As I Blog While Starving (And A Chicken Is Baking In My Oven And Our Whole House Smells Like Lemony Garlicky Deliciousness)

And as my stomach growls...

Boy howdy, this blog is going to be a favorite of mine.  I can just tell.

I've been toying with the notion of actually making some of the vintage recipes that cross my path, kind of like what I did with The Salad of '75 (remember?).

Then I would photograph the results and give you my review.

What do you think?

I love the condescending quotation marks.  Isn't that cute of that homemaker, to actually think that she's a chef?  Whatever will her pretty little head think up next?

From 1957 and 1958: TWA Jetstream

1957

The TWA Jetstream was a common site in movies in the 1950s.  Two films that immediately come to mind are Funny Face and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?  In the latter, you see Jayne Mansfield languishing in one of 
the Jetstream's luxurious sleeper beds.

1958

I always love Trans World's colorful, eye-catching advertising from this era.  Many of their travel advertisements could have doubled as art for the home, and often did.

Be sure to double-click each ad so that you can read 
all of the text!

What This Blog Needs: The Magic Of Soup

I love soup.  I could live quite happily on the stuff.

Growing up on a tight budget in Indiana, we ate a lot of Campbell's soup.  Bean With Bacon and Tomato were the favorites in our house.   Our thermoses were often filled with Beef Barley soup for schooltime lunches.  And if you were sick, Mom made our sickroom a little more special with Chicken And Stars.

Today, as an adult, one of the ultimate comfort foods for me is Campbell's Tomato made with full-fat half-and-half.

From 1956: As I Lay Dyeing

 

This ad is a divine double-clicker!

From 1979: Pa Gets A Camera From Oleson's Merchantile And Shills For Kodak

People
April 23, 1979

Quick note to my readers: thanks for giving me the heads up about People basically destroying their archive site.

All of those wonderful ads, all of that wonderful history...gone!

I am just gutted by it.

I've sent them several emails, begging them to reconsider and put all of the pages from every magazine back on the site. People, PLEASE.

Currently Occupying My Time

Retronaut

Seriously, folks...this is the coolest website I have ever seen. -Laura Beth

Hope You Had A Cool Yule

Me, I'm plum tuckered out from making the Yuletide gay!

We had a really splendid holiday, lots of lovely presents (I got a Kitchen Aid stand mixer!  A cashmere pashmina!  A bottle of Samsara perfume!), gallons of libations, and a Christmas dinner of all-you-can-eat crab legs at our favorite local Chinese buffet.

I hope you all had a beautiful Christmas, if that's what you celebrate.  May it have been as much fun as this:

1977

I love this picture.  It's from this blog, and I find it so wonderful.

Wait a second...Santa Claus, NO!

I Got Me A Case Of The Vintage Hungries: Ripe Olive Susan To The Rescue!

And look at them yummy Deviled-Ham Rollwiches!

It's still hotter than Billy Be Damned here in Hell, Arizona, and one thing that always tastes good when the temperatures are still 193 degrees are sammiches!

Be sure to note the radish bouquet.

From Eudaemonius' most excellent photostream on Flickr

Bee-you-tee-full Website

My Vintage Vogue

And Finally, The Chef Himself

Notice how he pronounces his last name: Boy AR dee.

Chef Ettore (Hector) Boiardi
1898-1985

Curly Girls

From 1952: Beautiful Avon Ad Featuring Loretta Young

A phenomenal double-clicker.

Papá Noel adora tetas grandes!

"Christmas with the dog lunatic...just for adults"

¡Ai yi yi! Put the kids to bed and put some cocktails in the shaker, because the dog lunatic awaits with some sophisticated holiday fun! ¡Las Pascua de Navidad atractivas para todos!

From my new favorite blog ever, LP Cover Lover.

From 1955: Bettie Page Wishes You A Merry Christmas

January 1955, where Page was Playmate of the Month.

She had a saucy innocence that is both contemporary and provocative, and also nostalgic.
Hugh Hefner

In This Vintage PSA, Mr. Killjoy Ruins A Perfectly Good Cocktail Party At Sam And Darin Stevens' House

And to think, Mr. Killjoy didn't even mention the handfuls of perfectly legal barbituates the partygoers all downed before they started drinking.

God, I love The Sixties.

From 1977: Tootsie Rolls Extolled As An Effective Antidepressant And Possible Mild Hallucinogen

Sing along, Seventies Kids! I know you know every word to this jingle!

And okay, was there ANY facet to our shared existence in The Seventies where drug use did not play a significant role? Even something as innocuous as Tootsie Rolls, possibly the most delicious of all Halloween treats, was advertised with cartoon children tripping out on chocolaty goodness, seeing airplanes and tree trunks and even an errant whale in a lake turning into Tootsie Rolls!

"The world looks mighty good to me...I'll claim it's the Tootsie Rolls that I am eating, but it's really because of the two Quaaludes I stole from my big sister's purse this morning before I left for school..."

Edited to add: look at the slogan at the very end of the commercial, with the sort-of Lincoln Log structure of Tootsie Rolls. How times have changed. I think that the intention was for it to read as if someone was making a "yummy" noise, and then excitedly mentioning that "it's from Tootsie Roll." Instead, I initially read it with a Chandler Bing-type sarcastic bent. "Ummm...it's from Tootsie Roll (you moron)?!!?"

From 1968: Salivating Over This Charlie Whiskey Tango

One of the coolest toys I have ever seen. I of course am dreaming about all of the now-defunct airlines that must have been included in this toy: Pan Am, Eastern, Piedmont, Allegheny, Braniff, National...this is a real must-have for a vintage aviation freak like me!

From 1969: A Great Big Bottle Of Deliciousness

Kraft still makes Roka Blue Cheese Dressing today.

It was my Dad's all-time favorite salad dressing.

From 1979: And Then You Run Across Something So Awesome, Even I Am Rendered Speechless.

It's a home movie!

It's an official PSA film for the California Highway Patrol! (That's right, where Ponch and John worked!)

It's...I have no words for how this incarnates everything I love about Vintage.

In a word, it's awesome.

(And I think we have a rumaki sighting, folks! Pardon me, I have to go take a couple of belts of somethingorother to come down from the high this clip gives me.)

From 1956: You Can't Conceive This Level Of Awesome

Follow this link to see what might be my favorite post on The Information Superhighway so far this year. It is, in a word, fabulous.