Adventurous Advertizing of Days Gone By

I've been reminiscing over these two magazines back in day. At 10.5 x 14 inches, they're about 20% bigger than a sheet of writing paper. Companies you know and many that are forgotten would buy ad-space by the page or even a full centerfold. The magazines themselves sold for a quarter. They were a Father’s Day gift so I have no idea what my daughter paid for them.

What is surprising about the last issue of 1963 and the May '64 Life Magazines are depictions of modern life. The new cars are antiques in terms of looks, technology, safety and performance. Still, they were promoted with the same breathless wonder as our lane keeping, radar cruising, cross traffic detecting sedans and SUVs.

Clockwise, Studebaker, Pontiac, Champion spark plugs, VW, Chevy and Pontiac again. They all want to assure you that you're making the right choice when you buy one of their fine products.

Bobby Unser’s Pikes Peak racer aside, today’s market would favor that 23 window Volkswagen. Provenance proving that you had that exact unit would yield six figures all day long as they say. People go as far as Brazil to find a shell to restore. If it only had 15 windows, they’re liable to cut some more holes and make a tribute version. It’s still gutless, unreliable, noisy, oily and unsafe but people love ‘em.

Consumer Technology: The Atomic Age but on the Cusp of the Space Age

Technology never sleeps. A brave new world awaits the consumer. Whether it comes to cooking with electricity instead of gas or getting that high-tech refrigerator/freezer in luscious avocado green, the kitchen is a place to upgrade. In 1964, you were more or less safe from microwave radiation. Go ahead and watch the food cook! By all appearances, warming things up and cooling them down was serious business.

After dinner, the Admiral television console unit can be seen in styles ranging from Contemporary to Danish Modern, Early American, French Provincial and so much more! “Hand crafted from genuine veneers and hardwood solids.” They brag about 26,000 volts of picture power and 11 years of color experience. Baseline models come with a VHF tuner while you can add UHF down the road for a whopping total of 82 channels. What are you waiting for?

Clockwise, the O'Keefe and Merritt Gas Contempo range, ad from the Edison Electric Institute, Admiral televisions, Polaroid camera, GE fridge, Sony TV, Revere tape deck, Honda scooters and (center) the “Magnificent Imperial Nineteen” refrigerator by Frigidair; a product of General Motors.

Meanwhile the portability of transistorized electronics were just coming out with amazing reductions in size. The portable Sony TV could run on mains power or on batteries with the same 82 channels. Any given area will only have a handful of actual broadcasts but hey! It might take a little bit of technical know-how to get those snowy broadcasts to resolve on the picture tube.

Aside from volume and channel selection, we also had horizontal and vertical hold knobs where you could adjust the varactors and stop the image from scrolling or skewing. Additionally, there were secondary knobs for brightness and "fine tuning" once you found a channel that wasn't just broadcasting a test pattern.

Most stations played the Star Spangled Banner at midnight and then signed off until morning. To tell the truth, we could probably stand a bit more time being disconnected. Our airwaves buzz with thousands of continuous streams of data; information overload.

Food and Beverages: Nostalgia With a Twist

Unlike our electronics, some things never change. Packaging of the successful food products that we consume have a way of sticking around. They can go relatively unchanged over the course of decades. Other items are test marketed and then fade into obscurity. You’re completely forgiven if you’ve never even heard of some of these items.

Clockwise: Ritz crackers, Squirt soda, Banquet TV dinners, Kellogs cereal, Hunts catsup and Chef Boyardee pizza in a box.

We grew up on this stuff. Saving up those box tops to send in for some kind of a reward was part of the deal. The more sugary cereals may have even had a cheap toy of some kind in the box. We rarely saw that stuff, and if we did, it was Life or Kix which aren’t pure sugar. Convenience was a key selling point for the ‘60’s mom like mine. It didn’t fit into the image panel but there was a seven-cents-off coupon for powdered lemonade in the magazine.

I’ll tell you what else isn’t going to make it into the panel. I’m not showing the copious ads for cigarettes and alcohol. Both back covers were full-pagers for smokes. There was no Surgeon General’s warning either. More likely was a man in a lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck advising us to switch over to menthols if we were feeling sick. One ad did say that they were for adults. The vibe was more like “Are you Man enough?” rather than “Kids shouldn’t smoke.”

The iconic image of John-John at the funeral.

I don’t want to get kicked out of the PCB Designers club so I'd better finish strong. These brain surgeons, (no kidding!) are taking advantage of the latest gadgets to monitor the health of their patient. This leading edge facility is the National Institute of Health in Bethesda Maryland. The bottom left isn’t acupuncture, the electrodes are placed directly on the patient’s brain to record brain waves. Meanwhile, the blood pressure readings are almost as intrusive.

Well, well, Weller!

Weller was and is the soldering iron of choice when it comes to fixing things including our printed circuit boards. The $8.95 price tag was equivalent to a decent pair of shoes of that era. Today, there are many knock-offs and a boutique iron from Hakko if you want to spend extra. A Pro kit with the molded box will set you back about one hundred in today’s dollars. By itself, the gun will cost about half of that. The wattage will be roughly double to handle lead-free temperatures.

There you have it. Setting aside the food items, there would be a vintage printed circuit board inside of everything shown in these ‘63/’64 advertising campaigns. While the designers generally didn’t have Computer Aided Design, they made due. I would guess that the automotive industry had some kind of rudimentary CAD stations that they created in-house. As for the components, they would be hardly recognizable. You could actually see each and every transistor. Not anymore!