I bought the magazine because the cover price was 10 cents (not what I paid for it) and because it was from 1956 and because the featured articles were "How to Have Chicken Every Day and Like It" and "14 Easy Ways to Finish Paneling," as if either was some kind of worthy goal.
Inside the magazine were more articles to savor, such as "Making a House 'Just Like Home'," a nominally confusing concept since the house in question was the home of the Jeffries family who lived there. The chicken-every-day article featured an array of recipes involving dried fruit, cream of mushroom soup, yams and, improbably, pork.
There was also an article on stacked dishes, the idea being that entrees and desserts taste better and look more tempting if they're layered. Hence: Red and White Salad Loaf, featuring tomato-shrimp layers and heavily mayonnaised vegetable layers and a self-explanatory Layered Ham and Chicken Loaf, each layer heavily reliant on bread crumbs and, of course, cream of mushroom soup.
The ads were for the most part what I expected, too: a full-page, four-color ad for a GE refrigerator with revolving shelves and magnetic doors, an ad for Lucky Strike cigarettes proclaiming the tobacco is "Toasted ... to taste better!" There were ads for paints and freezers and air conditioners as well as a host of ads for convenient food products, such as Borden's non-fat dry milk, instant dog food mix from Ken-L Ration and the ever-tempting Cheez Whiz shown here spread on toast rounds and topped with Spanish olives for that south of the border panache.
Not surprisingly, the ads were gender specific in their target marketing: men pictured with the heating, cooling and painting products, women in the ads for Ex-Lax ("EX-LAX HELPS your child toward his NORMAL REGULARITY"), kitchen appliances, supplies and apparel.
Yet beyond the typical female-targeted ads encouraging readers to buy three bras designed For Daytime, For Playtime and (ooh-la-la) for Gaytime or to order from Lane Bryant "If You're Stout," there were ads that were much more — there's no other way to put it — shame-driven.
Opposite the table of contents page, mothers were advised "Stop hurting your child with old-fashioned harsh antiseptics!" and switch to Johnson's First Aid Cream.
A left-hand page toward the front encouraged a woman to talk to her doctor, her mother and her best friend to discover how easy it is to use Tampax — which she would never even have to touch!
Lysol was marketed for use as a regular douche: "You feel more radiant and look better when you're so completely clean and nice."
And the same product is sold as a household cleanser a few pages later with the tag line "Let Lysol do the dirty work."
The smaller ads toward the back of the magazine were more insidious — or maybe they were intended to be more discreet.
The Roller Rolaxer that "rolls away excess fat" encouraged women to "massage your way to beauty" and ads on facing pages for Large Bust Style Catalog and Small Bust Style Catalog assured women that with the right bra you can alternatively "cup your large bust into a smaller, youthful shape" or "mold the small bust into a fuller, well-rounded, exciting bustline instantly," while the Fredericks of Hollywood ad featured a naked woman holding a catalog in front of her, assuring readers that these gorgeous Hollywood creations were "especially designed for male appeal."
The ad for Norform suppositories featured a demure looking beauty, hands crossed in her lap, nails manicured, while the caption assured us that this product was the "Easier, surer protection for your most intimate marriage problem."
And this led me to wonder that, if something a simple shower would take care of was the worst of intimate marital problems, maybe the '50s were a better decade, after all — for husbands, at least, if not for women.
Jo Page's email address is jopage34@yahoo.com. Her website is at >www.jo-page.com>.