You’re right about the ad copy not exactly matching the product photo. However, if we are trying to determine if such an ad could be real instead of faked, the existence of nearly identical products lends support to the real.
I think I will be able to shed some new light on this subject in a few days, so be patient.
I had these things as a little girl back in the mid-seventies. They made them in different materials and colors. I remember a red velvet and nylon set my mom brought home from Goldsmith’s, where she worked in the children’s department. There was a size two in little girls back then too. I was very girly so I loved my bras, whether I needed them or not!
We had play high heels too, so I can see this ad being quite realistic. Not that it is. I have no idea about that but it looks
The “BETTER HOMES…” tag looks like the name-and-date tag that a lot of magazines ran at the bottoms of pages in those days. (In book publishing, when they appear at the tops of pages, they’re called “running heads.” I suppose these are “running tails.”…)
The local campus library has bound volumes. I’ll try to remember to run in and check later today.
That must be a humongous library space if they have original, bound volumes from that far back. If you find it, can you copy/scan the entire page, just to show where it appeared and what kind of ads are adjacent?
I checked, and the ad is genuine. It appears on page 186, and is directly above the running subheading, as you see it here. I don’t think it was doctored in any way.
It was common for magazines to have sections of inexpensive classifieds in those days, which is what I thought this might be.
ignore this
I’ll try, but I don’t know what equipment is available on-site to do that with, and I can’t take the book out of the library.
I think most libraries have a copy machine you can use and they might charge you a quarter. Or you could take a photo with a camera set to macro distance, but that’s far less desirable.
Ah, but I haven’t the home equipment for scanning.
I’ll take your word for it, Sam, even if Musicat won’t. I remember ads for that sort of stuff and that section of most mags was my favorite part. I still haven’t gotten a Spider Monkey, though.
How did those Sea Monkeys work out? That chinchilla breeding scheme? The X-Ray vision gadget?
My mother grew up in the '50s…she remembers having “dress-up heels” that were sized to fit a child’s foot. That might explain what the little girl is wearing in the ad.
As previous posters mentioned, I don’t think the picture in the ad is real. The ad itself certainly seems to be genuine, but I think the picture is an example of pre-Photoshop image manipulation. Which makes sense: it’s a cheap ad, and getting a model and a photographer together for a shoot costs a lot more money than having an intern take some scissors and paste to a couple of stock photos.
If anyone communicates with Mitch about this, tell him a friend in Pittsburgh wore his shirt going through a DUI checkpoint and the cops were amused (I was scared shitless):
Drunk Shirt…
Incidentally, we’re losing the “Pink Elephant” trope: I wrote a screenplay in which the sound the drunk heard was “probably just a pink elephant,” and none of the 20-ish cast understood what it meant! They changed it to “little green man.” Kids these days…!
My wife’s fish loved the [del]brine shrimp[/del] Sea Monkeys (I got a whole test tube of eggs at a pet store), my grandfather took over a chinchilla farm in payment for a bad debt (it remained bad, being it was 1932) so I knew better than to suggest it to my dad (testing things like that is the other use for older brothers after getting you booze and drugs), and didn’t get the X-Ray specs until my younger brother’s wife gave me some from Archie McPhee (after seeing the ad for 50 years I expected to be disappointed and wasn’t, or something like that).
I have obtained a complete, original copy of Better Homes and Gardens, November 1959. On page 186 I found an ad that looks identical to the one on the OP (not the best quality scan, but good enough):
http://www.doorbell.net/junk/better_homes/Nov1959_p186.jpg
The mag page (about 10"x 13") is too big for my scanner, so I only scanned a portion of pages 186 and 187, but this will help you see the sort of ads on those pages, near the very back of the issue.
I have come to the conclusion that the ad as presented in the OP is real, and while it seems odd in 2012, it was a product of the times. Would anyone like to dispute this conclusion, and if so, on what grounds?
It’s a gold mine of old ads!!! I love the People Pencils…and I remember seeing towel calendars in my grandmother’s house. I don’t recall them ever being used as towels though.
I’ll try to scan some more pages, but I’ll have to borrow another scanner to get the full page in one piece. Scanning in 2 parts and gluing them together in Photoshop is too much work.
I have some of those towels. And note those are “gay” calendars!
