Vintage advertisement Crisco 1915

 Once upon a time to a transfixed nation, trans fats were not the troublesome substance we now view them as but were the very symbol of scientific progress.

If the FDA has their way about it, bad-for-you- hydrogenated oils, i.e. trans fats, will soon be banned from the American diet.

Hard to Swallow

It may be hard to digest but there was a time when vegetable shortening made from hydrogenated oil  like Crisco was a smart, wholesome choice. Labor saving and economical this cooking fat was a wonder for the harried, health conscious  housewife.

Nowhere was the transformative power of trans fats felt more than in the Jewish household.

Miracle in the Kitchen

The introduction in 1911 of Crisco-the king of hydrogenated oils- was a  life altering  game changer for kosher housewives, for whom strict dietary laws forbade the mixture of dairy and meat at the same meal.

All vegetable shortening Crisco proudly promoted itself as a Kosher food, one that behaved like creamy butter but could be used freely with meat.

As if it were the appearance of the messiah, Crisco boldly announced “it was the miracle for which the Jews have waited 4,000 years for.”

Crisco’s entry into Kosher Kitchen culture would make kosher cooking easier for generations

For observant Jewish immigrants like my Great Grandmother, it was nothing short of a miracle.

She along with millions would be transfixed by trans fats.

 Food Beliefs

Vintage advertisements 1918

At the beginning of the last century, my Great Grandmother Rebekah like most folks at the time believed certain foods were good and others dangerous but there was no proven scientific basis to it.

There was no concern about high protein, low carb foods because food itself hadn’t even been classified as such.

You knew you had  a healthy child if she was chubby, pink and fleshy.

By the time of the Great War, food was entering a modern scientific age and with it developed new products new attitudes and new rules towards eating, and cooking.

But in an Orthodox Jewish household like my Great Grandmothers, the only important rule- one that was non negotiable was the time-honored rule of Kashruth,  keeping kosher.

We Answer to a Higher Authority

Returning home from school late one cold winter afternoon in 1917, my then teenage grandmother  Sadie found her mother standing at the coal cook stove in the spotless, onion scented kitchen, rendering chicken fat (schmaltz) in the “fleyshik” (meat) frying pan, and frying cheese blintzes in the milkhik (dairy) pan, never ever confusing one cast iron pan for the other.

The heat of the kitchen warmed Sadie’s chilled bones as she peeled off layer after woolen layer of winter clothing.

The rambling house in Williamsburg Brooklyn was alive with the odors of burning carrots, frying onions, cooking cabbage and fermenting sauerkraut. Without even looking up from the stove, Rebekah handed Sadie a piece of challah, schmeered with schmaltz, – a nosh before dinner.

Food is Love

“Love and bread make the cheeks red,” Rebekah would often say.

Her hand would touch her heart to indicate the source of the food- herself. Food really was love in Great Grandma’s home, a bestowal of the purest affection.

Hungrily biting into the fresh bread, Sadie was bursting at the seams to tell her mother what she had learned in her Home Economics class.

Domestic Science

A true American girl of tomorrow, 18-year-old Sadie was among the first girls in her school to take a class in the new field of Home Economics.

In 1918, it was the ambition of every Brooklyn girl after graduating from public school to attend the prestigious Girls High School, the very model of a 20^th century school building, where she could enjoy the advantages of advanced education.

And no subject was as cutting edge as Domestic Science.

The no-nonsense class was run with the efficiency expected of a future household engineer. Donning her crisp, sanitary white apron and starched white cap, Sadie quickly absorbed the most current information explaining the new and efficient ways to think about diet, digestion and hygiene.

Vintage advertisement Royal Baking Powder 1917

Her Home Economics teacher, Miss Hattie Patton was a stern looking woman, with salt and pepper  hair pulled tightly in a bun, her features as sharp and angular as the wooden ruler she wielded.

Wearing pince nez and an immaculate white smock, the domestic dominatrix, would explain to the class how men of  science had devised rules of nutrition which would not only prevent illness but encourage a long life.

“Girls today,” she emphasized, “are taking hold of the feeding job with intelligence.”

Cooking, like mothering, could no longer depend on instinct, but on scientifically determined exact formulas.

Sadie learned that although it was  a German Scientist who had come up with the new idea of classifying foods into proteins, carbohydrates, fats, minerals and water, the “new nutrients,” it was, naturally, American know-how and industry that was putting it to good use.

Science to the Rescue

(L) Vintage Ad Armour Lard 1915 (R) Vintage illustration food laboratories

“You don’t have to trust guesswork anymore. Science has selected for you,” her teacher informed  them proudly. And you didn’t have to take just anyone’s say so. The sanitary testing kitchens of both manufacturers and government were all working overtime to put their knowledge at m’lady’s disposal.

“Who could provide more authoritative judgment about a food product than the esteemed directors of Home economics in the many corporate manufacturers of fine food?”

Science was constantly coming up with new and better products for the American dinner table; new ways to lighten the load of the housewife.

Scientific Discovery

Preparing doughnuts for the doughboys using patriotic Crisco No wheat flour, no sugar, neither butter nor lard
Vintage ad for Crisco 1918

And so it was that one day Miss Patton explained  a recent scientific discovery the  miracle of Crisco.

Progressive housewives Miss Patton explained  were ridding their kitchens of old-fashioned lard and expensive butter for new wholesome factory fresh Crisco. Which would also be the only fat used in the schools cooking class. Many HS having Domestic Science departments use Crisco

“It seems strange to many that there can be anything better than butter or cooking or of greater use than lard,” she continued, and “the advent of Crisco  has been a shock to the older generation born in an age less progressive era than our own.”

Crisco was clean pure and wholesome. Nothing artificial about it, it was concocted in a lab by trained scientists.

“There is nothing more important to the American housewife than the preparation of wholesome delicate and dainty foods for her family,” Miss Patton  stated firmly.

“Indeed the purity and wholesomeness of foods have become subjects of national interest. More and more people now realize that by intelligent eating not only can they avoid such common ailments as headache and indigestion but can do much to make good health their normal condition ( A future of Type II diabetes and clogged arteries would come decades later )

Fully endorsed by doctors and renowned dietitians Crisco was a product that would make for more digestible food.

Crisco she further explained,  had taken the place of butter and lard in a number of hospitals where purity and digestibility are of vital importance.

Crisco is being used in an increasing number of better class hotels, clubs restaurants dining cars and ocean liners.

A Country at War

Food Will Win the War- Don’t Waste it !
Vintage WWI ad for Crisco 1918

Not only was it economical and  digestible it was patriotic.

Now that we were at war patriotic housewives were asked to conserve food. We were  admonished to save wheat, use less sugar, and  use no butter. Use of Crisco would contribute to the war effort.

All the girls marveled at this new product not only economical it was…Uncle Sam approved!

Crisco is Kosher

Miss Patton held on to the most tantalizing tidbit for last.

Crisco was kosher.

This rich wholesome cream of nutritious food oils was rabbinically certified!

Smiling, Miss Patton  read from The Story of Crisco a copy of which was given to each student.

“Rabbi Margolies of N.Y said that the Hebrew race has been waiting 4,000 years for Crisco. Crisco can be used with both milkhik and fleyshik milk and flesh foods. Special Kosher packages bearing the seals of Rabbi Margolies of N.Y. and Rabbi Lifsitz of Cincinnati are sold to the Jews.”

Whether baking challah or pastries Jewish housewives could avail themselves of Crisco

So the modern woman is glad to stop cooking with expensive butter and lard and step up and let science show them how.

Sadie couldn’t wait to share this with her mother.

Kosher Kitchen Kulture

Sitting at the oilcloth covered kitchen table nibbling on the rich, greasy, bread, Sadie excitedly explained to her mother how scientists had devised new rules of nutrition and  were now telling folks what was good for them to eat based on the foods recently discover chemical make up. Not only that, she emphasized,  it took special products, special equipment, and special knowledge to do the job of feeding a family right.

Gingerly, she pointed out to her mother, that many of her traditional kosher recipes, measured by these modern scientific cooking, fell short.

Sadie read aloud from her schoolbook: “To the modern wide awake twentieth century woman, efficiency in household matters is quite as much a problem as efficiency in business is to captains of industry.”

 “The progressive homemaker, my teacher says, walks right up to science and says :”You tell me how.”

Stirring the tzimis, on the stove Rebecca didn’t need this tsoris from her own daughter, no less.

She needed a scientist to tell her about food, like she needed “a hole in the head”.

Rebecca had already walked up to her own higher authority, the laws of Kashruth, the ancient Jewish Dietary laws and asked them to show her how.

 Separate But Equal

Jewish Cookery (L) Vintage Cookbook (R) Vintage illustration Housewife

 Kashruth- keeping kosher, was an elaborate system of rules that dictated the kinds of foods  that were permissible to eat  and even the way the foods are prepared.

Only fish with fins and scales can be eaten and only animals that chew their cud and have cloven hooves are allowed. Animals have to be killed in a certain way, so the blood drains out. Dairy dishes must be kept a respectable distance from meat dishes and never the two can mix.

This was a divine commandment that was given to Jews on Mt Sinai, she reminded Sadie, from learned rabbis,  “not from some know-it-all domestic scientist.”

“You expect me to follow these rules!” Great Grandma said increduously. “Hoo- Ha! Proteins shmoteins- the only ‘food groups’ you should care about is whether a food is Milkhik ( dairy), Fleyshik,(meat) Pareve,( neutral) or treif (not permitted).”

“You want order, precision, efficiency, try keeping a kosher home,” she scolded Sadie, “then you’ll see what rules are all about. You cook your meat in a vegetable pot and you can forget about it, the meat becomes practically milkhik!’ … separate dishes, separate pots, utensils. So tell me, who is more efficient than a Jew?”

But Sadie knew one items would interest her mother and saved it for last.

Crisco and the Jewish Housewife

Vintage ad for Crisco 1915

Gently she slid a booklet across the table in her mothers direction. Entitled Crisco Recipes for the Jewish Housewife it was printed in both English and Yiddish.

Crisco was whole new food neither butter or lard it was pure vegetable oil Sadie explained tp her doubtful mother.

Crisco promised there was absolutely no animal matter in it as shown by the fact it is guaranteed under the National Pure Food Law. If it contained fat it would come under the Government Meat Inspection law.

Crisco is absolutely kosher, that is in keeping with the Mosaic Dietary laws.

“New preparations of old foods are continually coming before the public but Crisco is an absolutely new heretofore unknown food product,” Sadie read out loud.

“To illustrate its importance the American head of the Jewish religion, after a thorough examination of Crisco, certifies that Crisco is absolutely kosher, that is in keeping with the Mosaic Dietary laws. The most orthodox have adopted it and it is used by Jews who for years have paid forty cents a pound for chicken fat, rather than use products have been considered unclean.”

But a new product would alter that 4,000 year old practice. With Crisco kosher cooking would be made easier.

Game Changer

She continued reading from the Crisco Cookbook, “it conforms to the strict dietary laws of Jews and is what is known in the Hebrew language as a ‘parva’ or neutral food. Crisco could be used with both milk and meat.”

Great Grandma looked up from her cooking, and never looked back!

The  mason jar filled with schmatz -pure rendered chicken fat- so long a fixture in the icebox ready to mix into chopped liver or frying or spread hot on bread, would be nudged aside for a can of wholesome, white Crisco.

The familiar blue and white package would have a place of honor for generations.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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Transformative Power of Trans Fats

American husbands were getting the frigid-aire from their spouses. According to experts the mid-century American woman was as frosty and frigid as the polar vortex.

The cold war was a chilly time to be an American woman.

A big chill had crept into the well-appointed bedrooms all across the nation and it would appear that the American housewife’s libido was in the deep freeze.

An epidemic was ravishing the nation  …frigidity. According to the medical community the mid-century American woman was as frosty and frigid as the polar vortex.

American husbands were getting the frigid-aire from their spouses.

Happy Homemaker?

The most envied woman in the world was the post war American homemaker…smart yet easy-going with never you mind freedom… this was the new Mrs America.

Her judgement and taste helped make Americas standard of living the highest in the world. It was a life of comfort and convenience, no rubbing, no scrubbing, no waiting no fuss no muss a world that was  flameless, frost-free, filled with touch tone push button ease, and oh, it was … passionless.

Apparently the happy homemaker’s  ability to orgasm was not achieved with push button ease, nor was it as automatic as her fully loaded kitchen.

Ironically the modern problem of “frigidity” had little to do with a woman’s actual enjoyment of sex. No longer did frigidity only mean disinterest in or ignorance of sex. It now included the woman who was sexually responsive, even taking pleasure in sex but did not meet the new criteria

According to mid-century psychiatrists and gynecologists frigidity was now defined as a woman’s inability to have a “proper” orgasm with her husband, the lack of which  could result in the breakdown of the contemporary marriage.

The only cure for defrosting the frigid woman was to achieve a “mature” climax, a vaginal orgasm, the only AMA approved kind of orgasm.

The Big Chill

How Happy Was the Happy Homemaker?
(L) Vintage Ad Maytag 1960 (R) Vintage illustration by Jon Whitcomb for Pin It 1958

 To the outside world Betsy Bland’s life in 1960 was bewitchingly magical.

In her smartly tailored shirtwaist dress and Playtex living cross your heart bra  she was living the new American Dream- a lady Clairol colorful cold war world of carpools, cookouts, and cream of mushroom soup casseroles, catering to contented children and happy-go-lucky husbands.

But to Betsy everything seemed drab, a dull routine….even sex.

Not that she would ever let her husband Randy know how she felt. She prided herself on never denying him his rights.

“This was one wife,” she would boast,“who never said no.” Betsy had promised herself a long time ago that she would never shirk from her wifely duty.

But the once pleasurable sex act had become a ho-hum chore. In the dark of night Betsy wondered if there something wrong with her?

The Cold Woman

One brisk October morning as the laundry tumbled in the Kenmore dryer, and the roast cooked in the automatic oven Betsy flipped through the morning paper.

With the presidential election a few weeks away the race was heating up. The press loved Senator Kennedy and the paper was filled with flattering pictures of the handsome, smiling candidate. Betsy glanced approvingly.

Checking out the TV listings, one ad caught her eye: “This afternoon NBC will air “The Cold Woman: A study of Sexual Frigidity.” The show was described as: “A frank account of a problem affecting millions of American women today.”

Betsy blushed deeply.

Wash in Cold Water Only

Airing Dirty Laundry
Vintage illustration from Oxydall advertisement

Like most housewives, she was familiar with the popular Purex Specials for Women.

Decades before Oprah’s daily airing of America’s dirty laundry became the norm, this highly acclaimed  series of soapy pseudo docudramas geared to the housewife dealt with intimate topics rarely talked about on television.

Running  on certain afternoons the award-winning  show  dramatized such now all too familiar topics as “The Trapped Housewife,” “The Single Woman,” “The Glamor Trap,” “The Problems of the Working Mother,” “The Change of Life,” and this afternoons offering “The Cold Woman.”

The intimate topic came as no surprise to Betsy.

Checking Under the Beds

Mid century doctors and gynecologists had joined forces with psychiatrists and put the American bedroom under the microscope.
Vintage ad Sealy Mattress 1955

In recent years the American Woman had come under close scrutiny in the media especially when it came to her sexuality.

Kinsey wasn’t the only one peeking into the private  lives of Americans.  Mid century doctors and gynecologists had joined forces with psychiatrists and put the American bedroom under the microscope.

When authorities weren’t checking under the bed for Communists, they  were looking between the sheets for signs of frigidity,

What they purported to find was chilling.

Frost Bitten

Frigidity in women was so widespread a problem that some psychiatrists claimed “it is the emotional plague.”

In the words of psychiatrist Marie N Robinson, whose 1959 book on women’s sexual frigidity “The Power of Sexual Surrender” sold over a million copies, “no other health problem of our time even approaches this magnitude .” (With polio recently eradicated, they obviously were seeking some other health problem to challenge.)

Concern over woman’s sexual frigidity so consumed mainstream gynecology and psychiatry during the 1940′s through the early 1960’s  that even the well-respected  Journal of American Medical Association published an article in 1950 which began with the claim:

”Frigidity is one of the most common problems in gynecology. Gynecologists and psychiatrists especially are aware that perhaps 75% of all women derive little or no pleasure from the sexual act.”

The Deep Freeze

Deep Freeze Heart of the Home
Vintage ad 1953 Crosley Shelvador Freezer

Frigidity wasn’t new; it was the definition that changed.

In the 1920′s and ‘30s Female Sexual Anesthesia as frigidity  was called, was all too common. Though physicians may have seen women’s sexual frigidity as a serious threat to the stability of families, forcing husbands to seek sex outside marriage which could lead to VD and the break up of the home, the problem was considered normal as “nice” women were considered less hot-blooded than men.

Good girls were  told :“Nice men with marriage on their minds do not like girls to discuss sex, to go out all on the subject. Nice girls do not discuss sex, tell off-color jokes. Common sense and  good taste forbid this. A man cannot become romantically interested in a girl who dwells on the subject.”

But the term frigidity itself had taken on a new meaning in the more enlightened post-war years.

No longer did frigidity only mean indifference to sex.

Oh Come On!

Apparently the happy homemaker’s ability to orgasm was not achieved with push button ease,

Now the diagnosis of frigidity  included the woman who feels sexually responsive, who was aroused “who enjoys some phases of coitus, even reaching clitoral orgasm during manipulation.”

But that was woefully inadequate.

The new definition classified every woman as frigid if she was incapable of reaching vaginal orgasm during sex. Anything else was second-rate.

Along with her dollies and teddy bears the grown up mature woman was to abandon all childhood attachments including the girlish clitoris in favor of the womanly vaginal orgasm.

A wife’s inability to experience the requisite “mature” climax was a neurotic with “deep rooted psychological problems” that could only be cured with counseling and psychiatrists.

The husband’s skill was not to be blamed.

Defrosting the Frigid Woman

After Glow
In the nuclear age, the only way to defrost the frigid woman was for hr to achieve an orgasm of nuclear proportion.

When it came to sexual dysfunction Purex struck a nerve with the “Cold War Woman.”

With great interest Betsy continued reading the article on the show.

Starring a hot Kim Hunter as a frigid woman with Jack Klugman as the husband, the actors  “ portray a married couple deeply troubled by the most personal of emotional problems in a dramatization based on case histories, professional reports and taped interviews…today despite the American woman’s privileged status, her club memberships, college degree and kitchen full of appliances a great number of her kind is in distress.”

“The complexities of her new situation, in many cases, have only added to her anxieties. And she may reach a point where she becomes a problem for society-perhaps in a divorce court, a magistrate’s office or an alcoholic ward.”

After Glow

Fumbling through her purse, Betsy found the crumpled piece of paper with the phone number  her gynecologist had given her.

Before she too ended up in divorce court or a hospital ward, Betsy would go see a psychiatrist.

Who was to blame for this epidemic of sexual frigidity?  And what could be done about it?

The answer tomorrow.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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The Frigid Woman in the Cold War PtII

When it came to sex, just how happy was the proverbial happy homemaker?

Not so much.

An epidemic was ravishing cold war America …frigidity. According to the medical community the mid-century American woman was as frosty and frigid as the polar vortex.

Doctors  and gynecologists joined forces with psychiatrists and put the bedroom under the microscope with alarming results.

The Big Chill

Vintage Advertisement Beauty Rest Mattress 1948

A big chill had crept into the well-appointed bedrooms all across the nation and it would appear that the American housewife’s libido was in the deep freeze.

Regardless of her enjoyment of sex, frigidity was defined by a wifes inability to experience the requisite “mature” vaginal climax, the only AMA approved climax. Cast as a neurotic with “deep rooted psychological problems” a housewife’s only hope of a cure was with counseling and psychiatrists.

Can’t Get No Satisfaction

Vintage Magazine 1960 “Medical Confessions”

Which was how in the fall of 1960  suburban housewife Betsy Bland found herself sitting nervously in the waiting room of a West End Avenue psychiatrist.

The dour faced doctor did not overlook the awkward manner in which the anxious faced brunette with the soft Toni Home Perm, slid gingerly into the chair facing him.

He made no comment.

Betsy was an up to date mid-century American housewife and helpmate, pretty and perky dressed in a becoming Bobbie Brookes tailored suit and a fresh coat of pretty in pink lipstick.

Gently Dr Otto Hesse spoke, asking what brought her here, though he knew only too well.

The only unanswered question facing the good doctor was the precise nature of the problem, the forces that would convert a good wife into a troubled one.

All the x-rays and thyroid pills and sex manuals in the world that this unhappy woman had been prescribed had no power to exorcise so subtle a disease, he thought to himself.

Betsy’s voice broke and she reached in her bag for a hankie. Offering her a cigarette, the doctor  lit one for himself. She sighed contently exhaling the smoke.

Dr Hesse had stressed that completeness and frankness was the first rule.

Biting hard on her freshly painted lips, she tried to explain.

The plight of the frigid housewife

Speaking as softly as a child, the attractive housewife confessed that she did not feel overpowering desire in response to her husbands advances admitting that she sometimes needed stimulation to be made to be excited.

With tears welling up in her eyes, Betsy concluded with the question, “Is something the matter with me doctor ?

The doctor grew thoughtful and removed his glasses. He came right to the point.

His answer was an unequivocal “Yes”.

If he’d heard this story once he’d heard it a thousand times.

Vintage ad Servel Refrigerator Freezer 1955

The portly psychiatrist informed her that she was suffering from frigidity an affliction affecting millions of American women. “No other health problem of our time even approaches this magnitude,” he explained somberly.

And who was to blame for this epidemic? For once it was something that could not be blamed on the Russians. Or an inept husband. The blame was the modern woman herself.

Medical experts were convinced that America was suffering from an epidemic of “unwomanliness” the root cause of their sexual dysfunction.

An acceptance of the inherent passivity of woman was key to a happy marriage.
“There were too many women who want to do or to get something for themselves rather than merely reflect the achievement of their husbands. These women show their resistance to their lot in their inability to have vaginal orgasms.”

Conventional wisdom placed the blame for the frigid woman squarely on her own immaturity: “ the normal woman accepts the “passive” receptivity of the vagina.”

“The neurotic woman suffering from an inability to experience vaginal orgasms finds a typical scapegoat-man.” stated sex experts Edmund Bergler & Kroger from their 1954 book Kinseys Myth of Female Sexuality.

“Ignorant of the fact that her own neurotic difficulties is responsible for her frigidity, she places the blame on mans technique…(But) a healthy and experienced man is helpless when confronted with a frigid woman. The frigid woman’s scapegoat theory is by no means harmless. It poisons a marriage and frequently leads to extramarital affairs and divorce.”

Always Ask a Man

Hollywood’s glamorous Arlene Dahl, “internationally known film star and one of the worlds loveliest women” spills the secrets of developing your femininity, in her 1965 book “Always Ask a Man Arlene Dahl’s Key to Femininity”

Dr Hesse knew it all boiled down to the basic question….was  Betsy Blane  rejecting her femininity?

Pulling a well-thumbed through book down from the shelf, he began reading a passage out loud from “Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality.” In the introduction  to the anthology a Dr Hendrik Ruitenbeek’s  stated:

“There were too many women who want to do or to get something for themselves rather than merely reflect the achievement of their husbands. These women show their resistance to their lot in their inability to have vaginal orgasms.”

Betsy blushed deeply

The path to healthy adult femininity, Doctor Hesse explained, “was paved with sacrifices”. For women sex was to be an exercise in happy self-denial.

Psychoanalytic theory presented the necessary steps to achieve true womanliness.

“First as she outgrew her girlhood a woman had to renounce the pleasures of the clitoris in an attempt to transfer feelings to the more “womanly” vagina. When a woman accomplished that task of abandoning the clitoris she symbolically set aside all masculine striving and accepted a life of passivity.”

Deep Freeze

Along with the media, psychiatrists were steering women toward appropriate fulfillment by reminding them of the joy of subservient home life.
Vintage image from Honewell heating Ad 1951

Frigidity was a symptom of a bigger social problem-modern woman’s rejection of her femininity.

Along with the media, psychiatrists were steering women toward appropriate fulfillment by reminding them of the joy of subservient home life. “Women with other ambitions, “ the doctor continued  “were  likely malcontents and neurotic in her inability to accept her passive role.”

“You all know women who lack warmth tenderness delicacy and sweetness…” one psychiatrist advised a NY lecture audience. “They do not want to be homemakers they do not want to be mothers. They want to become presiding judges of the Supreme Court…’” Such women could suffer “total sexual frigidity or homosexuality,” he cautioned, and even worse than that, this psychosis could result in a woman “separating herself from all that is considered womanly such as cooking, making a home…”

“The greatest Casanova is helpless against frigidity,” Dr Hesse concluded smiling. “It is not to be cured by tricks or special art of lovemaking.”

An acceptance of the inherent passivity of woman was key to a happy marriage.

The best advise for the frigid woman was to put her ambitions in the deep freeze.

With that acceptance, the doctor  reassured Betsy she would soon be  back home reveling in her job as wife and mother. Snug within the warmth of a good man’s love she would once again glory in the laughter of her healthy children and glow with pride with every acquisition.”

So Betsy along with millions of other frustrated housewives took matters into her own hand. Learning how to “self defrost”- that’s what would make the happy homemaker happy once and for all.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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(L) Vintage illustration Little Golden Book “We Help Daddy” 1962 illustration by Eloise Wilkin (R) Vintage ad for Pesticides for garden pests

Birds and the Bees

First day of spring conjures up a childhood filled with  the anticipation of blooming flowers, budding trees  and a haze of pesticides being sprayed across my suburban neighborhood.

Talk about March Madness!

By the time I was 5 years old in the spring of 1960 Mother Nature began supplanting Mother Goose in my curiosity.

Now that it was spring, I was full of so many questions, about the environment; about things I heard, and felt, and saw.  But there were many questions even grown ups didn’t have an answer for…and even more questions they never seemed to ask.

Maternal Instincts

Vintage children’s school Book “All Around Us”

Like my own mother, Mother Nature was trustworthy and reliable.

The Miracle of Mother Nature

The big world could seem random and arbitrary so it was precisely the predictability, the certainty, the sheer regularity of Mother Nature, that like my own Mother, soothed me.

Earth Science

Vintage Children’s School Book “Stories about Linda and Lee” 1960

The first warm spring day I couldn’t wait to get my hands into the dirt. There was something primal about the feel of sun-warmed soil. Thrusting my hands into the loamy garden soil warmed by the spring sun, I could actually feel the earth itself.

Sifting it through my hands I’d see the essential elements of the earth, bits of decaying plant matter, tiny particles of pebbles and rocks, maybe billions of years old, filled with industrious earthworms digging their way through the ground-maybe even all the way to China!

Necessity is the Mother of Invention

Vintage children’s school B ook “All Around Us”

Looking around, I noticed how our spindly little saplings were growing as fast as I was and now baby sparrows would be collecting in little groups on the branches, squeaking and chirping. On our shrubs hungry green insects could be found greedily chewing and swallowing the leaves into their tiny bellies.

As Dad was busy spraying the perpetrators on the plants, down would come a bird, looking for something to eat.

Spying what she was seeking, the Mama bird would happily fly away with the juicy green insect in her beak to feed to the baby birds.

The sweet smell of blooming French Lilacs that perfumed the air, blended with freshly spread fertilizer and the acrid aroma of the insecticides Melathione and Diazinon  gently wafting over from Dad’s tin atomizer sprayer.

He could mark his territory without even lifting a leg.

Mocking Bird

Vintage illustration children’s work book “We Read Pictures” Dick Jane and Sally

These new miracle pesticides were right at home in this land of good humor and friendship. They belonged to pleasant living, and our right to enjoy them belonged to our American heritage of personal freedom.

American scientists were hard at work in the name of freedom. Man, they believed, should and could take over the management of the Mother Earth he lived on  and use it exclusively for what he regarded as mans higher purpose.

His needs.

Silent Spring Mornings

As the soft spring breeze carried the mist, the residual oil caressed my skin, the pesticide’s warming tingle, stimulated a healthy glow….my delicate skin tingling, and my little eyes tearing was Diazinon come to life.

The amalgam of scent so strong, its imprint would forever evoke spring. “Yes I can’t seem to forget you, your Diazinon stays on my mind,”  Dad hummed to himself.

Ah, pesticides, the subtlest form of communication between a man and nature.

Its aftermath, a lingering and memorable message.

Bye Bye Birdie

All day long, birds would come in the garden and fly away with the now caustically coated green insects.

Eventually, by summer’s end, the green plants would grow big and tall, but sadly, the baby birds  their bellies filled with the pesticides infused insects would never get to grow up at all.

Which Ones Are Alive?
Vintage illustration children’s schoolbook 1950s

The beauty of outdoors…the feeling of life around us…that was the spirit of modern living!

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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In a gesture of maturity- though with about as much enthusiasm as swallowing a bitter pill- I finally came to grips this recent birthday with being referred to as “middle aged.”

So it was a shock to my baby boomer sensibility to learn that according to a post war ad, I would already have been considered a senior citizen.
Forget middle age. According to an advertisement from Northwestern National Life Insurance, I and anyone 40 and older was considered a geriatric.

Today when 80 is the new 60, it was a bit rattling to see that in 1948, 40 was the old 70.

The source was a 1948 ad in Time Magazine touting the miraculous benefits of Electro Shock Therapy for depressed geriatrics, or those folks 40 and beyond.

My Head Spins

I don’t know which was more jolting.

The fact of the enthusiastic endorsement of electro shock therapy for melancholia or the fact that I would have been considered part of the geriatric set.

Talk about a birthday surprise

The Shocking Truth Longer Life for People Past 40

Vintage ad Northwestern National Life Insurance 1948

As benign and invigorating sounding as a spring tonic, Electro-Tonic Therapy as the treatment was called in this ad was indeed a revolutionary panacea in the 1940’s.

Now called electroconvulsive therapy, ECT was developed in 1938 by Italian neuropsychiatrists and gained widespread popularity by psychiatrists as a form of treatment in the 1940s and 1950s.

“The Above Drawing illustrates electro-tonic therapy being used to correct involuntary melancholia, an illness besetting increasing numbers of people over 40” begins the informative ad from Northwestern National Life Insurance.

“This remarkable treatment which consists of passing an electric impulse through electrodes fastened to the head is painless. It requires no surgery, relatively brief hospitalization and is completely effective in 80 to 85 % of the cases.

“Moreover, since “melancholia is a “one attack” ailment, the result is said to be permanent.”

Vintage illustration of Electro-Tonic Therapy from Northwestern National Life Insurance Ad 1948

Like a thunderbolt, the dark ages were over. This most modern of treatments was a boon to old age.

Media stories of shock treatment enthusiastically described the possibility of improving very ill, formerly hopeless patients. In an age before psycho pharmaceuticals, this offered great hope.   In this context permanent memory loss, confusion and the risk for vertebral fractures caused by violent convulsive shocks seemed reasonable indeed.

“Melancholia is one of the commonest forms of “nervous breakdown” which will cause of out of 17 Americans now living to spend time in a hospital as a mental patient. It is most likely to strike women 45 to 60 and men 55 to 65.” the copy continues ominously.

“Restoring a sufferer from melancholia-deeply despondent listless and in profound physical and mental lethargy- to his place in the family circle and in society marks another conquest for geriatrics, the science of helping people enjoy life longer.”

Extending Enjoyable Life Expectancy

Magazines were full of ads and articles boasting of the “Great strides that had been made in medicine and in extending the length of life. It is pleasant to contemplate a healthy old age- the peaceful enjoyment of those mature years which hold the richest satisfactions of life. Not until our own time was such a contemplation possible,” one ad explains.

“Although cases of mental illness are increasing the number being cured by psycho-therapy and new procedures such as electro-tonic therapy is increasing even more rapidly. Not only melancholia, but other distressing mental disorders are responding favorably.”

The Snake Pit

(L) Vintage Time Magazine Cover Dec. 1948 Olivia De Havilland star of new movie The Snake Pit (R) Vintage ad promoting Electro Shock Therapy 1948

The mass media enthusiastically embraced this most progressive of treatments.

In a brilliant stroke of cross promotion, this ad appeared in the same year as the film The Snake Pit, giving  Electro Shock Therapy  a further jolt of publicity.

In 1946 Readers Digest had electrified the country with its condensed version of  the book the film was based on The Snake Pit the best-selling book written by Mary Jane Ward based on her 8 ½ months experience in a state mental hospital.

The mass media enthusiastically embraced this most progress

The heroine Virginia Cunningham a troubled NY Housewife played by Olivia De Havilland in the film, receives a large number of therapies- from electro-shock to hydrotherapy to narcosynthesis to psychoanalysis while institutionalized.

Modern Miracles

Along with all the great advances in science, the  insurance ad goes on to explain electro-tonics place in the annals of medicine:.

“Thus the cure of these mental ills is fast taking its place with control of such physical ailments as heart disease diabetes kidney disease, anemia and others which once darkened the prospect of later life.”

“Now thanks to geriatrics, the average man or woman of 40 can count on 30 or more ears of leisure and accomplishment. Naturally to enjoy fully those extra years calls for a good savings and life insurance.”

And if the treatment caused permanent memory loss and confusion at least you wouldn’t remember what made you melancholy in the first place.

About this there was no confusion.

“Thanks to advances in modern medicine-new drugs and treatment of amazing effectiveness have extended our lives expectancy to better than 63 years.”

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Just as mid-century garden nurseries were busy preparing for spring, filling their shelves with packets of seeds and cans of DDT, so American parents were diligently decorating their baby nurseries with happy-go-lucky wallpaper coated with protective DDT.

No April Fools!

Due Diligence

In the last weeks before my late March birth, my baby-bound mother Betty was busy preparing for her new baby in our new house. After all, there was so much to do to get ready for that little bundle of joy, and my nursery was not yet completed.

The enchanting sheer pink organza curtains to let in lots of cheery light had been bought and a soft plush pink rug underfoot for me to crawl on had been installed. But the nursery walls were woefully bare.

Something cheery and springlike seemed in order.

The miracle of spring time when color is fresh and vivid was the perfect time to be born, Mom thought wistfully. With its renewal of life, the joyful first appearance of daffodils, crocuses and forsythia was a magical time

She couldn’t wait for me to soak it all in.

Shoo Fly Don’t Bother me

But first sign of spring would also bring the flies and ants marching through our suburban house.

Mom would be right in step behind them, her aerosol can of Bug a Boo spray poised to douse the entire house. In large, can’t-miss-print, the can boldly boasted, that it contained DDT that far exceeded the US Government standards for insecticides.

From the time she was a little girl, no insect put the fear of God in my Mom and grandmother like the housefly.

It was no wonder people of a certain age had a fear of insects and flies.

These deadly pests, they were told, were carriers of deadly diseases. All insects were bad but houseflies were by far the worst since it was thought you could get polio through an insect bite.

The fly, this most feared and dangerous beast that frolicked and feasted greedily in uncovered garbage cans, the gutter, rotting food, or a dead horse even, could have landed on your nice ripe peach wiping his poisonous feet on the food.

The thought of a fly landing on her baby sent shivers through Betty’s spine.

But as luck would have it, science would come to my rescue.

How Lucky Can You Get

Vintage Ad Trimz Wallpaper with DDT

It was at her final obstetrician appointment that my mother learned the perfect solution; one that would offer protection for her baby and solve her nursery decorating problems.

To think her doctor was a decorator too!

Just in time for my spring birth a new wall covering appeared on the market that would be perfect for my nursery-a colorful. cheerful children’s wallpaper infused with DDT promising unsurpassed protection for your child against disease carrying insects.

“Tested and commended by Parents Magazine,Trimz DDT children’s room wallpaper kills flies, mosquito’s and ants on contact,” the doctor told Mom handing her a brochure to read.

“Medical Science knows many common insects breed in filth, live in filth and carry disease,” Mom read shuddering in agreement.

“Science recognized the dangers that are present when these disease carrying insects invade the home. Actual tests have proved that one fly can carry as many as 6,600,000 bacteria! Imagine the health hazard- especially to children- from flies seriously suspected of transmitting such diseases as scarlet fever, measles, typhoid, diarrhea…even dread polio!

Protects as it Beautifies

“Now a new wallpaper coated with DDT was developed just for children,” the copy continued. “Jack and Jill, charming storybook animals or Disney favorites- gay new patterns that protect as they beautify a child’s room.”

Here was a war born miracle so amazingly effective you could scarcely believe it.

“Guaranteed effective against disease carrying insects for 1 year. Actual tests have proven the insect killing properties still effective after 2 years of use.”

Years later we would discover it’s effects would be longer lasting than that.

Vintage ad Trimz children’s wallpaper with DDT Safe for Children

Best of all, Dr Orenstein reassured her, it was absolutely non – hazardous to children or adults to pets or clothes. “Certified to be absolutely safe for home use.”

”Your baby,” her doctor told her solemnly, “will be spared so much, because of the wonders of modern science!”

The Wonders of Science and Nature

Yes, mid-century spring was pure celebration of nature…or man’s conquest of nature.

Like most folks, Mom wondered in amazement: How can the chemists and the people who produce these products to sell, keep coming up with so many ingenious new services, so many welcome new products?

There had been so many more advances to help these young mothers, thanks to new remarkable products and knowledge to meet the new way of modern living.

DDT was the dawning of a whole new age of safety and dependability.

DDT Makes Dreams Come True

Giddily grasping the  brochure, Mom’s thoughts drifted back to a few months earlier when she walked  from room to room in the model house, mentally installing furniture and decorating it’s rooms. Pausing in the coziest sunniest one of the three bedrooms she lingered, imagining how perfect it would be for her not yet- born- not- yet- determined-new baby girl.

Smiling now, she envisioned the walls  covered with loads of playful prancing kittens and lambs gambling through the room awash in a sea of DDT.

Mom couldn’t wait for Dad to head on down to the hardware store, load up on Trimz wallpaper  and start papering the nursery.

Insurance Policy

While Mom and I were in the hospital for our 10 day maternity stay, Dad could get busy on the finishing touches of the nursery. My Dad like many mid-century Dads had been left out in the cold during most of the pregnancy, but now would be his time to shine.

The first day in April was a sunny one; it was the perfect day to tackle the wallpapering job.

Installing the paper would be a breeze! “Ready Pasted! Just dip in water and hang!” the instructions boasted. It would be finished way before my April 8 homecoming.

“Anyone can put Trimz Wallpaper up without help or previous experience,” the package  stated. “Millions have done it- proved its quick clean easy! Nothing to get ready, no tools paste or muss. Just cut strips to fit dip in water and hang. Dry’s in 20 minutes! You can protect your child for $8-$10 dollars so inexpensive.”

Best of all it was so convenient, so safe because “the DDT is fixed to the paper. It can’t rub off!”

Delirious with DDT

Vintage ad Bugaboo Insect Spray 1946

Dad happened to be a big booster of the ingeniously new DDT.

He called it an Atomic Vermin Destroyer. “They said it couldn’t be done, they said nobody could do it,” Dad bragged. But that didn’t stop American know how.

This was the wonder chemical that had saved thousands of lives during the war. It had been sprayed heavily on the South Pacific Islands where Dad served and he would proudly tell us how this wonder insecticide had saved lives from malaria carrying Mosquitoes. In fact, soldiers were issued DDT powder to sprinkle on their sleeping bags with no adverse effects.

After winning a victory during WWII, DDT shucked its military clothes, and came home a hero to take over the number one spot in Americas bug battle.

Peace of Mind

Vintage ad New York Life Insurance 1960

DDT was like a good insurance policy.

Surveying the  nursery Dad thought of the task ahead of him, but it was nothing compared to the long task ahead.

Parenting.

That was a job for a long time. Now that he was the father of 2 he knew how important life insurance was. His new baby deserved the best of everything within his power.

Just as insurance would safeguard his children’s future, so this protective wallpaper would safeguard me.

Fortunately  I would be well protected. A 1955 baby didn’t need a four-leaf clover to be lucky.

With DDT, your family could approach the dreamed of day of a healthy home.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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Shaking the Suburban DDT’s

.

1954 advertisement

Breathe Easier

Mid Century America was the golden age of pesticides and it was love at first sight. Any thoughts about Earth Day and the environment lay far in the future.

Thousands of new chemicals were put to use in new and amazing products, quickly tested and just as quickly rushed to market.

Now you could get relief for your garden the modern, speedy way. Pesticides. They’re easy! They’re quick! They’re automatic!

Why wait for old-fashioned organic nature to deal with pests, when there were new, fast working chemical compounds that went to work instantly.  

 “Today’s pesticides,” so the thinking went, “go right along with the sensible modern trend. Today’s relaxed people at ease with so many things.”

Pesticides belong- to the fun of living!

A trip to the Suburban Garden Center

As spring exploded with a whoop and a holler, mid-century Americans cut loose in the great outdoors.Like clockwork, my father and I joined the swarm of suburban gardeners who would flock to their local garden center on Mothers Day.

In garden centers all over Long Island, you would find row upon row of pretty, terra-cotta potted geraniums and fetching baskets overflowing with petunias, prominently displayed as offerings for Mothers Day. At the eleventh hour, they were lifesavers for those last-minute husbands and sons who in their consternation of what to get Mom, perfume or another cotton house coat, had thus far bought nothing.

Time For a Breather

Vintage ad Monsanto Chemicals 1947

As soon as you entered the nursery, nostrils were bombarded with a blast of the earthy, musky, smell of peat moss, humus, and top soil, overpowered by the caustic odor of chemicals.

Ah, breathe deeply of the invigorating scent of power –chlorynated hydrocarbons.

 My father was like a kid in a candy shop, his eyes bigger than our small suburban backyard.

Dad dashed quickly down the nursery aisles, pushing past the plants, speeding by the spades, and totally ignoring the calibrated spreaders and wobbly wheelbarrows in his single-minded pursuit. What Dad looked forward to the most was the appearance of this springs new line of pesticides and petrochemicals.

Chemicals as bright and fresh as spring itself.

Aisle after aisle, choice after choice, shelves groaning under the weight of giant jugs of herbicides, boxes of insecticides, cans of fungicides and bottles of pesticides, all shapes and sizes, some dusts and pellets, others emulsions and granules.

Miracle products all,  with names such as Chlorodust, Toxiclor, Cook-Kill.

The miraculous herbicide 2,4-D (dichlorophenoxyacetic acid) was hailed as a breakthrough garden product when it was released in the late 1940s. Like most suburbanites, dad knew there was no longer any excuse for a weedy lawn.

He agonized over choice of weapons – should he go for the Martin Weed-Gun that came locked and loaded with a healthy supply of 2,4-D sufficient enough to kill ten thousands weeds or the nifty Killer Kane that squirted the same 2, 4-D herbicide killing  weeds “as fast as you can walk.” To compound the decision there was the ever popular suburban favorite  Weed-a Bomb, courtesy of the Thompson Chemical Corporation.

Speaking of weapons, 2,4,D would later come in handy fighting the Vietnam War as the principal ingredient of the defoliant Agent Orange.

It’s Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature

Vintage Illustration  Pruett Carter

Dad may have claimed he had great respect for Mothers in general, and Mom in particular, but the same couldn’t be said for Mother Nature. Mother Nature needed to be controlled. She was like a woman, fickle, stubborn but looking for a strong man to take control.

Though loath to admit it, my father had Mother issues.

Not unlike his own mother, he regarded Mother Nature sometimes as a friend, and sometimes as an enemy. He loved her, and resented her. Mother Nature was what he’d try to get away from, and yet he depended on her badly.

With Mother Nature he could act out his impulses and decisions freely, unchecked.

Formerly, Mother Nature, like his own mother, was more powerful than he. But now the balance had shifted. Man could control forces which at best rivaled and now seemed on the point of surpassing her.

 “It was heartening to recognize some of the things our science is continuing to create and store up for the better world of tomorrow! Dad would read. “American laboratories can now promise us virtual independence from many ‘natural’ sources of necessities. Food, fodder and fiber can now be grown without soil, without rain, without sunlight,” virtually, he’d chuckle “without Mother Nature herself!”

Intoxicating

Vintage illustration Ortho Ad 1950 “How to be a Carefree Gardner”

A clerk, dressed as a farmer in coveralls and a straw hat, was strolling around the nursery, spritzing samples of new herbicide 2,4,D for men to test.

Softly spraying some of the oily mist onto Dads wrist in order for him to sample, the Mr. Green Jeans -look -alike, tried to conjure up a bucolic image: “Experience the new aroma! Like the freshness of tingling bracing mountain air, it has a noticeable effect to all who partake. Hearts beat faster when you use it. It’s clean crispness stimulates. A unique scent prolonger M-10, makes the aroma really last.”

Apparently 1500 men tested other leading pesticides- and new, saucy, man-tailored formula2,4,D Dichlorophenoxyacetic won hand down. “And,” the clerk winked to Dad, “their girls loved it! “

“Its total harmony with nature assures you of being tastefully right.”

Dad splurged and bought 3 containers.

Years later we would we learn it was associated with cancer, birth defects, kidney and liver damage.

It was intoxicating!

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Dubious diets are as American as…well…. all-you-can-eat apple pie.

Relying on fad diets to shed a few pounds has been handed down from gullible generation to gullible generation willing to swallow anything promising a trim figure.

In 1938 The American Institute of Baking served up white bread as a “proper part of modern reducing diets” in its authoritative booklet “The Right Way to Right Weight.”

Let’s take a look at how one 1930’s gal went from gloomy to giddy and found her slender self with the help of a loaf of bread.

A Glutton for Gluten

Vintage Sunbeam Bread advertisement

Like most Americans, Gertie Gottlieb was a glutton for gluten. Whether bread, biscuits or Parker House rolls, Gertie gobbled ‘em up with gusto.

But like most gals, Gertie longed for a slender silhouette.

All the romance she got was out of magazines. And she had plenty of time to read them too.

A wee bit stout, she craved the right contours, eyeing with envy all the smart spring fashions pictured in the women’s magazines.

Flirtatious fashions, tailored for trimness. Fashions that called for a slim, youthful figure…”the lovely silhouette every woman so eagerly desires.”

Vintage Women’s Fashion Illustration 1934 “McCall’s Magazine” “Flirtation Fashions- Tailored into Trimness. The waistline is dreamily defined; Molded along modern lines for debutantes who crave the right contours.”

A Weigh We Go

Heaven knows, Gertie tried her hand at reducing.

“Being the modern common sense way to diet,” she knew enough to “reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.”

“Light a Lucky Strike,” the cigarette ads advised. “When fattening sweets tempt and you dread extra weight, light a Lucky instead. The sensible and sane way of reducing, just a common sense method of retaining a slender figure.”

At the end of the 1920′s a new slogan for Lucky Strikes appeared everywhere, advising to “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet,” suggesting smoking as common sense way of reducing. Celebrity endorsements, both male and female offered their personal testimony, such as the 1929 ad (L) featuring Grace Hay Drummond-Hay who was the first woman to travel around the world by air. The slim silhouette so in demand (L) Vintage ad Lucky Strike Cigarettes – “Smoke a Lucky instead of sweets” (R) Vintage Women’s Fashion Illustration 1934

But instead of a slim figure she ended up with smokers hack.

Gertie gobbled fat-reducing gum drops, chewed Slends Fat-Reducing Gum, and devoured so many grapefruits on the Hollywood Diet that she darn near felt she deserved a star of her own in front of Graumanns Chinese Theater.

The famous fat-busting banana and skim milk diet went bust, as did the bathtub filled with reducing bath salts with names like Lesser Slim Figure Bath and Everywoman’s Flesh Reducer which may have worked for every woman, but not for poor Gertie.

And speaking of bathtubs, she even tried her hand at washing away the fat with Fat-O-No soap hoping to lather up to slim down. And don’t get her started on all those thyroid pills, even if all the screen stars swore by them.

All she ended up with was a bad case of the jitters. But nothing a hot buttered bun wouldn’t fix!

A Diet Fit for Loafers

Down in the dumps, Gertie  worried if she was doomed to go through life feeling awkward and uncomfortable.

She had just about given up when her pal Mitzi told her about an amazing diet that was sweeping the nation. All Gertie needed was the proper guidance.

Gertie’s eyes glazed over at the thought of yet another diet till she heard the magic words: Bread.

For this gluten-loving gal it was a godsend.

The Bread Diet gives you delicious, satisfying meals- takes off weight without fatigue or nervous strain. (L) 1939 Ad Bread Diet, American Institute of Baking (R) 1934s Fashion Illustration McCall’s Magazine

The Bread Diet promised m’lady that in a few short weeks the pounds would just melt away all while enjoying your fill of the staff of life.

Authorized by the American Institute of Baking, their ads promised “To gain alluring slimness don’t think you have to starve yourself. Take the safe way to slenderness. Go on the Bread Diet.”

A registered nurse, Mitzi confirmed to Gertie that this diet was no gimmick. but  based on the most up to date, verifiable nutritional knowledge. “The bread diet is a scientific well-balanced diet based on years of research in leading universities and laboratories,” Mitzi informed her friend, handing her the advertisement.

Mitzi explained: “ Important in this diet is the amount of bread- 2 slices with each meal. Far reaching scientific tests have proved bread can be an important aid in reducing. It is a valuable combination of carbohydrates and proteins. In this reducing diet, bread helps you burn up more completely the fat you are losing. Excess weight is converted into energy.”

Vintage Bread Diet Ad 1939

Who could be more trustworthy than a doctor who by the way endorsed this program.

Reading further she pointed out a fact progressive doctors and nutritionists have long known: “Bread gives your body more than energy. It is a valuable source of muscle-building protein. Actually we get more proteins from bread and other wheat products than from any other class of food. Bread in this reducing diet helps keep muscles firm and strong!”

Vintage ad The Bread Diet 1939

The reason it was so successful was simple:

“Unlike so many reducing diets that cut down too much on needed food and often exhaust the system, the diet explained, the Bread Diet supplies the food elements the body needs. “

Vintage Bread Diet Ad 1939

The diet came with a warning to avoid the most dangerous pitfalls of most fad diets: “If you are reducing, take care not to rob your body of the food fuel it need. Then the fat that you lose is not burned up properly…a harmful residue is left in the system often causing fatigue irritability and lowered resistance.”

You could avoid these dangers by following the bread diet.

So if you’re dieting don’t think you have to give up bread. By following the safe easy Bread diet you can enjoy 6 slices of bread every day and lose weight!

Gertie was in good-for-you gluten heaven. Ain’t life grand!

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2014.

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“The Story Begins in the Middle” Vintage 1955 ad Warner’s

I figured out very early on that every female had a figure flaw.

But luckily when it came to figure problems a slew of manufacturers had it all figured out.

A good girdle was a must have for every mid-century gal no matter the season.

So despite the fact that the spring of 1959 was a real scorcher, I learned –at the tender age of 4- that sweltering weather was no excuse for a lady to let her figure flaws show.

For everyday wear, Mom’s summer time favorite girdles. “Enjoy a cool cool summer in Coolaire – Flexess new “air conditioned” fabrics- fashioned into figure flattering girdles” (R) Vintage ad Coolaire Girdles by Flexees 1952 (R) Vintage ad Gossard girdles for Summer 1955

Summer Silhouettes

Memorial Day had come and gone and along with the seasons first appearance of white shoes and wicker bags, revealing swimsuits and little summer dresses made their debuts.

Meaning, m’lady’s silhouette came under severe scrutiny.

Did the fear of midriff bulge cause panic in my mid-century Mother?

No sireee!

While some women panicked, nibbling on celery sticks and cottage cheese, subjecting themselves to the pummeling paws of a Russian masseuse at a fancy milk farm in order to shed winter weight and attain a svelte figure, Mom knew there were more effective ways to whittle your waist.

A well made girdle was all a gal needed to fit in.

Mom had recently purchased a new dress at Orbachs-a Molly Parnis knock off that was as easy on they eye as it was on the purse.

It was perfect for the big June Jamboree Dinner Dance at the El Patio Beach Cub. Despite the endless buffet and Viennese table served at the dinner, fitting into her new figure flattering number would be no problem.

Smart Cookies

American abundance- More of Everything you want (L) Vintage ad Admiral Refrigerator 1954 “Holds more than 120 pounds of frozen food.” (R) Vintage Warners Le Gant  Girdle ad 1955

In mid-century America you could have your cake and eat it too…literally. Why deprive yourself of that groaning board of American goodies.

Clever ladies knew that with the right girdle you could take command of your beauty and enjoy a wonderful new kind of figure that never existed before.

Ever wish there were two  of you? Warner’s asked provocatively in the  1955 ad for their le gant girdle shown in the ad above.

”One to splurge on shortcake- one to be a fashion plate! Seems like such a shame to choose- but here’s good news: with the Warner’s Le Gant no girl really has to. We’ve styled it in new persuasive elastic for the girl who munches and bunches in just that order.”

Go Figure circa 1959

Vintage illustrations from Formfit Life girdle ads (L) 1951 (R) 1950

Saturday night of the big dance I watched eagerly as Mom got herself ready.

Wandering into my parents bedroom, I sprawled out on the fancy quilted satin bedspread, the sounds of “Make Believe Ballroom” on WNEW playing on the GE clock radio, mesmerized as my Mother went through her metamorphosis .

The noisy oscillating fan in the bedroom only seemed to move the muggy air around the bedroom offering little relief as Mom prepared for the evening. Putting her face on would be no easy task as beads of perspiration kept a perpetual shine that no amount of Angel Face powder would subdue.

Mom emerged out of the bathroom shower in a great gust of steam, her fresh from the beauty parlor coif carefully encased in a polka dot plastic shower cap, a light dusting of Cashmere Bouquet on her damp body brought a veil of fragrance scenting the room.

“Curbs your Curves from waist to hip! Made of flexible airy nylon, this is a girdle to control your pounds, extoll your curves. Giving your hips a hooray! All at a purse easy price with money over for the matching bra.” Vintage 1952 ad Bestform

I watched in sheer wonderment as she wiggled into her latex girdle.

With the skill of contortionist or an enterologist at the circus, the fact that she could deftly squeeze her body into such a small rubberized container never ceased to amaze me.

Of course in the hot weather girdle wrestling could make her a raving beauty but she would end that eternal tug of war with a generous dusting of  talcum powder, that promised to allow your girdle to slide on smooth as silk.

Girdles from Spiegel Catalog 1959

Savvy Mom knew figure flattery, glamor and comfort began with the perfect fit in a girdle and like most gals had quite a selection to choose from.

Hip Hip Hooray!

“How Incredibly young and comfy you’ll feel in these weigh- nothing, do everything girdles! Sheer magic!” Vintage girdle ad 1950

For tonight, Mom’s new Perfect-O girdle, a high performance job that put an end to tummy bulges, was so lightweight that it made her just adore being “taken in.”  The ads were true-“The wonderful supple design, a neat play of satiny panels to snip off inches where every girl needs it most. Yes, inches. You can tell by the tape-and you’d better because you’ll never feel it.”

Looking in the mirror she thought this was the most flattering girdle she’d ever owned. How heavenly to discover-suddenly that you have the figure you’ve always dreamed about! Such flattering, flattening social security in something so delectably pretty to wear.

Mom could happily indulge in all the duck a la orange and Baked Alaska she wanted, confident of the containment provided by the girdle.

Vintage ad 1954 Life Girdles by Formfit

“What you put on first makes all the difference,” she instructed me. “Full skirt or slim skirt, shirtwaist or strapless gown…what you put on first adds the finishing touch. That’s why it’s so important to wear a girdle keyed to every outfit. The girdle that’s so wonderful with your tweeds wont have the same talent for silks!”

As usual she would quote from my great Uncle Bernie: “A girdle frees your step while it sleeks your figure.”

His considerable girth notwithstanding, when it came to girdles Great Uncle Bernie was an expert.

My corpulent Uncle Bernie Posner was the president of Perfect-O-Figure Foundations founded by his father my Great, Great Uncle Max.

Even with his drooping eyes clouded over with cataracts, Bernie had an eye for the ladies and their figures and never hesitated to pass his wisdom gleaned from over 40 years in the ladies undergarment business.

Smoke and Mirrors

Vintage Formfit girdle ad 1954

Whatever the occasion, Uncle Bernie couldn’t resist the opportunity to proselytize the gospel of the girdle.

Even at family backyard barbecues, while other uncles busily debated baseball , Uncle Bernie, now in his dotage, could rhapsodize poetic about ladies foundations. regalinged whoever was willing to listen.

I was always an eager ear.

His pink fleshy face flushed with enthusiasm, Uncle Bernie would impress me with the importance of a good foundation in life…at least as far as a girdle was concerned.

Sitting on his lap, he would explain to me  – always while nibbling on a fistful of Veri-Thin pretzels that -“Every woman needs to be Fit!”

Of course he wasn’t talking about fitness regimes, but instead the importance of the proper fit of a foundation garment. “Figure glamor begins with a perfect fit in a girdle” was his mantra.

Nodding in the direction of my perpetually slim Aunt Lois who was known to hoist a can or 2 of Metrecal from time to time, he continued.

“You need not diet or deny yourself the good things in life,” he said authoritatively, a stinky pre-Castro cigar clenched between his yellowing chicklet teeth. “You need take no dangerous drugs or tiring exercise. You are absolutely safe when you wear a good rubber girdle. You appear smaller the minute you step into a perfect-o-girdle.”

Wide eyed even as a 4-year-old I was tantalized.

Wagging his swollen sausage like fingers at me he warned: “If you are over twenty, you are in danger of ptosis (sagging) of the abdominal muscles. This causes a bulging abdomen and the hips appear too large. You need a good girdle to give you uplift and support!”

He paused long enough for the point to stick, jabbing his wet cigar butt into than ashtray.

Taking It All In

Vintage Illustration Formfit Girdles Ad 1949

I absorbed this information, storing it away for a future destined to be filled with girdles and garters, just as a previous generations of women in my family had done.

Our family was intrinsically bound up in the world of girdles, a business built on the bulging bellies and swelled hips of women and the ever-expanding cultural expectations and changing fashions.

Bernie’s retelling of his father business was legend in our family and he had a captive audience in me. His watery eye lit up in delight at the telling and I never tired of listening to him, greeting his familiar stories with the same enthusiasm as hearing a favorite fairy tale.

Foundations

My mothers Great Uncle, Max Posner had been a tailor back in Russia so when he came to NY by way of London in 1883 where he had established a reputation as a skilled corsetier , he quickly found work in the ladies flourishing corset business.

“When Pop first started working here, everyone wanted to look like statuesque Lillian Russell.” Bernie explained describing the popular, amply bosomed, massive-hipped woman.

Plumping Up not Pumping Up

Vintage Corsets Illustration

By 1900 plumpness was still fashionable. The Ziegfeld Girls and the Floridora girls, the chorus girls of the smash musical were held up as beauty’s ideal with their full breasts and rears, plump thighs and arms and soft bellies.

“Women may have wanted smaller waists,” he remarked, happily tapping his toes in his gleaming white leather Italian slip-ons, “but you can bet your sweet life they wanted lush curves, 40 inch busts and thighs that could measure 53 inches all around .”

It All Adds Up

“No one wanted to be a Toothpick Tessie,” Uncle Bernie would exclaim. “Underweight girls would cry themselves to sleep, hopeless that they were doomed to a lifetime of skinniness.”

What was a gal to do if she didn’t have the luscious eye-catching curves required to fill out a turn of the century dress?

A clever tailor, Uncle Max knew he could help women transform their appearance .

“Posner’s Scientific Perfect Physique Foundations,” Uncle Bernie explained referring to the companies original name, “promised healthfully and scientifically to help round out the entire form until a woman was fully developed.”

“Skinny Minnies,”  Bernie continued impaling a deviled egg on a toothpick as he spoke,“could fill out their scrawny bony figures with a number of devises that Pop supplied.” False breasts, thighs and calves were available in addition to rubber backs and hips that had “natural” dimples designed into them.

Vintage Fashion Catalog Corsets Sears Roebuck 1903

“And individually constructed corsets took care of a lot, yes indeedy,” he’d say with a satisfied smile.

My great Uncle Max was in great demand.

The New Woman

By about 1908 the voluptuous hourglass figure started to slowly fall out of favor, as the Gibson Girl with her comparatively  more slender, youthful figure burst on the scene, becoming the new standard of beauty.

The New Woman was still bent in an exaggerated S Curve and still possessed the voluptuous bust and rear that the times favored requiring heavy corsets. Vintage corset Sears Roebuck 1908

A true gal on the go, this New Woman was as comfortable with a tennis racket as she was setting the table.A well fitting corset was more important than ever.

Vintage Corsets 1915 Sears Roebuck Catalog

Stout Women needed slimming Vintage corset ad

With Max’s trained hands any bothersome bulges were slimmed down by his stylish garments. His patented armor-lastic stretch corsets were flying off the shelves.

“With the end of WWI,” Bernie continued, “things were changing with the speed of lightning!”

Vintage Corset and Corselettes

The flapper was just around the corner.

Ain’t we Got fun

The Flapper with her stylish boyish figure required, garments to securely bind her flesh, flatten her bosom, slim her hips and flatten buttocks

Vintage Fashion Catalog Corsets, Brassiers 1927 Eatons

As flaming youth roared, Uncle Max began to slow down. Eager beaver Bernie took over the business, quickly changing the name to a snappy Perfect-o-Foundations, more fitting with the roaring twenties.

1926 Corsetlette Girdle -Sears Roebuck Catalog

When the flapper burst on the scene with her new boyish silhouette of slim hips and flattened buttocks , Perfect O-Foundations and other lingerie manufacturers were forced to change tactics to modernize for women who might forgo the old-fashioned corset altogether.

No nudnik, Bernie knew this was no passing trend and jumped on the bandwagon expanding the corset business to include girdles.

What with the popularity of the flapper and her streamlined look, the girdle business boomed. After all you couldn’t Charleston without one!

The die was cast.

Girdles For Betty Co-ed 1929 Co-ed Corsetry Sears Roebuck Catalog

Girdlelicious

The 1930s signaled the return to a more womanly shape and his girdles promised slimming flattering figure loveliness thanks to the miracle of latex.

Before and After 1933

“The Modern Miss could say goodbye to old-fashioned corset bones and stays.-miracle latex used in all the latest girdles was as easy as putting on a pair of gloves,” he said fairly swooning.

Vintage Ads Life by Formfit Girdles (L) 1948 (R) 1951

Modern girdles, he explained, made of tree grown liquid latex were designed without a pesky seam stitch or bone yet these new girdles would mould you smoothly allowing complete freedom of action, and controls your figure for your busy active life.

“Slimming loveliness can  be all yours!” he promised me, hungrily ravaging his right-off-the-grill burger.  I watched in fascination as the rivulets of grease dribbled down the precipice of his double chins leaving an oil slick in its. wake.

“It doesn’t take a lot of money to get the figure you want,” he concluded with  big smile. “All it takes is a head on those pretty shoulders.”

Sheer Magic

The Miracle of Lycra Spandex- Fairy Godmother to Women Everywhere.  Invented in 1959 it wasn’t until  1962 until  the full scale manufacturer of Lycra went on the market , expanding possibilities for women everywhere.  Girdles were no longer only peach, ivory, and black instead bright pastels and patterns became the rage. (L) Vintage ad 1962 Hollywood Vassarette Girdle and Bra (R) Fairy Godmother Cinderella Walt Disney

“But the best was yet to come,” he whispered to me. A new miracle fabric had been created, one that was very hush hush.

Even as Bernie spoke, chemists at DuPont were hard at work developing  the century’s greatest miracle…one that would change the business forever.

Like all fairy tales, this story had a happy ending.

Just as  the beautiful princess rode off into the sunset saved by her prince, so helpless women world wide in need of figure control would be rescued with the arrival of that years greatest miracle- Lycra Spandex .

A match made in heaven, they would live happily ever after!

 © Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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How Long Since You Had Your Eyes Examined? Vintage Ad 1940 Soft-Lite Lenses

How much is your world of vision worth to you?

Vision, clear, sharp, sure …no aching, straining eyes sapping your energy, fumbling your work, keeping you constantly tensed up.

Care of your eyes is by far, the best of all buys! Vintage advertisement 1951 Better Vision Institute

The Eyes Have It

“There are eyes that grope in a world of blurs and double images…neglected eyes straining to see, plaguing their owners with untold misery.”That was the fate of neglecting your eyes as warned by the The Better Vision Institute in an ad recommending eye care for everyone.

“Then there are eyes that really see! ” the ad copy continues. “They add to the well-being by banishing nervous tension…they give beauty by abolishing ugly wrinkles. All eyes on the job every minute of every waking hour.”

Is there anything you wouldn’t give to have eyes like that?

I sure would.

Office work is hard on Eyes This ad ran in 1947 as part of a series of advertisements placed by the The Better Vision Institute to promote America’s eye health

Office Work is Hard on Eyes

Mary “White Collar” Johnson’s story from this 1947 Better Vision Institute advertisement  could have been mine:

“She had it once, that bright, keen poised look that radiates charm and personality. But long tiring hours of eye-straining, close-up work -day in and day out-have taken their toll, blurred her vision and wrinkled her brow.”

“Take a memo, Miss White Collar Worker: “It’s smart to be eye-wise; and its part of your job to keep your eyes fit!”

“When you neglect your eyes and allow them to weaken, they impair your working and earning powers; they age you and mar your beauty. Girls who peer, squint and grope though the day- at typing and filing, at notes and figures-soon develop crow’s feet and scowl lines.”

“They get headaches tire easily and are generally “all in” when its time for fun.”

“Don’t you lose out! Have your eyes examined regularly!”

Better Vision For Better Living

Yes, now you know that your visit to your friendly optometrist, or ophthalmologist produced the biggest bargain you ever bought! Vintage illustration from Better Vision Institute 1950 ad

Founded in 1929 the Better Vision Institute  brought together representatives from ophthalmology, optometry and opticianry to promote a business environment to stimulate growth and influence the eye care industry while addressing  Americas Vision health.

In the 1930s The Better Vision Institute even sponsored a radio show ( the perfect medium for those with poor eyesight) called Men of Vision.
Using the play on the word vision the show presented dramatized bios of “men who’ve opened the eyes of the world” through optical discoveries and inventions.

The series that ran from 1934-1937 was sponsored on local radio stations by optometrists ophthalmologists and opticians. It was so popular that the Institute printed booklets to go along with the show

I’ll Be Seeing You

A Golden Gateway to living! Vintage Better Vision Institute ad 1950

Whichever way you look at it,  good vision is worth plenty.

So to clear the fog from my own eyes, keep my vision keen and sparkling,  letting me work in tip-top efficiency, I will be having eye surgery today and will be away for the remainder of the week.

Please continue enjoy some favorite posts.

I’ll be seeing you soon!

 © Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Thanks to war-time research and  American know how, growing up in suburban mid-century America  I would be the happy recipient of a veritable bushel basket of sun-kissed, vitamin rich fruits and vegetables.

No other country we were told  “has the good fortune to enjoy such a varied, appealing and wholesome diet”.

And no, we did not have a plethora of farmer’s markets, green grocers or organic community food co-ops; in fact today’s locavore movement- the notion of eating what is produced locally local and shunning what isn’t – would have been laughed at.

Most of the farm fresh goodness I would experience came courtesy of Birds Eye Farms ( quick frozen for quick serving) and the verdant  Valley of The Green Giant

No matter the season, I could always enjoy cans and boxes of good tasting, fresh-from-the-pesticide-sprayed farm flavor of fruits and vegetables.

Old McDonald had A Suburban Farm

(L)Happy days on the farm vintage children’s book illustration from “On Cherry Street” Ginn Basic reader 1950s (R) Vintage ad- Snow Crop Frozen Vegetables Country Fair 1957

 Quick frozen or in cans, dried or powdered, when it came to fruits and vegetables it was like having a farm in your own back yard, which funny enough I did.

Like so many other housing developments of the time, my ranch house sprouted up on what had once been one of hundreds of potato farms that dotted Long Island.

The original farmer, Mr Gutztsky who looked remarkably like Mr. Green Jeans on Captain Kangaroo, held on to a small plot of his original farm so that in fact for many years instead of rows of split levels houses, there was an actual working farm behind us.

For a while there were the early morning rooster alarm clock, the stray clucking chickens in the backyard and even a horse poking his nose in an open bedroom window.

Whatever connection of being back to the earth my city-bred parents originally  felt, was in just a few short years, eventually  totally bulldozed away when farmer/businessman  Gutzsky sold the last of his acreage to developers.

Better n’ Fresh

Actually preparing fresh vegetables seemed as out of date as the horse-drawn plow used on the farm we usurped.

Why bother boiling and peeling and mashing those plentiful local Long Island  potatoes when Instant dehydrated flakes were so much easier.

But the abundance of all those local russet potatoes did not go to waste.

They came in darn handy in creating an extended family for Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, with plenty o’ little tater tots to go around.

 A Ripe Idea

It’s Magic! L) Vintage Illustration Fairy Godmother Cinderella Walt Disney

Naturally from time to time, we did enjoyed the wholesome goodness of fresh fruits and vegetables straight from Mother Nature herself. The produce section had been set free of the tyranny of the seasons and become global in its choices.

Even with the proper refrigeration  the problem with these gold mines of health was that they were always so gosh darn perishable, but once again American scientists came to the rescue.

Why wait for lazy Mother Nature – when miracle sprays would force all the fruit to ripen and like magic, change color at once.

In this new, fast-paced jet-age, who had time to wait for vine ripened tomatoes?

Why wait till the end of summer, when with a healthy splash of ethylene gas those rock hard green tomatoes of yesterday suddenly would become today’s garish red ones, conveniently packed in styrephone trays encased in plastic, just ripe for tossin’ in the salad.

 Safeguarding Democracy

“Safeguarding the delicate natural flavor and goodness of many tree and vine ripened fruits and vegetables is made possible by Food Machinery Corp.’s Flavorseal process.” explains this (L) ad from 1948 “Protected by a thin wax like film these fresh grown products stay fresher and wholesome longer.” Just in time to be hermetically sealed in DuPont Cellophane wrapping. (R) Vintage ad DuPont 1957

 It was a Post War Promise kept – “You can have fresh fruits and vegetables tonight…..even if the calendar says no.

The reason- Flavorseal protection.

Developed by research scientists, Flavorseal was a solution which was sprayed in a thin waxy film over the surface of freshly harvested citrus fruit, tomatoes, cucumbers and other produce helping the products stay fresh and wholesome longer for your enjoyment.

Flavorseal, they boasted, slowed down the natural deterioration of the fruit or vegetable…preserves its original freshness flavor for many extra days or even weeks!

More food to eat- less to throw away.

Was My Face Red

“Wilt? I wilt- Not says this lettuce even after 30 days!” announced this 1944 ad for Goodyears Pliofilm. (R) Vintage ad 1944 Goodyear Pliofilm

Food could be kept fresh from the vine for months.

Believe it or not the ad claims this gorgeous red ripe tomato was picked ripe from the vine 30 long days ago!

Harvest wrapped in Goodyears miracle wrap Pliofilm- “a marvelous new transparent moistureproof, spoilageproof wrapping material that seals in natures goodness and seals out natures gremlins. “

To drive home the point  Goodyear boasted that tests made by the University of Florida Agricultural Experiment Station proved that “Pliofilm has a way with fruits and vegetables that lets them keep their natural goodness, flavor color and vitamins for weeks and even months after ripening.”

And toss those ripe tomatoes in wilt-proof lettuce. Imagine lettuce, we are enticed: “keeping its head- and its crispness, and color and flavor- for 30 days after leaving the garden” thanks to Pliofilm.

Yes, it was always harvest time in our household, no matter the season. And thanks to science, it was not just canned and frozen vegetables and fruits- but fresh, rot-resistant tomatoes, fresh frost resistant strawberries year ‘round!

The future of good nourishment was well protected!

Cool Shades

Break out your Wayfarers…today is National Sunglasses Day!

Accustomed to sporting cool shades I have of late been seen skulking about in those oversize, black, wraparound sunglasses so very chic amongst the senior set in Bocca Raton.

Though hardly ready for a retirement home, I have been required to wear these temporarily because of recent eye surgery.

Sunglasses worn solely to protect my vision…what a concept

I Wear My Sunglasses at Night

Sunglasses status as fashion accessories has become as great a consideration as the degree of protection they offer from the sun. Vintage Ray Ban ad 1960 “Try on a pair…you won’t settle for less”

Once upon a time, people wore sunglasses only when they were under the sun. Now they wear them from sun up to sun up. From New Years Day til New Years Eve.

In every kind of weather.

Everywhere.

So how did sunglasses evolve from frankly functional to fashions ultimate accessory?

Eye Care For the Sun

Vintage ad Willsonite Sun Glasses 1941 “Used by the Army Navy and leading airlines”

Before designers flaunted their logos on their overpriced frames, the only designer names attached to sunglasses were optical firms like Bauch & Lomb, American Optical and Willsonlite.

By the late 1930s advertisements for sunglasses began appearing emphasizing scientific protection from the damages of the sun…fashion was an afterthought.

Vintage ad Optiks Sunglasses 1941

In 1936 while army air corp pilots first began wearing polarized sunglasses developed by Bauch & Lomb to protect their eyes from the dangerous glare of the sun, earth-bound beach bunny’s were soon encouraged to protect their own precious peepers from harmful rays, with their own version of the Ray Ban aviator sunglasses.

“Don’t blame the hot dogs for the dizziness and nausea you feel after a day in the sun,” Optik sunglasses cautioned the beach goer in this 1941 ad. “Ten to one its due to unsuspected distortion in your sunglasses!”

A “Beach headache” they explained was a red flag that you were getting too much sun and its harmful ultra violet rays which could lead to permanent eye damage.

Capt.Only Superior products such as Optiks sunglasses with their scientifically ground and polished lenses, would protect you from distortion danger,

Vintage ad for Gaby Suntan Lotion 1944

Besides which, isn’t you eyesight worth 50 cents?

So while you were slathering on the baby oil to get a healthy sun tan, be sure to don a pair of good sun glasses for protection.

 Outdoor Eye Care

American Optical offered lenses in Cosmetan (brown) or Calobar ( green)

Advertising continued to be geared to sportsmen Whether shushing on the slopes or splashing in the surf, hunting down deer or driving a ball down the Fairway, sun glasses were for the active American lifestyle and fashion was still a second thought.

Long before Google glass there was Sportglas by American Optical to protect the active post war sportsman…and sports lady Vintage ad American Opticals Polaroid Sportsglas ad 1946

National Sun Glass Week

Ironically, despite the ubiquitous of sunglasses today, National Sun Glass Week has been whittled down to a mere day- June 27 National Sunglass Day! (L) Vintage ad 1946 American Opticals (R) National Sun Glasses Week ad 1950

By the postwar years, sun glasses were becoming so popular that they merited their own week June 26-July 2- “Wear Sun Glasses for Comfort and Safety.”

In one of their ads we are warned of the dangers of not wearing sun glasses to sporting events. “Who has made the smarter choice,” we are asked. Smart Sue or Dumb Don?

“Over exposure to sun will reduce the fellows eye sensitivity to light about one-third compared to Smart Sue who wore sun glasses to the baseball game. Dumb Don’s ability to see will be curtailed for hours, possibly days- real danger lurks when he drives after dark or works in his factory.”
Not wearing sunglasses can cost him his job! Every person is affected this way. Sun glasses protect your eyes.”

“Buy 2 or 3 pairs,” the reader is encouraged. “keep them on hand.”

Star Struck by Sunglasses

Hollywood star Barbara Stanwyck sports fashionable shades 1947

As sun glasses increasingly became associated with Hollywood glamor and the wealthy vacationers in St Moritz, celebrities now not only wore sun glasses but began lending their name to the products.

Post War Celebrities Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenberg wear sporty American Opticals Polaroid Sportsglas to get rid of Reflected Glare 1948 ad

That popular post-war celebrity couple Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenberg – stars of sports, radio and television – who lent heir endorsement to dozens of product proudly wore snappy Polaroid Sportsglas whenever they lobbed a few tennis balls.

“How the unique Polaroid principle blocks reflected glare” Vintage ad American Optical Polaroid Sportsglas ad

Polarized lenses technology had been created in the 1930s by Edwin H Land founder of Polaroid Corp. and American Optical used it in their Sportglas.

Fashion Eyes

As the melding of sunglasses and glamor grew so did the market for flattering glasses.

Vintage ad Flexfit Sunglasses 1951

Flexfit sun glasses posed the question?

“Why be a ho-hum girl…when you can be a humdinger!”
“This summer glamor eyes your face with Flexfit sun glasses! Wonderful styles to turn admiring eyes your way!”

Flexfits “Hidden Spring Action” is truly the most sensational invention in sun glass history! Only Flexfit Sun Glasses bring you this revolutionary feature that outdates all other sun glasses!”

Fashion for the masses, was Flexfit’s promise with their flexible sunglasses that they boasted were the most sensational invention in sun glass history!

Flexfit sun glasses promised the smartest styling ever seen with features and styling that, they claimed, up till now have only been seen at Europes most exclusive resorts….in glasses costing from $12.50 to $25 ! Yet you pay no more for Flexfit sun glasses than for ordinary, old-fashioned sun glasses- a very democratic $1.49.

In addition Flexfit offered their miracle “Hidden Spring Action” – “found only in their sun glasses – lets you bend, shape and flex your sun glasses to a custom fit.”

Cool Rays

Vintage ad American Optical’s Cool Ray Sun Glasses 1948

Vintage ad American Optica’ls Cool Ray Sun Glasses 1946

Bausch & Lomb offered 11 exciting frame styles and 12 fashionable colors! Vintage Ray Ban Sun Glasses ad

Frame Your Eyes in Flattery with Ray Ban Sunglasses !

Foster Grants

Vintage Fosta Grant Sunglasses ad 1955

No one did more to emphasizing the sex appeal of sunglasses than Foster Grant.
“Look alive! Look lively! People can’t help noticing you…admiring.” begins this 1955 ad . “Fosta Grantly sunglasses are the freshest liveliest styles under the sun for man woman and child.”

By the 1960′s purely practical sunglasses became purely funglasses.

The death knell for utilitarian sunglasses was finally dealt a blow with the sexy ad campaign by Foster Grant that helped escalate the popularity of sunglasses.

The Spell of the Shades

Vintage Foster Grant Sunglasses ad featuring Raquel Welch 1968 The first ad in the series featured Peter Sellers and ran in 1965. Subsequent ads used Anthony Quinn, Woody Allen, Jane Fonda, Julie Christie.

In the 1960s attempting to compete against the technological edge of Cool Ray Polaroid polarizing lenses, Foster Grant developed the clever marketing “Who’s That Behind the Foster Grants” ad campaign, that went on to huge success becoming part of popular culture.

The folks at Foster Grant were besides themselves with the new rage for sunglasses. “Since we are the undisputed king of the hill in sunglasses, this international boom really hits us where we live,” they boasted in one of their ads.

And bragging rights were justified.

They were the grandaddy of sunglasses. In 1929 Sam Foster of Foster Grant Co sold the first pair of Foster Grants sunglasses on the boardwalk of Atlantic City. They were also the first company to use abrasion resistant lens coatings to block the suns ultra violet rays.

Vintage Foster Grant Ad “Isn’t that Anita Ekberg behind those Foster Grants?” 1966 “Behind each and every pair Anita underwent a strange and awesome change. Now somehow cooler, more aloof. Now wittier. Now prettier”

America was under the Spell of the Shades, observed Foster Grant.

“If you don’t believe it, gentle reader, look around. We are in the midst of an intercontinental sunglass explosion and it has nothing to do with the glare of the sun.”

Of course Foster Grant sunglasses did offer eye protection with their ff77 lenses, but that was a mere afterthought to most folks.

As they explained in their ad: “People don’t buy them for their lensmanship. Anita Ekberg, for instance, doesn’t know ff77 from first base. But when we left, she ordered 15 pairs.”

Just like a woman!

Vintage 1966 ad Foster Grant “Isn’t That Elke Sommer Behind those Foster Grants?”

The provocative headline asking the reader: “Isn’t that Elke Sommer behind those Foster Grants?” lent an cool air of mystery to the shades.

“The suspense is killing, so we’ll fess up. It is Miss Sommer,” they reassure the reader.

“But you’ve got to admit that, despite her singular talents, there is a split second when you wondered. And that’s the power of sunglasses. Our 1966 Foster Grants have wondrously worked their magic upon her. Elke changes.”

“Looks and mood alike. Coy. Arch. Petulant, Commanding.”

“That dear friend, is the Spell of the Shades!”

“The day of strictly utilitarian protection from the dastardly glare of the sun is gone. Now sirens like Sommers are sporting a different pair with every vapor every ensemble ever time of day. Winter and summer.”

“Sunglasses are in.”

The rest is history….

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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1938 Vintage ad Chesterfield Cigarettes

Have a Smokin’ Independence Day!

Better Vision for Better Living- Celebrating 125 years of Research Vintage ad American Optical Company 1958

The eyes have it- “Better Vision for Better Living” seems to be my mantra for this summer.

The Road to Health

Vintage school book illustrations from “My First Health Book: The Road to Health” 1951 Laidlaw Brothers Inc.

Despite the fact I diligently heeded my mothers admonitions to sit up straight when I read, making sure there was adequate light and never, no never watched TV in the dark or God forbid sat too close to the set for fear I’d ruin my eyes, my seemingly overprotective yet overworked peepers are now going back to the fix-it shop this week for the first of a round of retina repairs.

I began the summer with eye surgery, and now alas it seems I will end it the same way.

A brief break from blogging, and I’ll be back good as new!

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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Back to School. Vintage ad Sears Back to School Clothes 1957

It was the day before Labor Day 1957 and the countdown had begun for the end of summer and the new school term.

From Long Island to Little Rock, crisp black and white marbled composition notebooks were hastily purchased, and last-minute yellow Dixon number 2 lead pencils skillfully sharpened.

I need shoes, she needs shoes all children need shoes.

To prepare for the big school launch, a visit to the shoe store was in order, as summers canvas Keds, were sorrowfully replaced with sturdy, sensible school shoes.

Getting my brother Andy to trade in his shoe of champions  for a pair of Kindergarten approved Oxfords was no easy feat.

I too would trade in my knitted booties for my very first shoes.

Getting that extra care to start tots toddling  was oh-so-important. It was none too soon for my feet to start getting the protection they would need.

And lucky for me our local shoe store no longer had to rely on the old-fashioned 6 point fitting plan, but could take advantage of the miracle of the x-ray fluoroscope.

That’s Shoe Biz

(L) Vintage ad Poll Parrot Shoes for children (R) Vintage ad Red Goose Children’s shoes 1950s

All week-long radio commercials were competing for attention on the airwaves as all the shoe stores were offering pre Labor Day sales and new school term incentives.

Because the number  of US small fry kept rocketing upward at a phenomenal clip it was a business bonanza with shoe dealers competing for the right to dress your youngsters feet. From rockabye babies to cookie jar raiders to little ladies in pig tails, each company promised  form-pampering shoes for your child that would outperform any other.

Vintage ads Childrens Shoes (L) Poll Parrot (R) Weather -Bird Shoes

Vintage ads Children’s shoes (L) Jumping Jacks 1957 (R) Robin Hood 1958

Pol Parrot Shoes squawked  “Pol Parrot the name you ought to buy to make your feet run faster, as fast as I can fly,” while Weather-Bird Shoes promised that only their shoe “would keep kiddies feet protected in any weather.”

Red Goose Shoes claimed they were built for action fun and looks, while Jumping Jack Shoes  targeted  Mothers pocket books  assuring that their  shoes would “keep your moppets well shod and still keep you solvent.”

Buster Brown Fun

 But only Buster Brown at Henleys Shoe Store could boast of that futuristic apparatus -the fluoroscope, to x-ray your feet.

The radio announcement  blaring between WNEW’s Klavin and Finch was all the incentive Mom needed:

 “Every parent will want to hear this important news!

“Now at last you can be certain that your child’s foot health is not being jeopardized by improperly fitting shoes.”

“Henleys Shoe store on Hempstead Turnpike  in Franklin Square is now featuring the new ADRIAN Special Fluoroscopic Show Fitting machine that gives you visual proof in  a second that your children’s shoes fit. The ADRIAN Special shoe fitting machine has been awarded the famous Parents Magazine Seal of Commendation…a symbol of safety and quality to millions of parents all over America.”

“If your children need new shoes, don’t buy their shoes blindly. “

“Come in today, let us show you the new, scientific method of shoe fitting that careful parents prefer.”

“Henley’s Shoe Store invites all of you to visit us today for an interesting demonstration. We know that once you buy shoes that are scientifically fitted you will shop at Henley’s s all of the time.”

Fit Right In

Staring at the big plastic Buster Brown lighted dealers sign we stepped in to the crowded, stuffy store.

Once in the store, crowds oohed and ahhed as children of all ages toddled and walked down the blue carpeted runway with its picture of a winking Buster Brown and Tige, in new sporty saddles, hard-working Oxfords and the hands down beauty-shiny mary janes.

Vintage Schoolbook illustration “Stories About Linda and Lee” 1959

While the shoe salesman measured my feet, my trigger-happy, have-gun-will -travel brother  Andy was off shooting down a rogue pair of Oxfords  with his cosmic atomic ray gun. The plastic gun shot powerful electronic colors beams on the tall wall of floor to ceiling shoe boxes.

I jiggled up and down on Moms lap and curled my toes when the shoe salesman measured my feet. His pudgy fingers with thickened yellow nails had nicotine stains between the first and second fingers of his left hand, as he placed my foot in the classic Braverman metal shoe measuring device.

Vintage Shoe Fitting Card

Even this once scientific breakthrough 25 years earlier was now old-fashioned.

The salesman looked and sounded remarkably like Andy Devine, the gentle giant, a rotund, high-pitched gravelly voice host, who coincidently hosted a show sponsored by who else…. Buster Brown.

I half expected him to utter the words “Froggy plunk your magic twanger” and green Froggy would appear in a puff of smoke interrupting the sales pitch with his trademark “Hiya kids Hiya Hiya”  in a low raspy voice sinister croak

Ready For My Close up

The importance of the proper fit

Gently, he placed my foot in the fluoroscope- x-ray machine, a big box that looked like an old radio floor model. My tootsies were ready to have their  picture taken.

His well-practiced “Here’s looking at you kid” guaranteed to elicit a giggle from Mom. With the seriousness of a doctor and the expertise of a scientist his foot side manner created just the right blend of scientific know how and showmanship.

Naturally my brother Andy was fascinated by the fluoroscope- it was not unlike something that Captain Video that technological genius had invented like the Opticon Scillometer a long-range x-ray machine to see through walls.

Placing my foot inside the box I could see all the bones of my foot glowing white in a hazy green foot.

My future in footwear captured forever.

Copyright (©) 2014 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved

If you are to believe the news media and some Republican’s Ebola is coming for us all and the government is hiding the truth about the deadly disease Social media and television news are promoting the hysteria, breathlessly spreading panic, stoking fears, while offering mind boggling misinformation.

A pandemic of panic seems to have swept the nation. Ebola fear has gone viral, spreading faster than the virus itself.

Fear-mongering in the face of an unknown epidemic is nothing new.

The panic and the rampant distrust, the half-truths and demonizing, the calls for travel restriction and locked down borders, resemble another epidemic that occurred  nearly a century ago – the Polio epidemic of 1916, the worst polio epidemic ever.

Though too young to remember that scourge, the memories was passed on to me from one who had experienced it firsthand.

Scarier by far than any Grimm’s Brothers fairy tale, or even an episode of the Twilight Zone, were the stories my grandmother would tell me of about the summer of 1916 when a virulent polio epidemic swept through NYC and the mid Atlantic States.

Held Hostage to Terror

Polio Masks 1916

Two years before the deadly flu epidemic of 1918, the worst and deadliest polio epidemic in history struck NYC at a time when the disease was unknown to most people.

The outbreak was unexpected.

Health officials were in the dark about how to control it.

It brought panic, sudden death and medical bafflement, causing suburbs to create roadblocks against city children.

The effects on the people were calamitous. To them this killer was not only a scourge but a new mysterious and frightening one.

Public health authorities could not agree on the right approach and the public knew it. Tempers flared and contradictory recommendations fed a growing hysteria about the epidemic.

Sounds familiar?

Though polio no longer plagues America its legacy shadows us still.

Penicillin Generation

Vintage Lederle Drugs Ads 1950s. (L) “If this were 1900 instead of 1951,” the copy in this ad begins, “there would be far fewer children playing in your streets. More than a hundred thousand live this year who then would have died…but this is 1951 and they will not die…thanks to researchers and science who have created substances that prevent as well as cure disease.” (R) “The Virus World-Final Frontier of Infection”

I grew up in an age of optimism about the conquest of disease.

As child I was constantly reminded that mine was a charmed existence, protected from deadly contagious diseases that had previously wiped out families and communities forever. And not just in the Dark Ages but in my own mothers and grandmothers lifetime.

As a proud and healthy member of the Penicillin generation I was fortunate to be born after the great antibiotic revolution, endowing me with an immunity to those perils that had plagued other generations. In addition, inoculations would keep me safe from the dreaded diseases like whooping-cough, diphtheria, and polio that had ravaged other childhoods.

Vintage Posters The National Foundation For Infantile Paralysis

In fact I would take for granted one of the most remarkable developments in modern history. The polio vaccine, approved in April 1955, only a mere two weeks after I was born, was nothing short of a modern miracle.

No disease struck the same terror as polio. And for good reason- polio hit without warning.

It didn’t matter how good you were, how clean or how rich or poor, polio was the great American equalizer.

Luckily in America that land of opportunity, opportunistic bugs didn’t stand a chance.

Immunity From Disease

The wonders of modern science and medicine had allowed me to be growing up in the safest, cleanest and healthiest time man had ever known.

It seemed impossible that in this antibacterial, spic n’ span country where confident Americans were not just clean but Clorox clean, where physicians worked twice as fast for faster relief and creative chemistry worked wonders killing germs on contact by the millions, that any new scary virus could ever appear to contaminate my antiseptic American dream.

The first cracks appeared with AIDS. Waiting in the wings was Ebola.

Fear Factor

Spurred by the current wave of scare-mongering, terrifying tales my grandmother would retell of the polio epidemic and the ensuing panic that occurred the summer she was sweet sixteen have come back to haunt me.

Polio Epidemic 1916, N.Y.C.

While the battle of the Somme raged on in Europe all summer and fall, Americans fought a battle of another sort, with the outcome almost as grim.

All but forgotten, the summer of 1916 was the first and worse polio epidemic nationwide and the worst happened in N.Y.C., with my Nana Sadies’s beloved Brooklyn as ground zero.

“The yellow forsythia bloomed particularly early that spring,” Nana would remember wistfully, “and spring fever was in the air.”

Conjuring up an image as wholesome and upbeat as any MGM opening credits she would continue, “Were the streets ever bustling in Brooklyn that year!”  Clang, clang, clang went the trolley and everyone it seemed was out and about- ladies in large hats trimmed with roses and ribbons, men in fine  bowlers, little boys in knickerbockers and caps and little girls with fat curls, all whistling the latest tune from Irving Berlin.

Heat Wave

The last week in May had rolled in with an unexpected wave of heat. Swarms of flies appeared everywhere, zooming in through windows and buzzing around the rooms.

The city was like a giant oven, the air was close and heavy. In those days before window air conditioners, Nana would remind me, even an apartment with cross ventilation wouldn’t erase the stifling heat, so to escape the oppressive humidity, everybody sat on their front stoop.

“When the stoops weren’t filled by grownups surveying the street life or by men playing dominoes, you’d see groups of little girls playing jacks, or potsy,” she’d explain smiling.

Before the Parade Passes By

Parade 1916 NYC

“There were so many parades that spring,” Nana would recall, “especially for the youngsters, that you couldn’t keep up with them.”

Besides the cheering crowds at the annual May Day Parade, there was their boroughs very own holiday, Brooklyn Day, the first Thursday in June.

All the public school pupils got an extra day off to march in the annual parade.

But the biggest parade that year, she always maintained, was the huge Preparedness Day Parade “to show the Kaiser we were ready for anything!”

“I’m telling you, the streets turned into a sea of red, white and blue- for miles all you could see were the waving of thousands of American flags of all sizes,” Nana remembered. “It was really something!”

Though America had yet to enter the Great War that had been dragging on for two years, we would be prepared for any war “Over There.”

“It was Over Here that would catch us by surprise!” she would sigh forlornly.

Unprepared

Out of no where, Nana would explain, a wave of polio, “like the plague,” came to terrorize N.Y.C. in 1916 (R) Quarantined Child A common scene in Brooklyns hardest hit district during 1916 epidemic

There were still flags and banners and streamers left hanging from the big parades when suddenly one June day, to their astonishment, a totally different kind of fever hit a very unprepared NYC “with a sledge-hammer blow like you wouldn’t believe.”

It began in the crowded immigrant section of Brooklyn and stayed for five months.

“There was no warning, no drills, no nothing,”  she recounted. “One day bands had played for the children as they marched the streets, the next the streets were bare.”

Out of no where, Nana would explain, a wave of polio, “like the plague,” came to terrorize N.Y.C. in 1916 and it raged all summer and fall.

Until then, “What did we know from polio?” she would shrug.

Infantile Paralysis

Infantile paralysis was almost unknown by most Americans and even doctors thought of it as a rare disease.

Everywhere, people, their faces gray with worry and fright, whispered in fear of this unknown, unseen villain that was crippling and destroying little children.

Gloomily she spelled it out: “Nobody had any idea of the cause and how to treat it was anyone’s guess.”

Day after day, as she described it, frightened mothers with suffering furrowed in their faces appeared carrying infants who were suddenly deathly sick, complaining that a daughter could no longer use an arm or a leg, a son could suddenly no longer hold his bottle.

“It broke your heart, it was so sad; who knew how contagious it was…..?”

At Baby Health stations mothers and children mingled together, the sick and the well and the sly virus spread even deeper into the community.

Soon, an all too familiar sight was the glow from a kerosene-lit kitchen window in the middle of the night where a worried mother was up with a sick child, a harried doctor, kit in hand, rubbing his sleepy eyes as he hurried to answer yet another night call.

Good Health…Knock on Wood

Polio stricken child on his way to the hospital. many parents ignorant and frightened refused to part with their ill children.

Health Inspectors were dispatched to smoke out the enemy.

“They schlepped door to door but the disease was a regular speed demon and had beaten them by several days,” she would remember.

All over Brooklyn, the persistent pounding of doors by the city health inspectors became as dreaded and feared as that of the Big Bad Wolf, bearing words that choked the throat and chilled the heart.

Without so much as a warrant, health inspectors had the power to arrest families suspected of hiding an infected child.

To the poor families in crowded tenements it was the health inspector himself who became the villain, the Snidley Whiplash of his day.

Frantic fathers tried to barricade their door to keep out the authorities, until finally, as Nana described it, “like the Russian Cossacks,”  the police would arrive to tear the sick child away from a screaming mother, taking the child to a hospital where “these poor children were in enforced isolation for 2 whole months, with not even a visit from the parents allowed.”

The Big Bad Wolf

Desperate, Mothers tried scaring their children  likening this unseen enemy to the crafty wolf in the story books, warning them not to leave the house “for if this wolf gets in, he’ll gobble you up, bones and all.”

“Worried parents, frightened their child would be taken away to a city hospital, where-everyone-knew-you-died, locked their terrified children in the house, in the dark, with the windows shut, making the rooms as hot as ovens, shvitzing like a Turkish bath” explained my grandmother.

The same refrain, in a variety of tongues and accents, could be heard all over: “A free country?” they bitterly asked. “What’s so free about it when the law grabs a child from its own mother and forces you to endanger their lives to go to a hospital?”

All day, all night the air was pierced by the shrill clang of the ambulances, co-mingling with the plaintiff wails of heartbroken mothers keening loudly as if wailing for the dead…which often they were.

Empty Classrooms

Vintage cartoon appearing in Life Magazine 1916

Soon there were empty seats in the classrooms.

Fears of the epidemic would fill the rooms with the strong penetrating, aroma of garlic or camphor balls in hopes of warding off the disease.

“Rumors, mostly bubemeisers, of remedies and cures spread from building to building as quickly as the disease itself. Suddenly everyone was a maven when it came to a cure,” she said.

Like so many thousands of frightened mothers as steeped in superstition as they were skilled at sewing, my Great-Grandmother carefully stitched up little cloth bags and filled them with 5 cent cakes of gum camphor to tie around the necks of her children, since the rumor was this would prevent polio.

Forget Coppertone, to Nana Sadie the peculiar odor of camphor would always conjure up summer for her.

“Each night my mother said a prayer for all the little ones that had been taken away,” she  remembered. Her mother kept refilling the camphor bags to ward off the disease even though she began to have little faith in them, but, as Nana recalled,  “she would always say, ‘My children. In perfect health, kayn aynhoreh’”.

“So day in and day out,” Nana recalled, “even if we were unhappy about it, we wore these stinky little bags next to our skins, dangling from a string around our necks that bounced up and down whenever we moved.”

Weeks passed as the plague and panic continued to mount.

Tomorrow : Blame needed to be placed somewhere. Scapegoats would be found. PT II

With hysteria at high pitch blame had to be placed somewhere…a xenophobic fingers pointed at immigrants

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Scarier by far than any Grimm’s Brothers fairy tale, or even an episode of the Twilight Zone, were the stories my grandmother would tell about the time a virulent polio epidemic swept through NYC in 1916. While  war raged over in Europe, the worst and deadliest polio epidemic in history struck NYC at a time when the disease was unknown to most people.

Like today’s pandemic of panic  over the Ebola Virus,  the unexpected, unfamiliar outbreak created mass  hysteria while  mind-boggling  misinformation stoked fears and conspiracy theories. The sources were unknown, its symptoms terrible  making it ripe for conspiracy theories.  A public was paralyzed with fear 

Just like today, blame had to be place somewhere.

Panic Spreads

In the painting by Charles Fouqueray British troops press forward oblivious to wounds or their fallen comrades

With the same force as  the Germans attacking the British at Somme that year, the disease plowed through neighborhoods, wiping out everyone in its path.

The city was being besieged by an enemy who refused to leave unless he was paid his ransom of thousands of children’s lives.

Polio just swept through the neighborhoods with a breezy self-assurance, since no one knew how to stop it.

A platoon of scientists and big shot doctors were helpless in offering treatment or prevention.

Just like General Pershing’s failure to find Pancho Villa in Mexico, so the polio virus eluded the scientific community. Like that elusive Mexican outlaw, many said the virus combined “the deadly cunning of the rattlesnake with the oily craftiness of the Mexican.”

Scapegoats were needed.

The fault needed to be found.

Foreign Occupation

“Only weeks earlier, winter weary windows had been flung opened to let in the gentle spring breezes,” Nana Sadie explained,  and with it the bucolic, early morning crowing of the roosters coming from the yards of the Italians on the North side of Brooklyn who kept chickens in their yards.

The familiar cries of the neighborhood street vendors and rag-pickers, would waft from the sidewalk and mix with the melodic voice of Enrico Caruso singing Ol Sole Mio being played on nearly every gramophone on the block.

“Sure there were no radios then…but, there was always music and dancing on the streets,…” Nana recalled her voice drifting off. “Now these same windows were shut tight, the cracks stuffed with rags so the disease wouldn’t come in, and the familiar street vendors shunned.”

Even though like the beloved Caruso the vendors were Italian, most folks of Italian descent were perceived to be careless and ignorant. Dirty and poor, immigrants in general and Italians in particular, were the scapegoat du jour.

Because the outbreak of polio first appeared in a heavily Italian section of Brooklyn, it was assumed they were carriers of polio.

So it was no surprise that Italians were blamed for importing – along with olive oil, broccoli and garlic – deadly germs from Naples.

No Mixing the Melting Pot

“You’re a Cheap Bunch of Soreheads and You Can’t Land Here,” says a bloated Uncle Sam in cartoonist Art Young’s protest against discriminatory immigration laws. This editorial cartoon appeared in “The Masses” the radical, socialist magazine that attacked the status quo. The 2 original art editors were John Sloan and Art Young . The magazine with a rabble rousing editorial policy was founded in 1911 in NYC’ s Greenwich Village and attracted the most radical of the country’s serious writers and artists.

The good ol’ American melting pot was seen more as a cauldron of germs, of filthy foreigners mixing with “native” others in parks, streetcars and subways.

A classic American recipe for disaster that has been handed down through the generations.

Who Can You Trust?

Local street vendors came under suspect

Great Grandma cast a suspicious eye on everyone – dirty, unsanitary immigrants delivered a variety of services to middle class neighborhoods – Giuseppe the fruit peddler, Luigi the junk man, Mr Fiorelli the knife sharpener, would all come rolling in their horse-drawn wagons into her clean, sanitary neighborhood.

Folks were alerted that for health insurance, to be wary of buying fresh fruit. Government-issued pamphlets warned an already panicked public: “an infected fruit peddler ( no doubt an immigrant of Italian extraction) may use saliva to polish the fruit, and the germs might grow well on the fruit just polished!”

“Every once and awhile,” Nana remembered smiling, “the organ grinder would come around with his monkey, so cute dressed in a little red jacket, but who, my mother said, had fleas so I should stay away from him; whether she meant the monkey or the organ grinder, who knew?”

Fear and Loathing

Vintage cartoon by Paul Reilly Life Magazine 1916

Only later when a xenophobic finger began pointing to the Eastern European Jews as contributing to the epidemic, were my great-grandparents outraged.

“Oh boy was my father hot and bothered about that.” Imitating her father, her voice would take on a Russian accent:
“The highest court in the land finally has a Jew, a schtarker like Louis Brandeis on the Supreme Court,” your Great Grandpa would bellow in disbelief,” yet they still put the blame on the Jews!”

The government itself took lots of heat. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle placed much of the blame on the steps of City Hall. In a front page editorial it said:

“When infantile paralysis knocked at the door of the city and a great emergency came to the Health Department, it found that most important arm of the city government unprepared to handle the situation as it should be handled – chiefly because of lack of funds.”

Flies Carry Filth

Vintage American Red Cross Information

Everything came under suspicion. – paper money, ice cream candy wet laundry.

But the favorite source of blame continued to be –the most dangerous animal in the world- the fly.

If the FBI had existed when Nana was a little girl, there is no doubt in her mind its number one most wanted, most dangerous enemy of all would the American house fly, more dangerous in the public’s mind than the German or even the Bolshevik.

San Francisco may have had its anarchist bombings that summer, but to nerve jangled New Yorker’s, uncovered garbage cans were a ticking time bomb of their own- breeding grounds for thousands of flies that could then crawl all over babies bottles and lips

Nana honed her considerable fly swatting skills at the numerous city sponsored fly swatting contests held that summer.

The anti-fly campaign was the cornerstone of the health campaign against polio. “Grown men and women,” Nana recalled, “like meshugennehs walked the streets swatting flies enthusiastically

The fly swatter – was summers must-have accessory.

The Perils of Panic

(L) A gagged and bound Pauline White from the movie “Perils of Pauline” (R) Women donning face masks during polio epidemic 1916

In July as the front pages of daily newspapers displaying the growing number of cases and deaths in bold black type, the public panicked and became hysterical.

Suddenly, the way Nana explained it, day-to-day life sounded like an episode straight out of the movie serial “The Perils of Pauline.”

No one was safe from the villainous brute polio.

Danger, scowling and sneering could be lurking right around the corner – yesterday a suspiciously shared sarsaparilla in a sordid soda fountain, today, a sneeze on a shared seat in a sullied streetcar, tomorrow-who-knows- the blunder of a borrowed book from the public library.

(L) A NYC Movie Theater (R) Movie Poster- The Perils of Pauline

At the Moving Picture Show, that popular heroine of perilous plots, Pauline, could fight off savage Indians and escape mad pirates, but would Harry, her handsome hero be able to save her from the perils of polio in the nick of time?

Nana would never find out because in July, besides closing the library, the city closed the movies to children too!

Boys of Summer

Vintage 1916 Saturday Evening Post Cover by a young Norman Rockwell who had begun doing covers for the publication earlier that year. Sadly, because of polio so many young boys would never again be able to run and play ball after that summer, nor would some live to be the age of “gramps” in the illustration..

Even as one by one playgrounds barred children and eventually closed, empty lots were still filled with “the boys of summer.” Nothing it seemed would stop them from their dreams of playing baseball for “them bums.”

However, as summer progressed the sight of those eager boys in their knickerbockers and caps, running bases and hitting home runs in their field of dreams, became fewer and fewer.

“So many of those little boys would never throw a ball again,” Nana said sadly, and worse still, even more would never live through the summer to see their beloved Dodgers play in the World Series that fall.

“The series opened with so many vacant seats in Ebbitts Field, it was heartbreaking.”

“But, to tell the truth,” Nana would point out, “maybe, bite-my-tongue- it wasn’t such a bad thing after all, since those stinkers, the Red Sox, with their big shot player Babe Ruth, beat ‘them Bums.”

Fear and Flight

Day after day during the epidemic, an exodus of women and their children took place on trains leaving the scourge-ridden city. The city became a ghost town, not unlike the deserted towns in war-torn France.

The city became a ghost town, not unlike the poor, deserted towns in war-torn France that they would read about in the papers every day.

Towns where frightened citizens fled after a German shell was dropped, running scared out of their wits thinking the Krauts were about to enter.

So panicky New Yorker’s began fleeing in fear of the polio virus.

Sounds of Silence

Normally congested neighborhoods that during the hot weather spilled out into the streets remained empty. The once familiar sight, suddenly gone, of little girls playing double dutch or Ring around the Rosie, their fat curls bouncing in the sun and their hands joined walking in a circle.

Even to sit on their own stoop made people jittery.

Streets once teeming with the sounds of children was muffled, then silent and gloomy, like a transistor radio battery slowly going dead.

Mothers were so afraid they would not even let the children enter the streets, locking them in their rooms, their clothes hidden, to prevent them from infected children and breathing infected air that carried the disease, as if polio were like the poisonous gas used by the Germans at Verdun.

That summer it was as if Houdini had waved his magic wand, uttered the words Abracadabra and made them all disappear.

Next: Travel Restricted, Borders Close as Panic and Prejudice Go Viral

Many families that fled the city to escape contagion did not find welcome elsewhere as this sign at Brewster NY shows

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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A Paralyzing Fear Pt I

Americans are suffering from a serious panic attack, as panic itself has gone viral.

Ebola hysteria is spreading faster than the virus itself, creating a climate of fear mongering, misinformation and intolerance.

Along with frantic calls for travel restrictions and border closures, the panicked reactions resemble another viral epidemic of nearly a century ago.

The 1916 Polio epidemic, all but forgotten now, was the worst polio epidemic ever, striking a baffled N.Y.C. out of the blue creating a pandemic of panic.

Like the Ebola virus, the sources were unknown, the hysteria unchecked, making it ripe for conspiracy theories and xenophobic blaming.

Sound familiar?

A public was paralyzed with fears, and panic and intolerance went viral.

The stories my Brooklyn born grandmother would tell me of this awful, unknown epidemic that hit an unprepared NYC in the summer of 1916 would haunt my childhood.

Vintage photo masks worn during Polio outbreak 1916

Scientists and doctors  were helpless in offering treatment as this new mysterious outbreak swept through neighborhoods.

Mothers were so afraid they would not even let the children enter the streets, locking them in their rooms, their clothes hidden, to prevent them from infected children and breathing infected air that carried the disease, as if polio were like the poisonous gas used by the Germans at Verdun.

Everything came under suspicion – paper money, ice cream candy, wet laundry.

Local street vendors came under suspicion as carriers of the disease as they were considered dirty and unclean, especially those of Italian extraction. (R) Vintage warning how germs are spread

But because it began in the crowded Italian immigrant section of Brooklyn, panicked fingers blamed foreigners.

The good ol’ American melting pot was seen more as a cauldron of germs of filthy foreigners mixing with “native” others in parks, streetcars and subways.

Panic mixed with prejudice created a potent brew that quickly bubbled over into travel restrictions and border closures to children under 16 without proper health certificates.

Stories Pt III

Day after day during the epidemic an exodus of women and their children took trains leaving the scourge ridden city while others were stuck in quarantine with signs warning the healthy. Doctors, strangers to polo, could do little to help the victims. (L) A scene in Brooklyn’s hardest hit district during the 1916 polio epidemic

The stories my grandmother told me about this epidemic only got worse as the summer wore on.

“The disease spread,” she would continue in her story, “and a panicked public wanted to get away, anywhere where the air would be clean.”

With the ironic caption “Why don’t they go to the country for a vacation?” artist George Bellows captures the overcrowding of slum streets and tenement buildings in NYC along with the sensation registered by middle and upper middle class observers over the seemingly unbearable conditions . The cartoon appeared in the socialist magazine “The Masses” in 1913, where Bellows was a regular contributor.

In the stream of refugees that poured from the city that summer, the poor were in the minority.

They couldn’t afford to leave.

So thousands of New Yorker’s fled the heat if only for a day, for the cool ocean breeze of Coney Island.

Coney Island

Fatty Arbuckle enjoys the whip at “Coney Island” in his 1917 short silent film of the same name. The film also featuring Buster Keaton, follows his antics at Coney Island where he sneaks away from his wife to enjoy the attractions.

My grandmother often begged her mother, without any success to take the family to Coney Island for the amusements, but it seemed her father, “considered such pleasures as those, as inferior.”

Maybe strolls on the boardwalk or dinner at Feldmans, but Luna Park and the amusements were, he felt, beneath the dignity of his family.

And with the recent upgrading of the BMT line to a subway, now making the trip to Coney Island so much more accessible to the masses Coney Island was shunned by her mother more than ever.

The Other Half

Perhaps that legacy is why years later Nana Sadie never once set foot on a public beach like Jones Beach, where the crush of crowds concealed the sand, preferring the safety of a private club, whose members were in fact the very progeny of the people her mother tried to avoid. (L) Immigrants entering Ellis Island (R) Coney Island 1940 by Weegee

No Emma Lazarus she, it seems the poor, tired and huddled masses harbored too many contagious diseases for my Great Grandmothers taste.

Like many of her class, she believed unclean people not only harm themselves but are dangerous to clean people. One dirty man or woman in a street car, or in a crowd could poison all the air for others.

No one was safe from polio.

Safe Havens of Fresh Air

Traditionally every summer Nana and her family like many city dwellers of means, would pack up their belongings leaving the stifling, oppressive city for the health giving benefits of “cool, fresh country air and sunshine.”

Breathing deeply of either the salty sea air of Long Beach, or the piney mountain air of The Catskills, these safe havens of fresh air were a welcome relief.

Even under normal circumstances, the hot still air of the city during the summer was considered especially poisonous and dangerous, with opportunistic disease germs just waiting to pounce.

In the openness of the country with its abundance of fresh clean air, good health was just around the corner.

The Perils of the Posners

During the Polio panic the east coast became like a war zone, as residents formed strategy’s to protect their communities

However, that summer, hundreds of these so-called safe havens of fresh air responded nervously to the epidemic with severe restrictions of just who could inhale deeply of their pure clean oxygen, barring children from entering the area.

Gasp!

All was not quiet on the Eastern Front.

The east coast became like a war zone. To stop the virus from establishing a beachhead in their towns, medical inspectors, behaving more like paramilitary soldiers, guarded state borders, setting up roadblocks, ready to turn away any refugees from N.Y.C.

The same towns that had cheered and welcomed children in May were by July turning them away. Many families that fled the city to escape contagion did not find welcome elsewhere, as this sign at Brewster, N.Y. shows. (R)

All over Connecticut, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, residents mobilized, setting up barricades and taking drastic action to keep New Yorker’s out.

Entire train stations were guarded by regular citizens whose job it was to turn back children from the city. Towns posted large red signs on the roads that you couldn’t miss, warning travelers that certificate or not, no children would be allowed to even pass through their community.

On Long Island where in just 30 more years its suburbs would become the promised land of so many ex urbanites, was now anything but welcoming to city residents.

When polio patients from Oyster Bay were sent to the only available hospital at nearby Glen Cove, residents of that tony area reacted violently, threatening to kill the health officer and burn down the hospital.

In suburban Woodmere angry mobs gathered at an isolation hospital and threatened to wreck it until the institution was placed under heavily-armed guards.

Fellow Travelers

Towns took steps to combat the threat of polo by refusing entry to children. (L) 1916 photo- Great Neck, Long Island barred children under 16 and authorities checked each incoming car.

That July, as Nana remembered it, while traveling to their rented bungalow in Long Beach, Long Island, “suddenly, like some poor Russian peasants trying to escape to Vilna in the dark of night, instead of decent tax paying Americans, we were stopped by authorities who were checking every incoming car-like contraband for children under 16.”

The Health Department issued a law that no child under 16 could leave N.Y.C.without a health certificate that would absolutely positively certify that the child was not infected, nor had gone within two feet of an infected neighborhood.

“But,” she continued, “a certificate signed by your own family doctor, which-I-should-mention-we-had, wasn’t good enough for these shmegegees to prove we were free of infections. It had to be signed by a big shot city health inspector.”

Those cars with children without proper certificates were detained and sent back to the city, “and so like common criminals, back to the city we went.”

Manhattan Morphs into Minsk

“It felt to my parents,” explained Nana, “who-thank- God–had-narrowly-escaped-them, like the terrible May Laws in Russia which restricted where Jews could travel and live.”
“How is it”, my mother would ask, “that in such a free country, you can’t go as you please… and since when, may I ask, did our President Wilson turn into, I-should-bite-my–tongue- the-Tzar.”

Equal Opportunity

But my Great Grandmother missed the big picture which was that this was indeed America, the land of equality.

Uncle Sam didn’t restrict only Jewish children, but all children’s freedom as well. Moishe as well as Mathew.

Land of equal opportunity, indeed!

End in Sight

Vintage poster for the March of Dimes to Fight Infantile Paralysis

Then late in the summer when the two month isolation period had passed the hospitals began to discharge the polio stricken children.

Out they poured with crippled arms and legs with bodies stripped of any chance of normal development.

“There were infants who had not yet learned to walk and who never would,” Nana said mournfully. “Babies who never would hold a bottle” “Youngsters who would never carry a school bag,” she sighed  bleakly.

Nodding her head in sadness, Nana always ended the story with “You should only know how lucky you are!”

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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A Paralyzing Fear Pt I

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More Doctors and more bowlers smoke Camels. Vintage 1948 ad Camels Cigarettes featuring Ned Day Bowling Champion.

Can you get Ebola from a bowling ball?

The question seems to be popping up all over especially in the Big Apple. Panicked New Yorker are concerned after an Ebola infected doctor revealed he recently bowled at a Brooklyn bowling alley.

Despite medical authorities dismissing  transmission as extremely unlikely, Ebola panic continues to spread through the city.

Keep bowling New Yorkers.

You are more at risk from the dangers of second-hand smoke than you are of contracting the Ebola virus.

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Prejudice and Panic Go Viral PtIII

For some parents the scariest part of Halloween is the prospect of all the candy their children will consume once they’ve brought home their haul.

Chill.

It may be hard to swallow but once upon a time candy was not the unhealthy villain it is viewed as today. By the 1930’s nutritionists called it a miracle food as important to the body as coal or oil is to the furnace, and conscientious moms made sure Americas youngsters had adequate supplies of this energy producing treat.

By WWII candy’s place in the diet had been firmly entrenched.

Home Economists – especially those in the employ of candy manufacturers – were quick to point out the nutritional value of candy aiming to show candy as good wholesome food.

And good ol American corn syrup helped make it extra special healthy and wholesome.

Good and Good For You

Vintage WWII advertisement 1943 Budweiser

No one fanned the healthy corn syrup flame more than Corn Products Refining Co. producers of dextrose sugar. So it was no surprise that their ads encouraged parents: “By all means, let ‘em eat cake…and candy, too”

The only surprise was this particular ad from 1943 touting the same sweet sentiments was from less than wholesome beer brewery Anheuser Busch.

Let ‘em Eat Cake…and Candy Too

“Nature has her own way of telling us there is energy in sweets,” the cloying copy begins .

“Today corn syrup, rich in dextrose is playing a more important role than ever before in supplying active America with the sugar that gives power to the body and keeps wits sharp.”

“Candy is part of field rations and sweets are served generously to our armed forced everywhere,” Budweiser boasts patriotically. “Sweets served in war plants have greatly stepped up human energy and production.”

Candy Corn

“Tremendous quantities of corn syrup are used to make icings, cookies, cakes, candies and pies so temptingly good- and good for you,” explains Anheuser Busch a major supplier of corn syrup during the war.

The Beer company began producing corn syrup as a result of Prohibition which made it illegal to manufacture and sell alcohol.

Using its grain supply it began selling barley malt syrup, soft drinks and then started producing corn syrup, a key ingredient in candy manufacturing.

“Immense amounts of corn syrup for the army as well as for civilian consumption are produced by the Home of Budweiser. Our corn Products Division grew out of the experience that developed from years of laboratory research,” the copy claims.

And once the kiddies got old enough, they could get their fill of corn syrup in an ice-cold Bud too!

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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