be green if he weren't so brown. The tobacco has made him so sick he wants to vomit. But ONE SIMPLE THING can "Minimize the After-Effects of Tobacco to a Remarkable Degree"! Nowhere is it stated that you should just stop smoking, idjit, and save your lungs as well as your precious tummy. 

Now we get to the issue of "starved blood" (in later decades known as "tired blood"). Delicate girls and women "need that blood-strength which comes from medicinal nourishment. No drugs can make blood." There is something faintly Dracula-like about all this - "blood-food", are you KIDDING me? But if you are frail, languid, delicate or nervous, then you belong in a vampire movie lying back on a chaise longue waiting for Bela Lugosi to bite your neck.

There is something just so esthetically pleasing about this ad for a punching bag, with its elegant illustration of a man wearing a long, ornate brocade skirt tied with a tasselled sash. No one explains why he's in drag, or why there is a CHILDREN'S SIZE punching bag for a couple dollars less. I have never heard of a child using a punching bag, and it is still more strange to see a man from the early 1900s wearing one of his wife's ballgowns to work out. Or maybe it's the dining room curtains?

Aha! CATARRH! This was one of the obsolete diseases I was trying to remember. Just the name is disgusting and phlegmy. So why has this dire condition fallen out of fashion? Do people not GET catarrh any more, has it just changed into a runny nose which you should shut up about, and why on earth would a runny nose spell such doom for people, particularly in the summer? The guy wearing the graduation cap seems to know all about this, though he would never answer the most fundamental question: what the hell is IN this stuff? 

Again with the stomach remedies! This woman doesn't need Alka-Seltzer, she needs a good night's sleep, and more help with the children on a daily basis. If you have that headachy, tired-all-over feeling, your body is telling you to get the hell to BED and get some rest. But no, it's plop-plop, fizz-fizz, oh what a relief it is. Overwhelmed with the constant stress and isolation of child care? There's a pill for that. 

Oh me, oh my: LOVE Aunt Jenny's Pie! (and it's made with SPRY!)

 

I just don't know what to say about all of this. I was compelled to post these incredible Norman Rockwell-esque images after seeing them on a Facebook page which features a new vintage recipe book every week. This one was a humdinger, folks! But after about the twentieth image, I get a little sick of looking at "Aunt Jenny" and her eternal bushy-tailed grin and her "bakin' and broilin'" - as if she can't get her brain around an "ing" ending to save her bustling, ever-useful life. This is a character which has been invented, built from the ground up by some Madison Avenue team not unlike the Mad Men crew, with guys in suits sitting around a boardroom table sipping bourbon, smoking Luckies and loudly arguing over who the characters should be in this little domestic drama. "Maybe the husband should be, oh, let's see - Ralph?" "No! Calvin, like Calvin Coolidge." The distant echo of Calvinism and all its prudery is likely not a coincidence. This is Middle America, folks, in the middle of the 20th century. These are good, decent, God-fearin' people, and let's not forget it.

Calvin is such a wag, asking his wife "c'n I lick the spoon?" when she makes her Spry frosting for her Spry cake, praising her chicken (fried in Spry) and her strawberry shortcake (made with Spry) with a rapturous, slightly stoned expression glued on his face, and generally acting just like those menfolk always act, all thumbs in the kitchen, just helpless and needing to be constantly tended to and fed. 

And let's not forget Aunt Jenny's role as matriarch of the community (I left out an INTOLERABLE image of her sewing circle chattering away about frying things in SPRY), "starting brides off right", which means breaking them in to a life of servitude over a hot stove for the next forty years. No wonder young women were so keen to get married.

Then there's Grandpa Briggs up at the Old Soldiers Home ("Old soldiers never die", remember? They just go to live up at the Home) who'll eat any kind of pie so long's it's "aye-pull" (which is the way you KNOW this fictional Aunt Anybody character would pronounce it). And as Aunt Jenny keeps  hammering on about, foods cooked the SPRY way are DIGESTIBLE - in fact, that seems to be one of its main virtues, so that even children and old people can somehow ingest it without becoming violently ill. 

But the really weird thing is this. If you take a good look at the folksy, g-dropping, ever-grinning Jenny, she doesn't really look grandmotherly at all. She's an actress who is probably in her thirties and made up to look "old", which translates to a grey wig, a print housedress and glasses (which in those days automatically spelled "biddy"). This is character-invention in the nature of Irene Ryan as "Granny" on the Beverley Hillbillies, who was maybe 45 when she played the role, and even the Italian Mama on Golden Girls - whatever her name was, I don't want to look it up - who was actually a couple of years younger than that dinosaur Bea Arthur and all the rest of them. (The same Bea Arthur who got pregnant and had an abortion on Maude when she was pushing SIXTY.) And oh yes, the same deal as on Mama's Family, in which Vicki Lawrence played Mama even though she was 15 years younger than Carol Burnett. 

So we have this little well-greased domestic universe (and don't ask how Jenny and Calvin survived their wedding night with so little sexual experience - perhaps that tin of Spry next to their bed tells the whole story). We have the daughter Sylvia, who never really makes an appearance here (I left some of these out, though even at that, they seem to go on and on and ON until you want to smash Calvin in the face with one of those famous "paaahhhhs"), and even two "bachelors" (gay men had to call themselves that in the "good old days"), Ebenezer Todd and Hank Parsons, who frequently hang out together "down by the depot" but never seem to get a decent meal there. Aunt Jenny seems to have adopted these two social strays as a sort of missionary work.

 

And even though this whole thing smacks of a rural setting, it's odd how formally-dressed everyone is, particularly the men. They're wearing white shirts, ties, even suits when they sit at the table, so it's unclear to me what the exact social stratum is in this scenario. These aren't farmers, they aren't blue collar working stiffs, in fact, I have no idea WHAT they do except sit in the kitchen and eat with a fatuous look of joy on their faces.

This whole thing was cooked up, baked up, dreamed up, by Madison Avenue to further the cozy domestic dreams of housewives in the '40s and '50s, to present an ideal setting with a good plain country cook who speaks no nonsense and always welcomes you into her comforting circle. But there was no Aunt Jenny, no Calvin, not even a Grandpa Briggs up at the home or those two poor old sods down by the depot. She didn't actually exist except as a 30-year-old supply model who did glamourless magazine spreads for a living and sold buckets of grease with a promise of domestic Paradise, in which no one fights, no one fucks (well, not much), and everything is soaked in bubbling rivers of SPRY. 

Radiation where it counts: Vita Radium Suppositories

VITA RADIUM SUPPOSITORIES

Our VITA RADIUM SUPPOSITORIES (HIGH STRENGTH) are one of the outstanding triumphs of Radium Science. These Suppositories are guaranteed to contain REAL RADIUM - in the exact amount for most beneficial effect. They are inserted per rectum, one each night, this being one of the several practical and successful ways of introducing Radium into the system.

After insertion, the Suppository quickly dissolves and the Radium is absorbed by the walls of the colon; then, within a few minutes, it enters the blood stream and traverses the entire body. Every tissue, every organ of the body is bombarded by its health-giving electric atoms, Thus the use of these Suppositories has an effect on the human body like recharging has on an electric battery.

The bizarre world of vintage ads