Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
I was cleaning out older newspapers, which is a frequent occurrence when you work at a newspaper. My bookshelf needed space, and space could be had by pushing the last three years of archives into the recycle bin.
But wait, something here goes back to 1939.
Oh, that’s right. Two years ago, while visiting my family in Montana, I stopped at one of those small Main Street stores every community has at least one of. The store could be called “Eleanor’s Timeless Classics” or “Main Place Exchange” or “Bill’s Trading Post,” but they could all just be named “Permanent Garage Sale.”
You’ll find that person’s obsessive hobby, be it quilting or collecting vintage Coca-Cola signs. You’ll always find technology that’s horribly dated, like dot matrix printer labels — they’re always listed half off original price, but still 10 times more than anybody would pay.
I like finding the outlier items, and my eyes came upon the Feb. 25, 1939, Saturday Evening Post. It was marked up 7,900 percent from its newsstand price of 5 cents, but it felt like a bargain at $4.
Old literature is always great, but old periodical literature lets you know the national mood far better than your average book from the same era. What were people buying? What were the limits of technology, and what advances did they dream of? How are demographics, and the attitudes toward them, different?
A few of my favorite items:
• You could buy a superb 1939 Studebaker, with the world’s strongest and safest steel body (maybe for the vehicle). The car had exclusive independent planar wheel suspension and the “Climatizer,” which filtered outside air and distributed it throughout the car to either heat or cool the interior — for a small added cost, of course.
• Or you could get what Walt Disney drove, the De Soto, America’s Smartest Low-Priced Car. “There’ll be no need for help from the back seat, either, for ingenious caution lights on the speedometer warn even the most preoccupied driver by turning from green to amber at 30, then flushing an indignant red at 50 and up.”
• Listerine was marketed as an antiseptic. If you gargled twice a day, you stood a better chance of avoiding colds. The cold wasn’t the problem, so much as the complications from said cold. No mention of how it helped your breath.
• Your refrigerator was making your children taller and stronger. Research at unnamed colleges showed youngsters to be 2 inches taller than youngsters of 25 years ago. It was credited to refrigeration making vitamin-rich, body-building food a daily occurrence. It couldn’t be any other factor.
• Heinz Tomato Ketchup was first in the hearts of Americans. The country’s cleverest housewives bought two bottles at a time — one for the table and the other for the kitchen. “By keeping a bottle always handy at dinnertime, you’ll be first in the heart of that important countryman — your husband.”
• You could earn up to $25 a month in extra income selling the Saturday Evening Post to others. Sounds like a pyramid scheme to me.
There’s plenty more, like travel agencies offering San Francisco World’s Fair tours for $16 per day or advertisements from every tobacco seller out there.
The newspaper stack is gone, and the recycle bin is full. But I’m still keeping the periodical from 1939. What else am I going to sell at Kevin’s Trading Post Exchange?
Kevin Wilson is managing editor of The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him at:
