Sunday, November 09, 2014

So Very MODERN!

More from old car brochures... these illustrating the 1952 Lincoln.  I was struck less by the car and more by the depiction of what "modern living" meant in the early 1950s.  Uniformed servants, Eichler homes, "push button magic," tuxedo-wearing dinner guests (eating in the kitchen!), and 3,721 square inches of GLASS!  (one wonders if glass was at a premium back then) Oh, yes... how very modern.







There are four more images from this brochure here.

21 comments:

  1. Where I lived, there were Eichler homes everywhere.
    They didn't look half bad once the landscaping filled in.
    There were lots of Lincolns, too...
    ...and a few families, of kids I went to school with, had servants.
    It seems funny seeing men wear hats, coats, and ties.
    Who dresses for dinner now?

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    1. My mother always wanted an Eichler home but she never got it. As for who dresses for dinner now? No one **I** know! ;-)

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    2. The Ol' Man wore a suit daily, to work at 225 Bush Street.
      He took the jacket off for dinner and hung it on the back of a chair in the dining room.
      We ate all meals in the kitchen unless we had "company."
      The car was a '51 Chrysler New Yorker (bought used from the Standard Oil motor pool) that was replaced by a '60 Chevy Bel Air wagon (that the Ol' Man got some kind of deal on).
      The only car on the road uglier than that Chev was any Edsel.
      Someone once described one as looking like a "Buick sucking a lemon."
      Our house was a sprawling ranch style fill with, what could could be described as, an eclectic collection of furniture... having been a combine of two separate households.

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    3. Your childhood sounds a lot like mine in many ways, Skip. My Ol' Man wore a suit to work every day, even while in the AF... mainly coz he was in the AF's Office of Special Investigations, which was a "plain clothes" outfit (OSI did require its members to wear the uniform once a month, however, which seemed to negate the plain clothes approach). We ate all our meals in the dining room, however, mainly coz our kitchens were never large enough for a table to seat four.. As for cars... I can't remember a new car in our family, ever. I think the Ol' Man bought his first new car well after he retired.

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  2. I often dress formally to serve my dinner guests. In the kitchen. Or the library. Don't you?

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    1. Well, I USED to dress for dinner. Occasionally. ;-)

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  3. LOL. LOTS of meals using TV dinner-trays in our house-hold growing up as Dad, being a college coach often wouldn't get home from Basketball practice until eight o'clock. No TV dinnere out of the fridge, tho. Mom would get home around 3-4 from teaching school and prepare a fully cooked meal. The kitchen table was reserved for Breakfast and Sundays when we would have my Grand-father over after Grand-mother died. The pull-out-from-the-side-board dining table in the living/dining room (we're talking a FLW-design team home here) was used only on Thanksgiving and/or Christmas--mostly xmas as we usually ate at my Aunt Opals for Thanksgiving--there was just the three of us after all..

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    1. we're talking a FLW-design team home here

      I came THIS close to buying a FLW-inspired house (think Prairie School) in Pleasant Ridge, MI around 1992. That was around the time I began making good money in my civilian career and we were considering ways to spend it. In the end TSMP and I decided to keep our lil 1920s-era house and put money away. That was a smart move (at least on my part), given the way things turned out.

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  4. Being a FLW design our home had the living area facing the back with many floor-to-ceiling widows while the kitchen, baths and bed-rooms faced the front street with head-high horizontal rectangular windows for privacy. Typical SoCal "walk-out" ranch-style home even if located in a small town in Illinois.. LOTS of blond wood modernist furniture, but not the skinny-leg ultra modernest stuff shown in the brochures.

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    1. PPS: No Lincolns either. For a middle-middle class family of teachers it was Fords all the way--seven of 'em from 1946-1957, lol. (Until seniority raises allowed Dodges in 59 & 62 and Chryslers in 64 & 65 (In retirement it was first Rivieras, then Caddys--but they only needed one car then, so there's that. )

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    2. Both TSMP's and my parents were big on that blonde modern furniture, too; TSMP's parents still had that stuff into the 90s. NO one in my family ever owned a Lincoln! Or a seaplane. :-)

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  5. We lived in Army Post housing usually built between 1889 and 1938. Nothing modern about it at all except electricity, indoor plumbing and enormous scale. No servants for us though unless they were referred to as 'the children.' :)
    Our black and white tv was on a little wheeled cart and sometimes we'd wheel it into the kitchen to watch the news during dinner. As I grew older in the service I knew why the news was so important to a young Army captain/major, etc. it was the situational awareness of the day and probably the first indicator of another 100,000 men deploying to Vietnam in the early 60's and 70's.

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    1. No servants for us though unless they were referred to as 'the children.'

      Heh. That reminds me of one of the Ol' Man's favorite sayings: "I'm the commander, your mother is the First Sergeant, and you kids are PEONS!" As for Army base housing... I've seen... and seriously admired... some of the older homes on Army bases, particularly the houses reserved for the field grades and GOs. You could use the word "stately" to describe some of them without your tongue in your cheek. I hear ya about SA... I think I get my "news junkie" habits from the Ol' Man.

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    2. My dad once announced that we were going to run our family as a democracy, with each of us seven kids having one vote, Mom having eight, and he having 16. . .

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    3. That was DEFINITELY true in my house, Craig. Well, sorta. Another of the Ol' Man's favorite sayings when either my sister or I would pipe up: "Who asked YOU?"

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  6. Since I retired, I very rarely wear anything other than some gym shorts. Tonight I put on a sweater though! I haven't worn socks in six months, and just slip into tennis shoes when it's time to go shopping. I think if I got invited to dinner (no one I know cooks anymore), I don't think I could even find my boxers and slacks...

    I do like the artwork. Never cared much for Lincolns, as I've always been a cheap Chevy owner.

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    1. I've turned into a Levi's and tee shirt kinda guy since retiring... and the ONLY time I wear socks is in the dead of winter. I did keep two suits when I retired, one dark blue and one light gray. Weddings and funerals... ;-)

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    2. Yep, that describes me to a t. :)

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  7. That's a good deal more than 3721 square inches of glass. If we say it's 8 feet tall, that would only be a bit over 3 feet wide (sorry; my inner engineer). . . I'm just thinkin' of heat bills; but apparently nobody worried about those back then, either. . . Or maybe they were all in SoCal. . .

    Was Eichler a student of FLW? 'Cuz if this is his stuff, it's powerfully reminiscent of Wright's. . .

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    1. Eichler's bio at The Wiki makes no reference to FLW but I agree with you. As for the glass... it's the car they're on about.

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