This Halloween think of going as a HOME ECONOMIST!

Oh, I can get enough items from this 1954 Sears, Roebuck and Co. Coldspot Freezer booklet to last for days. It's a veritable gold mine of kitsch. When it came out it reflected what consumers were used to seeing, but today through the warped glass I view things...it's just a hoot.

Let's get started, shall we? 

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Food photos. Presentation is everything and as you'll see there are levels of success. The strawberry cake above, not bad. Not bad at all. Okay the color reproduction has that odd '50s look to it, but still it looks edible. I can't say the same for that hunk of meet that is on the inside cover. Oyyyyyyy...the fat on that slab of cow brings back memories. Not going there. Don't want to think about it. Let's just say I believe the color reproduction did little to whet anyone's appetite.  

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Now what about that limp overcooked asparagus?  Obviously cold or that pat of butter would have certainly melted under the lights. So I'm thinking okay, frozen over cooked asparagus. Not going to their house for dinner, but they are serving shrimp cocktail so it's not a total loss. Well...I think that's shrimp cocktail. Then again....

And then there are those yellow things next to the slab. I'm not really sure what that is? I'm thinking winter squash that's stuffed. There's no recipe in the book. Do you stuff them before freezing or stuff them with something that's thawed and unrecognizable that you've pureed? It doesn't matter what they taste like. Remember...now repeat it with me: PRESENTATION IS EVERYTHING. 

Which brings me to tablescaping. It's apparently a hobby. I only recently became aware of it. There are some seriously kitsch photos online of tablescaping. I'm hoping someone is gathering them for a future book. It boggles my mind. 

Speaking of boggling...do manufacturers still make mother/daughter outfits? I remember having mother/daughter/father outfits in Hawaii all made from the same Hawaiian print. I sort of like this odd domesticated scene on the back cover. Unnatural look to all of it just makes it even more fun. The mother is teaching her "little me"...are you ready? I think you can say it. PRESENTATION IS EVERYTHING.

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And lets not forget that apparently all of this was brought to us by the home economic droids. Seriously, look at the women in the lab white nurse dresses. Between the two in the room and the inset they look like triplets. Droid triplets. I'm thinking if you're going to a Halloween party consider going as the lovely Jean Shaw. She's got a little bit of Bride of Frankenstein and Betty Crocker going on. And what would you think if this woman with this expression were to bring in that slab of meat and place it before you? I'd be thinking "Oh shoot, left over parts. She's serving me left over parts!" and I'd be running out of the house past the villagers carrying pitchforks.

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Now, I've left HIM for last. The penguin. Oh sure, he looks harmless enough. He's just a scientist penguin. Well, I will present evidence within the next few days that this little penguin is no ordinary penguin. Okay, I think I already made that point when I said he was a scientist. But no...I'm talking psychotic penguin. I think there's a reason this psychotic penguin and Jean "Bride of Frankenstein" Shaw are sharing the first page of this booklet. 

Stay tuned kids. Same penguin ephemera time. Same penguin ephemera channel.

HALLOWEEN EPHEMERA collected

If you're not familiar with some of the books of ephemera that Taschen has published you're missing out on some serious visual candy. One worth putting in your collection is Halloween: Vintage Holiday Graphics. A volume with page after page after page of wonderful imagery: postcards, photos of children in costumes, illustrations from children's books, masks, advertisements, etc. This will not be a book you'll

 thumb through once and put on the shelf. You'll be back to this one over and over again and each time you'll see things you didn't remember seeing the last time you picked it up. Okay, I'll say it...I give it two thumbs up. Thumbs seriously covered with chocolate from that Snickers bar I forgot about that's now melted into the seam of the bottom of my trick or treat bag. 

Driving my RED CADILLAC

When I was growing up Cadillacs were rich people cars. They had air conditioning. My folks had Fords, Chevys, and Oldsmobiles. We didn't have an air conditioner. Now Oldsmobiles are gone and Cadillacs are barely holding on. I drive a Japanese car. Who knew it would end up like this.

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I just found this ad in the June 1955 National Geographic and it made me smile because I've spent moments today at the cyber ball at Willow Manor. Shows you what the net can do. Use your imagination and you can go anywhere. Today, I'm this frosty looking blond driving away in a red Cadillac with Thomas Crown at the wheel. My reality...stopped up sink, storm outside, power on and off, net access here and there. I think I'll step back into this piece of vintage ephemera and worry about that ugly clogged sink later. I can pretend I'm elegant even while I sit here in a dirty Relay for Life t-shirt, mismatched socks, and a pair of sweatpants that faded from their original color long ago. Of course this is exactly what this ad had in mind. Fool me into believing that if I bought this car I'd turn into Grace Kelly. Well, a girl can dream.

Al Buell, Brown and Bigelow, and TED MANTES

This is a little piece of ephemera I've kept for years. I actually don't know how old it is. It's at least from the '60s, could be the '50s. Until today I really didn't pay much attention to any of the information on it other than the Mantes name. 

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I knew T. R. Mantes, Ted Mantes. He was a very kind man, boisterous voice, extremely vice like handshake. He was well known in the scale business. He died many years ago. I worked during a Christmas break in 1969 at his office in San Francisco which was just down the street from the police station. I used to sit and look out the window at the station. Turns out they were watching us too. People used to come in to buy small balance beam scales and say, "Uhhh, I need a scale to weigh ceramic powder." We all knew what they were buying the scales for and it wasn't ceramic powder. Well the police station knew it too and they'd watch the buyers leave and apparently follow them. Somewhere along the line Ted was talking to someone from the station who let Ted in on the fact the place was being watched. They told him that quite a few of his scales were in the evidence locker. Ted, being the salesman that he was, asked if he could get them back so he could resell them. The cop said "no."

It was because of Ted that I have this old promotional ink blotter. That's what this card is. An ink blotter. It even has an ink stain on the blue backing. Today I decided to research a little bit about some of the other information given on the front.

First off is Brown and Bigelow, a promotional company that's been in business since 1896 when their founder, Herbert H. Bigelow, produced and sold a one-color cardboard calendar with a picture of George Washington for the St. Paul, Minnesota coal and wood company. In other words, Brown and Bigelow has been manufacturing ephemera for us for a very long time. They produced this ink blotter. According to the Brown and Bigelow website:

In 1936, our president Charlie Ward stunned the calendar industry by paying the then extraordinary sum of $10,000 for the exclusive rights to Maxfield Parrish’s "Peaceful Valley." Other artists, including Norman Rockwell, C.M. Coolidge, Gil Elvgren, and Zoe Mozert, soon joined our company as contract artists.

And then there's this very interesting information available at this website:

Remember those great-looking Boy Scout Calendars from back in the day? With the classic Norman Rockwell paintings? All-American stuff! Couldn't get more American than that. What you might not know is that the company in St. Paul Minnesota that published those calendars was quite an operation itself.

Hubert Huse Bigelow was the CEO of Brown and Bigelow and enjoyed a measure of fame for his meticulous management style and his tendency to wear unnecessarily "cheap" suites. When the Sixteenth Amendment created the federal income tax, Bigelow simply ignored the law and became the first target of government prosecutors. He was thus convicted on June 24, 1924, fined ten thousand dollars and sentenced to two years in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas.

Of course, prison life was not exactly Bigelow's gig. A guy like him needed "protection." That "protection" eventually came in the form of a new cellmate, one Charles Allen Ward, who was already four years into a ten-year sentence for violating the Harrison Anti-Narcotics Act. Ward was released on parole in 1925 and, when Calvin Coolidge pardoned Bigelow in 1928, Bigelow showed his gratitude and made his former cell-mate operating manager, then Vice-President, of Brown and Bigelow. He and Ward then proceeded, as a matter of company "policy," to hire hundreds of ex-convicts to produce those darling Boy Scout Calenders, playing cards and this and that. Franklin Roosevelt granted Ward a pardon in 1935 and Ward ran the company after Bigelow's death, until 1959. Bigelow and Ward, the former cell mates, both died as millionaires.

Brown and Bigelow is still in business as a "provider of promotional products and corporate merchandise services". Not bad for a company that started out hawking one calendar.

And now, the obvious. The lady of leisure. The pin-up gal painted by Al Buell. The following is from Wikipedia:

Alfred Leslie Buell (1910–1996) was an American painter of pin-up art. He was born in Hiawatha, Kansas in 1910, and grew up in Cushing, Oklahoma. He attended some classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, which, in concert with a trip to New York City, decided him on a career in art.

In 1935, Buell and his wife moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he joined the Stevens/ Hall/Biondi Studio. By 1940, he had opened his own studio. During this period, he did a number of pin-ups for the Gerlach-Barklow calendar company. Buell also did work for several other calendar companies in the early 1940s.

During World War II, Buell was rejected by the draft, so he spent the war painting a variety of popular and patriotic pin-ups for Brown & Bigelow. After the war was over, he began contributing to Esquire's Gallery of Glamour.

Buell returned to Brown & Bigelow in the late 1950s. He continued to paint glamour and pin-ups until about 1965, when he retired from commercial art. He remained active until he was injured in an accident in 1993, after which he remained in a nursing home until his death in 1996.

To see more of Buell's work see the following sites:

retrogirls.com which shows more work in the same style as shown on this blotter

The Pin-up Files

A few more blotters at Majorettes

And finally Hernán Restrepo which shows the famous WWII poster

Until today this little card never meant much to me. Now I see a bit of the history involved on how it came to be. I value this now even more, though knowing it was from my family friend Ted Mantes was really enough. It's one of those little gems of ephemera that most people tossed away decades ago. A piece of paper with a history.

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New book available on Amazon.
Tattered and Lost: Forgotten Dolls

This one is for those who love dolls!

Snapshots from the last 100+ years of children and adults with dolls. Okay, there are a couple of dogs too.

Perfect stocking stuffer!

Champion International = Modern Screen = MARILYN MONROE

Champion-International Paper was a large paper manufacturer originally founded in 1937 as U.S. Plywood Corporation. There's a good bet that if you collect ephemera you've got something manufactured by Champion. Perhaps an old movie magazine like say...Modern Screen.

Modern Screen debuted in 1930 as a magazine providing pictorials and interviews with movie stars. Somewhere in this house I know I have an old copy of Modern Screen from the 1960s. The magazine ceased publication in 1985.

But at one point, specifically the April 1955 National Geographic, Champion-International and Modern Screen came together to use Marilyn Monroe. Didn't everybody use Marilyn Monroe? Did she get a piece of the action for this ad? Did her agent work out a deal or were laws so different then on how a celebrity likeness could be used that this was as much as a surprise to her as those who opened National Geographic and saw Marilyn smiling back at them?

Well Champion-International is now International Paper. Modern Screen is no more. And Marilyn? Marilyn is still out there hawking products whether she likes it or not.

Click on image to see it larger. (SOURCE: National Geographic April 1955)