Janie Wilson's Strong Fingers

Antidote for antimaterialism

2012-01-06T13:24:00.000-08:00

From Steppenwolf, by Herman Hesse (1929)

It was not my fortune to be Marias only lover, nor even her favorite one. I was one of many. Often she had no time for me, often only an hour at midday, seldom a night. She took no money from me. Hermine saw to that. She was glad of presents, however, and when I gave her, perhaps, a new little purse of red lacquered leather there might be two or three gold pieces inside it. As a matter of fact, she laughed at me over the red purse. It was charming, but a bargain, and no longer in fashion. In these matters, about which up to that time I was as little learned as in any language of the Eskimos, I learned a great deal from Maria. Before all else I learned that these playthings were not mere idle trifles invented by manufacturers and dealers for the purposes of gain. They were, on the contrary, a little or, rather, a big world, authoritative and beautiful, many sided, containing a multiplicity of things all of which had the one and only aim of serving love, refining the senses, giving life to the dead world around us, endowing it in a magical way with new instruments of love, from powder and scent to the dancing show, from ring to cigarette case, from waist-buckle to handbag. This bag was no bag, this purse no purse, flowers no flowers, the fan no fan. All were the plastic material of love, of magic and delight. Each was a messenger, a smuggler, a weapon, a battle cry.

New arrivals at the farm

2011-02-18T14:41:00.000-08:00

Day in the Life, Part 2

2010-12-17T20:26:00.000-08:00

I counted 15 last night while freshening water, but oldest ram was hobbling, like me, with bad arthritis. I wonder if he just keeled over, or coyotes took down the weakest. By 10 am, nature had pretty much taken back what it had given

Late Breaking News on the Farm

2010-06-09T15:05:00.000-07:00

Predators

2010-06-07T15:57:00.000-07:00

At right is our chicken coop, containing five hens and a rooster. The coop is portable; I drag it around the yard so the birds can find fresh greens, worms and bugs.

At center is a large bird, I believe a turkey vulture, who, on a windy day, soaring high drafts with fellows, spotted something he might like to eat and decided to check it out.

Removing stains from red wine

2010-05-25T21:28:00.000-07:00

Older people can extend their lives by drinking several glasses of red wine in the evening. A hazard is that red wine spills occur. In my case, I often have an unfinished glass on my bedside table. During the night, I reach for the nose drops and accidentally knock over the glass of wine, which spills on the bedclothes and floor.
Remedy 1: Cursing helps relieve tension. I usually say some combination of goddamit, fuck.
Remedy 2: Don't leave the wine glass anywhere near where you are sleeping.
Remedy 3. Step 1.Remove all the stained bedclothes, clothing, etc., ASAP, and soak in water. You'll notice that the bright red turns purple. Attempt to flush the stain.
Step 2. Some people recommend soaking the cloth with white wine. I have never tried this. Others recommend using a mixture of hydrogen peroxide, which is a mild bleach, and vinegar. (Of course, we all know that we can use regular bleach if the cloth is white.)
Step 3. After vigorously flushing material in sink, applying remedies such as HP, bleach, stain remover, etc., we use regular hot water washing cycle (not overloading but underloading to provide maximum flushing action).
Red wine can extend our lives but can be messy. Prompt action after an accident can prevent stains or the need to replace permanently stained fabrics.
p.s., I don't have any white, shag carpets, which can be hell, but only have finished wood flooring all over my house, so that's not a problem. Also, the last couch we bought at Rooms to Go has some kind of miracle petroleum fabric that is impermeable to wine spills if you wipe and flush.

Spring Fever

2010-03-10T12:48:00.000-08:00

The delicate new blossoms on my plum tree are being ravaged today by a motley band of bees, flies and wasps in orgiastic frenzy. I wish the flowers had more time to grow up.

Heralds of Spring

2010-03-08T17:53:00.000-08:00

The sun came out briefly this afternoon and pushed out a few white plum blossoms,

then cast a pinkness across the southern clouds and horizon.

For a Eulogy or a Wedding Toast --(Did Salinger think he was a Buddhist or a poet?)

2010-01-28T14:02:00.000-08:00

J.D. Salinger wrote a short story entitled "Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters."

The title of the story is the first line of a message left by Boo Boo Glass for Seymour on the bathroom mirror of the family's apartment, which Buddy discovers towards the end of the story. The message itself begins with a line taken from Sappho's fragment LP 111:

“Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man.”

Here's a eulogy someone wrote drawing from the line:

“In Medieval times, when a great man was soon to travel from one domicile to another, it was customary to alert forthcoming hosts to prepare to house a VERY consequential guest, a person of value and stature. Heaven should prepare now to raise high its roof beams.”

More quotations from Salinger’s works.

• You know that song, 'If a body catch a body comin' through the rye'?'"
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 22

• "It's 'If a body meet a body coming through the rye'!... It's a poem. By Robert Burns.'"
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 22

• "Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 22

• "I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don't honestly know what kind.... It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.' Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer. I just don't know."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 24

• "This fall I think you're riding for - it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 24

• "Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 24

http://classiclit.about.com/od/catcherintherye/a/aa_catcherquote_2.htm

I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so — I don't know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

“Then the carousel started, and I watched her go round and round...All the kids tried to grap for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she's fall off the goddam horse, but I didn't say or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it is bad to say anything to them."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

“Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will. -Holden Caulfield"
— J.D. Salinger

“Don't you think I have sense enough to worry about my motives for saying the prayer? That's exactly what's bothering me so. Just because I'm choosy about what I want - in this case, enlightenment or peace, instead or money or prestige or game or any of those things, doesn't mean I'm not as egotistical and self-seeking as everybody else. If anything, I'm more so!"
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he ever wrong?"
— J.D. Salinger (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction)

“I would like you to clear up for me just what the hell your motives are for saying it." He hesitated, but not long enough to give Franny a chance to cut in on him. "As a matter of simple logic, there's no difference at all, that I can see, between the man who's greedy for material treasure--or even intellectual treasure--and the man who's greedy for spiritual treasure. As you say, treasure's treasure, God damn it, and it seems to me that ninety per cent of all the world-hating saints in history were just as acquisitive and unattractive, basically, as the rest of us are.""
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"However contradictory the coroner's report - whether he pronounces Consumption or Loneliness or Suicide to be the cause of death - isn't it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience."
— J.D. Salinger

"But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they’re brilliant and creative to begin with—which, unfortunately, is rarely the case—tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

:What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote."
— J.D. Salinger

"Always, always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"But quilt is guilt. It doesn't go away. It can't be nullified. It can't even be fully understood, I'm certain - it's roots run too deep into private and long-standing karma. About the only thing that saves my neck when I get to feeling this way is that guilt is an imperfect form of knowledge. Just because it isn't perfect doesn't mean that it can't be used. The hard thing to do is to put it to practical use, before it gets around to paralyzing you."
— J.D. Salinger (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction)

"If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

'Are you a poet?' he asked.
'A poet?' Nicholson said. 'Lord, no. Alas, no. Why do you ask?'
'I don't know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.' "
— J.D. Salinger (Nine Stories)

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/819789.J_D_Salinger

That's Vanity

2009-09-24T12:38:00.000-07:00

Walker Percy does a short jog, working up a sweat, in French despair a la Camus, and finds a glimpse of God. Cormac McCarthy trudges in agony for a lifetime and finds nothing.

[This dramatic reading shows the screenwriters' faithful but creative adaptation of the original.]

To watch video, try this link:

http://www2.chinadaily.com.cn/language_tips/auvideo/2008-03/14/content_6537967.htm

I shouldn't diminish Percy's effort, though his happy ending in The Moviegoer seems an aim at Hollywood comedy a la The Graduate rather than Christian optimism. Here's a few more lines from the novel:

Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies - my only talent - smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall - on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.

To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair. The movies are onto the search, but they screw it up. The search always ends in despair. They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange place-but what does he do? He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance. In two weeks time he is so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be dead.

And the novel's epigraph taken from Kierkegaard:

. . . the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.

I Hate Plastic and Subdivisions

2009-09-22T21:42:00.001-07:00

“Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions.”

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

An Ordinary Catholic Woman

2009-09-17T12:59:00.001-07:00

The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy

Sometimes when she mentions God, it strikes me that my mother uses him as but one of the devices that come to hand in an outrageous man’s world, to be put to work like all the rest in the one enterprise she has any use for: the canny management of the shocks of life. It is a bargain struck at the very beginning in which she settled for a general belittlement of everything, the good and the bad. She is as wary of good fortune as she is immured against the bad, and sometimes I seem to catch sight of it in her eyes, this radical mistrust: an old knowledgeable gleam, as old and sly as Eve herself. Losing Duval, her favorite, confirmed her in her election of the ordinary. No more heart’s desire for her, thank you. After Duval’s death she has wanted everything colloquial and easy, even God.

"But now do you know what he wants to do? Fast and abstain during Lent." Her eyes narrow. Here is the outrage. "He weighs eighty pounds and he has one foot in the grave and he wants to fast." She tells it as a malignant joke on Lonnie and God. For a second she is old Eve herself.

This Explains Everything Part 3

2009-09-17T12:46:00.000-07:00

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert B. Cialdini

Salesmen, advertisers and other compliance professionals manipulate us through use of these six principles of persuasion:
--our human sense of reciprocity
--need for internal commitment/consistency
--attraction to scarcity
--being influenced by liking someone or something,
--appeals to authority, and
--social proofs.

This Explains Everything Part 2

2009-09-17T12:26:00.000-07:00

Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior, by Geoffrey Miller

Our successes and failures (and consumer purchases) are linked to these traits--all genetic, heritable and consistent through life:

1. intelligence
2. openness
3. conscientiousness
4. agreeableness
5. stability
6. extroversion

Thomas Wolfe on Aline Bernstein and Aline Bernstein on Thomas Wolfe

2009-07-02T11:22:00.000-07:00

William B. Wisdom had been gathering Wolfe's writings for years. He planned to establish a memorial at Harvard--a collection of all the Wolfe material he could get hold of, including, he hoped, the passionate love letters between Wolfe and Mrs. Bernstein. The sweetests and ugliest sentiments were conveyed in those letters. One of the most memorable salutations, for example, read, "My heavy-breasted, grey-haired Jewish bitch, I love the stench of your plum-colored arm-pits."

. . .

After several years of negotiating, Wisdom purchased [Bernstein's letters from Wolfe]. Mrs. Bernstein demanded that every penny of the money due her go to the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. Writing to [Maxwell Perkins] about this stipulation, she said: "It will be a retaliation for all the insults to the Jews that Tom hurled at me."

Max Perkins, Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg, Pocket Books, 1978, p.524-525

This Explains Everything

2009-07-02T11:09:00.000-07:00

Anne-Louise-Germaine de Stael-Holstein (nee Necker)
Madame de Stael
Delphine (1802)
5-page tale "The Reasons Why Leontine de Ternan Decided to Become a Nun.

"I was once a very beautiful woman, and I am now fifty years old. The two absolutely ordinary facts have been the cause of everything I have ever felt in life."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22689?email

Winky Dink and You

2008-07-31T15:00:00.000-07:00

There remains in my aging brain a neural connection that holds the memory of using a crayon to write on the screen of my television set as a pre-schooler.

What was I doing?

Using the Winky Dink and You TV Kit.

Click here to see an interesting description of this program including a clip of host Jack Barry's shameless pitch to incite young children to buy the kit. Among various fifties television sales to young children, this was among the most innovative with a relative long "playtime" use.

www.tvparty.com/requested2.html

Even more shameless was Ding Dong School marm Miss Francis's pitch for Wheaties.

Reinhardt Calluses

2008-04-09T16:25:00.000-07:00

With some free time on my hands, I can ponder changes to my body as I age. One that comes to mind is that during the first 30 or so years of my life, beginning in the first grade or so, I developed a large callus in the area of the middle finger where I grasped a pencil or pen. At Reinhardt, pencils were our primary tool; we stood in line at the pencil sharpener at the front of the room. On occasion, we stood at the blackboard with a piece of chalk doing our letters and numbers. The school janitor would cart off those chalk-filled erasers and clean them using a special machine down in his workroom.

Summertime was barefoot time for me. My heel calluses today are tiny remnants of those I developed as a child.

During the last 25 years or so, I have lost my middle finger callus and developed a new one at the bottom left of my right hand.

Lovely Ladies of the Auditorium: Why Some of Us Became So Artsy

2008-03-26T11:51:00.000-07:00

From A Century of Class: Public Education in Dallas 1884-1984, by Rose-Mary Rumbley. Austin, TX: Eakin Press, 1984.

The Dallas Times Herald columnist, William Rogers, pointed out in his book, The Lusty Texans of Dallas, that “There had been a pioneering spirit in the Dallas public Schools which had made a number of contributions to education in Texas. In 1921 they introduced into the Southwest the platoon system for elementary schools - an organization of classes which allowed the homeroom teachers to spend their entire time on fundamental subjects such as reading, writing, language arts and number work, with special teachers provided for music, art,and physical education."

But there was another special kind of teacher introduced that year not mentioned by Mr. Rogers. Not only was Dallas a pioneer in introducing the platoon system, but the Dallas educators introduced a whole new course of study to the elementary schools of Texas. This course was called Auditorium Activities. Today if one were to mention Auditorium Activities, only the Dallas natives would react to the words and know what one was talking about. Dallas was unique in offering this novel course to the children. Actually it was successfully taught in only a few school systems across the nation.

Lela Lee Williams was sent to Gary, Indiana, to study and report on Auditorium Activities, a course which had been initiated in the Indiana school districts but nowhere else in the nation up to that time. Miss Williams discovered that, "the purpose of the auditorium period is to furnish opportunities and situations for the exercise and development of abilities for which the usual classroom does not provide."

The child would learn in the classroom and use the learning in the auditorium. If a child studied an event in history in the homeroom period, in the auditorium he would enact the event. He'd recite a poem about the event. He'd read more aloud about the event. He'd write an essay about the event. History came alive in the auditorium. One teacher put it this way, "The dry bones of the past became the flesh and blood of the present in the auditorium activities class."

The same types of activities could reinforce a math lesson. The numbers became alive. Example: In a dramatic skit (visually) Mr. Number could be torn apart into fractions. The creativity that was used by the teachers, and the creativity that was squeezed from students was limitless. There is a leather bound curriculum guide - several copies of which are still on file at the school administration building - that explains the whole unusual program. It was compiled by auditorium teachers handpicked by E.B. Cauthorn to launch this creative endeavor: Blanche Smith, Minnie Bizzell, Mary Capes, Myrtle Smith, Ethel Walter, Bertha Bizzell, Florence Buryear, Callie Moffett, Annie Lee Alexander, Ethel Thomas, Blanche Brandon, Baulah Keeton, Uleta Wilhouse, Alma Diekson, Louis Paulus, and Jewell York. These teachers were paid more than the other elementary teachers, and a report plainly stated that jealously reigned among the other teachers in the schools over this so-called merit pay.

These "lovely ladies of the auditorium" really did have a little kingdom in the school auditorium. On special holidays, they were responsible for programs that would give the history of the day observed. Jewel York boasted in a piece of writing about the program. "The auditorium classes gave the meat and bread of life to the school." Alma Dickson noted in an essay that the teachers taught poise and brought about concentration. There was intense visualization of any event or episode. There was a socialization of the work done in the classroom, for all the subjects were correlated in the auditorium. There was a strengthening of the work done by the classroom teachers.

Helen Rogers taught auditorium for twenty-five years in the Dallas system. She stated that she always enjoyed her work at Edwin Kiest, because this was a strong middle class school. This pleased her. She said that so often people did things for the poor and the needy, but they neglected the strong middle class. These students needed attention, and too, they needed material rewards. Therefore, she made certain that in a tangible way, her students were rewarded for good programs. Mrs. Rogers never neglected any chance of obtaining any free materials that the children might enjoy getting as handouts in class. She sent off for any free advertisement brochures of different companies and institutions. She tried to get as much material into the hands of the students as possible so that they could keep their own scrapbooks of programs and information.

A favorite play that Mrs. Rogers enjoyed giving was "Who's Who At The Zoo." Each child portrayed his favorite animal at the zoo. The stage setting was quite unusual in that ". . . each child was in his own little cage." This really was a great play to give, because obviously there could be no disorder during the production since the cast was securely behind bars.

Miss Leta Parks, who taught for thirty years in the system, was the auditorium teacher at Alex Sanger School. She decided when she entered the program that she would always approach her undertakings from an artistic angle. Each year she vowed that she would invent a new way of using good literature and would create a new approach to teaching. Doing the same things year after year in the auditorium was not her way of being an effective teacher. Miss Parks wrote many children's plays. In fact, she said that the only way to provide the proper experiences for every child in the class was to create a specific program just for that class of particular children. These auditorium teachers were called upon to present many PTA programs. They were united into one massive effort in 1948 by Dr. White when he asked auditorium teacher Pauline James to write, produce, and direct a program on Texas which would be a city-wide effort presented at the Fair Park Music Hall. Every elementary child in the city of Dallas was in this memorable program.

The children were taught both citizenship and parliamentary procedure in the auditorium. Also, debate was not forgotten. The students selected the topics.

Resolved: that it is as dishonest to give help on the test as it is to receive it.
Resolved: that it is better to tell the truth regarding knowledge of the guilt of a friend than to shield him.
Resolved: that it is proper for girls to wear blue jeans in school.
Resolved: that it is better to discuss our problems with our parents than to take orders from them.
Resolved: that it is better for parents to give their children an allowance than to give them money when they need it.
Resolved: that science has done more harm than good.
Resolved: that TV viewing time should be limited.

The schools in Dallas were so often named for outstanding people who had served the Dallas community. The children in the school need to know about the person for whom their school was named.

Bonnie Harford, auditorium teacher, wrote a biographical sketch on each of the women for whom a school was named, and she put this material into book form. She used much of this information from her study to make these ladies come alive for the children in her auditorium classes. This produced more school spirit.

These teachers were artists in adapting their activities to the school situation. Those that taught auditorium in poor areas of town made certain that all the scenery was made by the children themselves. This would provide a feeling of self-worth. The children accomplished something, and they had pride in that accomplishment. Developing this pride was a major concern of teachers who were teaching in the poorer neighborhoods.

May Day was a challenge. Many maypole dances were held on the lawns of the schools with each class dressed in a particular costume. The first grade mushrooms gathered. The wind would blow. The wind so often was the second grade class. The daisies would sway in the breeze. Daisies were third graders. Everyone took part and everyone had to remain in perfect order for such a gigantic theatrical production to be carried off. Nothing was too big for the auditorium teacher.

Most principals approved of and thought highly of the ac¬tivities in the auditorium. One cited, “The auditorium was to the school what a well apportioned living room is to the home. It is here that the visitor gets a general impression of the school. The stage is set in a special manner. The bulletin boards speak of the seasons or of the school activities.”

The auditorium activities program has been gone for fifteen years. Several former auditorium teachers, however, are still teaching in the Dallas schools. They are now teaching language arts, but many of them would like to see auditorium ac¬tivities brought back into the system. Anita Elliott, former auditorium teacher who now teaches language arts at Adelle Turner, feels that the reading ability of the students would be strengthened were the program reinstated. "I taught more reading in the auditorium than a reading teacher could." The reading skills were taught in the reading classes, but practice in the reading came in the auditorium.

In 1966, the speech arts teachers met for their forty-fifth anniversary. They had been organized into a club which met for idea sharing and social purposes. However, this meeting in the spring of 1966 turned out to be the final meeting of the club itself. Dr. Herman Benthul and Mrs. Wilma Stewart, who served as superintendents over the speech arts program spoke on the projected activities. However, the changes were on their way, and the speech arts teacher, considered a frill, was to be no more. However, for forty-five years, auditorium activities in the elementary schools strengthened the learning experiences of the children.

Sputnik and W.T. White: Why Some of Us Became So Brainy

2008-03-26T11:41:00.000-07:00

From A Century of Class: Public Education in Dallas 1884-1984, by Rose-Mary Rumbley. Austin, TX. Eakin Press, 1984.

The next month, October 5 [1957], the Russians launched the first artificial earth satellite and a month later followed it with a second, heavier and more impressive "Sputnik." Americans knew Russia was ahead in scientific technology. They also knew that America would have to catch up and surpass the Soviets. On December 6, a United States rocket carrying a grapefruit-size satellite exploded on the launching pad at Cape Canaveral. What was to restore our prestige in the scientific world didn't get off the ground. It all looked pretty grim.

What happened to the United States? No longer Number One? The first thing that President Eisenhower did was to announce an extensive program to upgrade America's rocket technology. The citizen tax payers gave an affirmative nod to this, but science still had to find a scapegoat. They finally decided that the whole problem stemmed from the educational system. It was the schools! Those kids weren't learning anything. That's why we were behind! The children were just playing around. The school system needed reorganization, and, of course, the reorganization began.
. . .
Dr. W.T. White came up with the High Academic Aptitude Group Plan. This plan would extend the learning span and give more challenge to the high academic students. These students would be in an honors group and would be taught by teachers that were carefully and thoughtfully selected. The junior highs were included in the program. Now, these high academic students would only be in honors classes for the basic subjects, English, science, math, history, but for the other subjects, they would be scheduled into the regular program. Dr. White assured all parents that calling attention to the high academic group would in no way lessen the effort of the school system to give every educable child the best possible opportunity for his complete growth and development. Dr. White promised a tightening up of all classes.

The fine thing about the honors program was its flexibility. When a student qualified to enter the program, he could. Always, it was the grades and the industrious and energetic attitudes that remained the key factors that got a student into or out of the high academic group.

In the elementary schools, the top twenty percent of the pupils were grouped in certain honors classes. Their teachers were selected especially to deal with these classes whose members ranked higher than average academically.

Dr. White said that this was not a crash program. It had been under consideration for a number of years. But, the sudden realization that the Soviet Union was surpassing the country would make any good educational plan come to the foreground quickly. Superintendent White noted, “This plan challenges the pupil by putting him on his own merits, abilities, and industry. It should go far in relieving the reported boredom of students, because their courses were slowed down by slow learners. It will spotlight the bright youngster who is not, for some reason, achieving to the top of his ability. It permits the school system to work with greater efficiency.”

The new plan first touched the science department. Since 1951, science had been taught in all twelve grades. It was required in the first eight grades, and then two years of science in high school were required in order to graduate. That would stay the same, except the course of study for the elementary grades changed to include an elementary approach to astronomy, geology, biology, electronics, physics, and chemistry. There were more courses offered in the senior highs, so that actually a student could take thirteen years of science in twelve years of schooling.

Then, of course, the science fair came into existence. Every year students from all over the city of Dallas entered scientific projects. Prizes for the most technical experiments were awarded. Scholarships were given to the students who actually made scientific discoveries. Our nation was planning to top Russia right there from the Dallas Convention Center where all the winning entries from the various schools were assembled and shown to the public.
. . .
The mathematics curriculum was stepped up. The little ones in the first grade learned to court, learned to make figures, and learned to identify figures with objects. This had always been the course of study for the first grade. However, the first grade course was the only one that stayed the same. All through the other grades the program was expanded to include more problem solving. Added math courses were offered in the high school, so actually, a senior (if he wished) could take college freshman math. Usually the high school curriculum stopped with trigonometry. Now, calculus was offered.
. . .

Under Dr. White's high achievement plan, the library was to become a learning nerve center at all levels of education. It had been predicted that with the advent of television, children might stop reading. This was not true according to the report of 1957. This was the year the question was asked, "Why can't Johnny read?" According to the library report Johnny could read and was reading more than ever in the DISD. Book fairs were celebrated that year, and this was a much easier fair for parents than the science fair. This fair was conducted by the li¬brarian, and she did all the work. The children just came and examined all the new books and learned about them and their authors. In the elementary schools, the children would dress up like their favorite fictional characters. Nevertheless, the children were reading.

Reinhardt History Corner

2008-03-26T11:21:00.000-07:00

From A Century of Class: Public Education in Dallas 1884-1984, by Rose-Mary Rumbley. Austin, TX. Eakin Press, 1984.

A couple of years before World War I a railroad was built northeast from Dallas to connect Garland (and other points east) with rail transportation. About halfway between the two cities the railway passed through a farm owned by Mr. L. Reinhardt. Fortunately for Mr. Reinhardt, a whistle-stop was arranged, a station built, a post office established, and a general store was also opened. The little town, Reinhardt, was located in the middle of rich farm land where the finest corn, cotton and small grains grew.

These farmers had children, so the Reinhardt Common School District was organized and a small wooden structure was built, a schoolhouse not too far from the railroad station. During the twenties, the community outgrew the wooden schoolhouse and so a two-story brick building was erected at the present site of the modern Reinhardt School. This first brick school built in the twenties served children through the seventh grade. For high school the students went to Garland.

In the thirties, the landowners no longer wished to farm, so they platted their acres into estate lots, and the Casa Linda Addition came into being. There had already been some residential growth in the Forest Hills Addition, for the city of Dallas was bound and determined to cross White Rock Lake and spread eastward.

In 1939 a group of enterprising Reinhardt citizens decided that their school needed modernizing and enlarging, so with a WPA grant of $66,000 they got more than they ever dreamed they'd have - a new school.

After World War II, the area, White Rock East, doubled and redoubled in population, and so in 1946 the Reinhardt School District - which included about four hundred children - was swallowed up into the Dallas system.

There was another little farming community not too far from Reinhardt. This was Bayles. The school for this little city started in a converted barn and eventually moved into a more stable building. The Bayles School by 1946, when it came into the Dallas district, had grown to a three-room school that was located just off Ferguson Road not too far from where the present Bayles School was built in 1961.

These two schools, Bayles and Reinhardt, have spawned quite a number of others in the White Rock area: Casa View, Victor H. Hexter, Edwin J. Keist, M.T. Reilly, Alex Sanger, Charles A. Gill, George W. Truett, W.H. Gaston Junior High, Robert T. Hill Junior High, and the high school, Bryan Adams.

Jack Ruby and the Shit-Filled River

2008-03-10T09:16:00.000-07:00

And the city got Jack Ruby who speaks of a time when he was recently in town from Chicago, "I was running the concessions at the Longhorn Ballroom for Dewey Grooms, selling beer and setups to all those thirsty Country music fans from dry Oak Cliff come pouring from their homes over the river to drink, to listen to Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb, Hank Thompson. Down in Trinity River Bottoms they'd come to the Longhorn and to the Big D to hear Groovy Joe Poovy, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis. They'd come to the neon honkytonks. You could just about always smell the shit-filled river down there. Man, if there was a big rain you could feel it swelling like it might burst out of its banks, up and over the levee to rage down Industial Boulevard. If it kept raining on a Saturday night and the waters got over the levee half the working men in Dallas could be swept away. Down here was the real cultural life of the city and I wanted to be a part of it."

http://www.dallasinstitute.org/Programs/Previous/Spring%202001/talktext/riverconferencertrammell.htm

http://www.watermelon-kid.com/dallas-sights/vintage/pcards/pcards.htm

Heralds of Spring on the Ranch

2008-03-02T11:13:00.000-08:00

MARCH comes in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb
The weather is traditionally wild at the beginning of March, but fair by the end.

1625 J. Fletcher Wife for Month (1717) II . i. ‘I would chuse March, for I would come in like a Lion.’‥‘But you'd go out like a Lamb when you went to hanging.’

1670 J. Ray English Proverbs 41 March hack ham [hackande = annoying ] comes in like a lion, goes out like a lamb.

1849 C. Brontë Shirley II. iv. Charming and fascinating he resolved to be. ... http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1O90-MARCHcomesnlklnndgstlklmb.html

Lambs, smallest born three days ago

Flowering Quince

Jonquils

Plum blooms burst out this morning

Fresh eggs a-laying

Warm weather will push this fertile rot to the roots

Twin too weak to survive will be a boon to the uppushing bluebonnets

One of my daily emotional concerns (source of nightmares) is that my sheep won’t have good quality forage in winter. These warm days have lit the green fuse.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
by Dylan Thomas

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm. http://radio.upei.ca/node/4920

Living With Eggheads

2008-02-29T09:35:00.000-08:00

One doesn’t have to look too far to see that public schools are very damaging to many, if not most kids.

Given the populations they deal with, many schools today are skilled at providing good care for children with special needs.

One category of need is for the “gifted” child.

During my public school days, nobody knew much about giftedness, but the Dallas mega-public school system did a pretty good job of separating out high achievers and pushing them through an excellent college prep curriculum.

Positive and negative characteristics of gifted children

Positive
Learns rapidly and easily.

Is highly imaginative.

Is less inclined to follow the organization and ideas of others.

Has a high degree of curiosity.

Asks many questions. Is interested in a wide range of things.

Has keen powers of observation and is alert.

Reasons things out, thinks clearly, recognizes relationships, comprehends meanings.

Has longer attention and interest span.

Can often form generalizations and use them in new situations.

Has greater than average ability to grasp abstract concepts and see abstract relationships.

Has a large vocabulary which is used easily and accurately.

Retains what has been heard or read without much rote drill.

Enjoys reading, usually at a mature level.

Follows directions easily.

Has a good sense of humor.

Can use material, words, or ideas in new ways.

Has a strong desire to excel.

Uses a great deal of common sense and practical knowledge.

Is a leader in several kinds of activities. Is often asked ideas and suggestions. Is looked to by others when something must be decided.

Negative
Can easily become bored with routine assignments.

May want to do things his/her own way--why not?

Can become a real pest.

May notice too much in the classroom.

May see relationships others do not see and want to spend large amounts of class time discussing all this.

Sometimes doesn't want to stop one project and start the next.

May notice the teacher's lack of inconsistency with "But you said we should always..."

Can get lost in pursuing own thoughts. Can appear to be daydreaming or not paying attention. Can lose other students or "turn them off."

Often gets bored by repetitious assignments.

Always has nose in a book and maybe the book doesn't seem terribly appropriate.

May not always pay close attention to those directions.

Can make jokes at adults' expense. Not everyone appreciates this.

Sometimes too innovative.

Can be easily or too deeply upset by perceived "failure."

Can be too authoritative.

Can become too bossy and be unwilling to listen to the opinions of others.

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/2746/rwclub/gifted.html

Reinhardt Dreamwork

2008-02-28T12:21:00.000-08:00

When I was a child, I had a recurring dream that I was in the hallways and classrooms, with only my underwear on, and nobody noticed.

Today, I have recurring dreams that I am enrolled in college, and attending classes, but have basically dropped out and don't know a thing about what I'm supposed to be doing. I also recently dreamed that I socked my boss in the mouth.

One of my classmates reports that he has a daydream of moving back into Reinhardt, converted into an old folks home:

Hey, maybe the DISD would just turn Reinhardt into an old folks home for alumni!!!!!

Another classmate reveals a weird dream:

[The] idea of Reinhardt as a retirement community for alumni . . . really struck home, because when I was a student at Reinhardt, I had a semi-recurring dream about LIVING in the school, not as a transient, but having the school retro-fitted as my house. What if we DID end up there after all? Would that finally be a dream come true? Or terminal detention?

My best waking dream would be to be sitting again as a child at my kitchen table (it was yellow formica with chrome legs and with matching yellow vinyl-covered chairs—would be worth a fortune today) and having my mother offer to mash up my potatoes and mix with the ground hamburger.

So goes our pitiful lives and desire to return to the Reinhardt womb.

Here’s some recent explanations:

Freud’s theory [dreams are wish fulfillment] has real difficulties explaining why people so often have anxiety dreams. Dreams also involve being angry a lot of the time. Freud said dreams were for fulfilling wishes. But who would want nightmares? Who would want to get beaten up or sexually assaulted in their dreams? So Freud’s theory just didn’t explain in any coherent fashion the fact that dreams involve far more than wishes and that only a minority of them can be characterised as wishes. And his claim that all dreams are sexually motivated is no longer given any credence. Freud claimed that we dream to protect sleep, to prevent us being awakened by threatening, sub-conscious wishes. However, the REM state, in which most dreams occur, is a regularly occurring biological programme in humans and other mammals, and not something which arises to protect sleep.

To recap, expectation pathways activate conscious, not subconscious, experience. There is no evidence at all that dreams are sexually motivated and Freud can’t plausibly explain why we would wish for anxiety dreams. The REM state occurs in all mammals, so it is not just a human activity, protecting sleep, as Freud suggested. A cat is unlikely to be dreaming about its Oedipus complex. So the attempt to revive Freud’s theory seems to be based more on wishful thinking than on realistic
considerations of its defects.

. . .
It was the first time in scientific dream research, I believe, that someone set out to predict their own dreams, with the hypothesis that dreams relate to emotional experiences of the day before – a hypothesis that has since been well validated. Dreams do involve waking emotional material. I set up an experiment using my own dreams, waking myself up every two hours, and, for a period of a week, predicted the emotional concerns that would feature in the dreams. I found that the dreams always reflected my waking emotional concerns of the previous day, but not necessarily the most important of these. By analysing the data, I was able to show that dreams dealt not with emotional concerns per se but with those emotional concerns that had not been dealt with satisfactorily. No matter how important the emotional concern, if it got dealt with while awake, it was over and did not reappear in a dream. The only emotional concerns that became dreams were those that I was still aroused about, for which I still had expectations that I couldn’t complete. Dreams are the fulfilment of those emotional expectations that have not been met prior to waking. They always act out the fulfilment in metaphor – ie a matching sensory pattern to the original expectation. For example, if a man feels like hitting his boss but restrains the impulse, that night he might dream of attacking another authority figure. The hypothesis was derived from a scientific experiment, which anyone can replicate, should they wish.

http://www.why-we-dream.com/

And so we old folks should wish for many and sweet dreams, but the bad ones are good too--helping us to deal with emotional concerns that had not been dealt with satisfactorily during the day.

I Must Have Been There, Because I Don't Remember a Thing

2008-02-26T11:36:00.001-08:00

Labor Day Weekend 1969

http://www.texaspopfestival.com/home.htm

Another Dark Story from the Early 60s

2008-02-26T11:27:00.000-08:00

From Columbia Magazine:

Copland’s Party Music

By Samuel Adler

Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression and War
By Elizabeth B. Crist (Oxford University Pres, 253 pages, $35)

In the spring of 1960, Aaron Copland came to Dallas to conduct the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in an all-Copland concert. In connection with the event, I asked him to spend some time with the composition students at the University of North Texas, where I was teaching. He accepted, and his visit was so successful that I invited him to come back the next year. “I appreciate your invitation, Sam,” he told me, “but I will never return to this part of Texas again.”

I wasn’t completely surprised. The John Birch Society, headquartered in Dallas, had contacted the Dallas Symphony Orchestra management and threatened to place a bomb beneath the conductor’s podium if they permitted Copland to conduct the concert.

Aaron Copland! Was there a more American classical musician than the Brooklyn-born composer of Appalachian Spring, Old American Songs, and Billy the Kid?

Copland receives his honorary degree at the 1971 commencement. Victor Kraft/ Aaron Copland Fund for Music

But what the Birchers well knew — for it was no secret — was that in the 1930s and ’40s, Copland had been affiliated with numerous progressive and left-wing causes, including, to some extent, the Communist Party. Elizabeth B. Crist, the author of the excellent Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland During the Depression and War, calls him “a communist with a lowercase c.”

The 1960 Dallas visit came a generation after his fellow-traveling, but his communist past haunted Copland for the rest of his life. The House Un-American Activities Committee, the FBI, and various conservative organizations constantly made Copland a whipping boy. His Lincoln Portrait (1942) was pulled from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s inaugural program after complaints from Illinois congressman Fred Busbey that Copland stood less for the spirit of Lincoln than for “alien ideology.”

It is therefore welcome to have a book that isolates these early years in Copland’s intellectual and creative life. The great ferment that prevailed among artists and art critics of that time brought the desire to tailor the arts for “the people.” How different from the blasé attitude we find among the artistic establishment today. Crist writes in depth about the collaboration and close relationship between the creators and critics of diverse arts and their efforts at reaching a wider audience, even as they sought an aesthetic to embody a difficult historical period.

Copland was instrumental in organizing the Young Composers Group, made up of composers such as Henry Brant, Israel Citkowitz, Lehman Engel, Vivian Fine, Bernard Herrmann, Jerome Moross, and Elie Siegmeister. According to Copland biographer Howard Pollack, they “leaned heavily in the direction of Marx, and [were] fashioned in some degree on the Russian group, The Five, or the French, Les Six. Yet though these composers practiced much greater stylistic diversity than their Russian and French counterparts, they were brought together by Copland.”

Copland’s love of the Americas, in particular Mexico, and his endeavor to expand our understanding of “America” leads Crist to an excellent discussion of the origins of El Salón México, and the Danzón Cubano. Crist looks closely at the relationship between Copland and Carlos Chávez and the influence the Mexican composer had on his American colleague: She does a fine job analyzing Copland’s major compositions from this period, especially such accessible works as An Outdoor Overture (1938), written for the New York High School of Music and Art Orchestra, and the children’s opera The Second Hurricane (1937). Seldom performed today, The Second Hurricane is an important work, for it again “reflects an awareness of the contemporary American political, social, and cultural context and influence of the Popular Front.”

Crist comments that Copland was “slightly disappointed in the European attempt to write Gebrauchsmusik (music for use, or utilitarian music), especially the works of Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith.” Copland seemed to agree with the assessment of Marc Blitzstein, who, in a 1934 article in Modern Music magazine, calls it “music which abjectly copied what the mob already learned to like. Instead of educating, it panders.”

I remember an interview that appeared when I was a student of Copland in the late 1940s. Copland was asked to comment on the fact that his music seems to perfectly evoke the feeling and ethos of America’s West. “That is very strange,” he answered rather sarcastically, “since I have never been west of Albany.” It was an offhand remark, of course, and Crist poignantly discusses the origins of Billy the Kid and Rodeo. These ballets, both about the West, have sociological and liberal political ramificiations. Rodeo, Crist explains, “envisions frontier democracy as a negotiation of individual and civic welfare, of personal expression and public good.” This is an “egalitarian, democratic West . . . entirely fit to serve as a usable past for present reform.”

With the sudden alliance between Hitler and Stalin in 1939 and the United States’ joining the war in 1941, America’s Left, and with it Copland, were shocked into a new reality. Though they did not give up their social and political ideals, their concerns turned toward a distinct Americanism. Copland had already made use of American folk songs, but he now fused folk elements and gestures in a new way to create an American sound — a Copland signature — that we all recognize as his. Fanfare for the Common Man from 1942, which became the basis of the final movement of his Third Symphony, possibly his masterpiece, presents this sound at its majestic best.

Crist speculates on the reasons Copland’s output slowed after the war. “His musical philosophy was repudiated by the cultural politics and aesthetic ideology of 1950s liberalism, and the progressive ideals that had proved so motivating in the era of Depression and war were, within the tenets of anticommunist ideology, considered at best naïve and at worst seditious.”

Although Copland’s popularity receded in the 1950s and ’60s beause of the prevailing preoccupation with more complex musical styles, his is today probably the most performed American music in the concert hall. The reason is simple: Audiences love it and orchestras and choruses are eager to perform it.

Crist has written an excellent book, full of insight into the times and Copland’s musical aesthetics. And while occasionally her concern with the political overwhelms the musical, this volume is, after all, not only for musicians or even for music lovers, but for all those who are interested in the struggles of the artists during one of the most trying and critical times of our national existence.

Samuel Adler is the composer of more than 400 published works and is a faculty member of The Juilliard School. In 2003 he was awarded ASCAP’s Aaron Copland Prize for lifetime achievement in composition and composition teaching.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Fall2006/copland.html

Texas Cowboys and Cowgirls Shoot from the Hip

2008-02-22T12:29:00.000-08:00

It’s gratifying to see our two Democrat candidates for President greeted so warmly in Dallas this week.

In 1963, many Dallasites likely would have spit on them.

Many of us have seen tv footage of one of Dallas's radical right moms beating Adlai Stevenson on the head with a sign in 1963

Everyone who lived in Dallas in 1963 was traumatized by the JFK assassination.

I’m reading Dallas Public and Private by Warren Leslie, which was written 1964 and analyzes pre-assassination and post-assassination Dallas.

And Casa Linda's own U.S. Senator Bruce Alger led a group of radical right hens to jostle poor Lady Bird and her husband during another Dallas visit during that time period.

Here are some interesting observations about post-assassination Dallas:

The world has indeed treated Dallas and Texas harshly. “Do not bring your children to this city” was the lead paragraph of a news story in Lord Beaverbrook’s London Evening Standard, written by his granddaughter. “Giants 27, Assassins 21,” somebody said, and it was a shock to understand that the “Assassins” were the Cowboys, Dallas’ professional football team.

“Where you living now?” a bartender at the St. Regis in New York asked an old customer, a former New Yorker.

“Still in Dallas.”

“I’d have thought you’d been coming home by now,” the bartender said. “Or going somewhere.”

In Los Angeles, shortly after the assassination, a fashion writer for the Dallas News, covering the California market, found it impossible to get room service. “Seems to take a little longer for the people from Dallas,” a waiter explained.

In New York, a returning visitor to Europe spent less time than usual in customs. “Dallas,” the customs official said, looking at her declaration. “Hell, don’t stick around here. Just go home.” He walked away.

After studying the city for a short time, a visiting journalist said, “If I were a liberal living in Dallas, I might try to shoot a President just to get attention.”

And a familiar remark now, among the thousands that have been made about the Dallas police: “I don’t think the Dallas police force is so bad—look how quickly they
caught Ruby.”

Tomboys and Sissies, Prissies and Studs

2008-02-22T11:46:00.000-08:00

When I was growing up in the fifties, we had two types of kids who were sometimes bullied--tomboys and sissies.

At school I had a friend named Betty who walked like an Amazon among her classmates. Always bigger and stronger than both the boys and girls, she used her strength to get her way.

I liked her alot and expressed my affection by kidding her (verbally). I think she liked me alot, too, and expressed her affection by kicking me very hard (physically) on my shins.

If my mother had been as protective of me as other mothers, she would have called Betty's mom and told her to make Betty stop making those big bruises on her sonny's legs.

Kids can be so cruel.

We know more today about why we had all these gender differences. And observing our cohorts' progress through life, we can see that those with a certain level of androgyny have fared well--perhaps even better--than the prissies and studs.

http://csulb.edu/~kmacd/361SEX.html

http://www.preventdisease.com/news/articles/born_to_be_tomboy.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Tomboy

Whodunit? Who Killed JFK and Lindsey Rose Mitchell?

2008-02-05T09:43:00.000-08:00

In 1963, Dallas was the site of the biggest and most complex murder case in U.S. history.

From Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Vincent Bugliosi. WW Norton, 2007.

Political author Thomas Powers cannot be accused of hyperbole when he observes that Kennedy’s assassination “was probably the greatest single traumatic event in American history.” Years later, it remains a festering wound on the nation’s psyche. Though Powers made his remark several years ago, its truth continues to this day. . . .

Throughout the years, national polls have consistently shown that the percentage of Americans who believe that there was a conspiracy in the assassination usually fluctuates from 70 to 80 percent, down to 10 to 20 percent for those who believe only one person was involved, with about 5 to 15 percent having no opinion. The most recent Gallup Poll, conducted on November 10–12, 2003, shows that a remarkable 75 percent of the American public reject the findings of the Warren Commission and believe there was a conspiracy in the assassination. Only 19 percent believe the assassin acted alone, with 6 percent having no opinion.

It is believed that more words have been written about the assassination than any other single, one-day event in world history. Close to one thousand books have been written. So why the need for this book, which can only add to an already overwhelming surfeit of literature on the case? The answer is that over 95 percent of the books on the case happen to be pro-conspiracy and anti–Warren Commission, so certainly there is a need for far more books on the other side to give a much better balance to the debate. But more importantly, although there have been hundreds of books on the assassination, no book has even attempted to be a comprehensive and fair evaluation of the entire case, including all of the major conspiracy theories. .
. .

I have spent many hours over the last month surveying what’s on the web about 1963 Dallas and JFK assassination theories. The Internet contains an enormous amount of conflicting and mis- information. On no other topic is the web likely to be such an inaccurate source for information. In 2008, a researcher studying the subject with a fresh eye is likely to be impressed with how many experts, having been “around the barn,” are convinced that both Oswald and Ruby acted alone.

http://www.reclaiminghistory.com/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/oswald/more/fr.html

On a lighter note, fictional mystery is much neater than true crime, and 1961 BA grad Mary Elizabeth Goldman has recently published a mystery novel rich with nostalgia about teenage years in the White Rock Lake area.

To Love and Die in Dallas by Mary Elizabeth Goldman. Forge Books, 2007.

Here’s a lengthy excerpt that captures some of the late 1950s Casa Linda nostalgia.

http://www.tor-forge.com/Excerpt.aspx?isbn=9780765309341#Excerpt

In her Author’s Note, Goldman recounts how she came to write the book:

Years went by quickly and one day in the early spring I received a notice of my upcoming high school class reunion. Early on I had resolved, and up until then had managed, to avoid such events but apparently time had softened me and now I was curious to discover what had become of my classmates at the school “near the city’s eastern borders underneath the Texas sky.”

Were the football players still popular? Did the ROTC cadets continue to stand at attention, did the class personalities become as successful as I imagined? Did the cheerleaders continue to exude bubbly encouragement? Did the preacher’s daughter ever learn to behave, and was homecoming queen still the most enviable girl alive? Sadly, there were several, too many, missing from this one time hopeful group of wide-eyed wonders, but Vietnam, the drug culture, and the sexual revolution had that effect on many graduating classes in the sixtieth decade of the twentieth century. I wanted to bring them back, to remember them in an imaginary world, and as a result, I created a handful of eager young people found here in the pages of To Love and Die in Dallas. I hope you enjoy reading the mystery, perhaps solving it as you go, and almost recognizing the characters portrayed.

And, the answers to the above questions are absolutely yes, in every case!

http://www.maryelizabethgoldman.com/

Jews, Negroes and Mexicans in the City—Part 1

2008-02-04T10:57:00.000-08:00

In the early 1950s, my parents waged battle at their new Casa View suburban home against Johnson grass and nut grass as they worked to cultivate their St. Augustine and Bermuda.

Other battles were being waged in the city.

From White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001, by Michael Phillips, Univ. of TX Press, 2006.

By 1948 a nine-square-mile community of 25,000 blacks, Mexican Americans, and poor whites lived on a low flood plain in West Dallas. Created by the earlier construction of levees along the Trinity River, West Dallas consisted of “flimsy shacks, abandoned gravel pits, garbage dumps, open toilets, and shallow wells.” Fewer than 10 percent of those dwellings had indoor toilets, and only 15 percent had running water. Tenants drank from wells located near human waste disposals. West Dallas accounted for 50 percent of the city’s typhus cases, 60 percent of tuberculosis, and 30 percent of polio.

Desperation forced relatively prosperous blacks to again venture in the early 1950s into the Exline Park neighborhood, scene of the 1940-41 bombings. Twelve bombs in the next year and a half targeted homes sold to blacks in formerly all-white neighborhoods in a two-square-mile area of South Dallas. Not expecting white protection, African Americans armed themselves. Juanita Craft noted in a letter to Walter White, the executive director of NAACP, that bombing stopped on Crozier Street when “the widow Sharpe” ran from her home firing a gun at a speeding getaway car after one explosion.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/021008dnmetcraft.316526e.html

1946 State Fair of Texas

http://dallaslibrary.org/CTX/photogallery/marionbutts/places.htm

The Conquest of Cool

2008-02-01T08:06:00.000-08:00

In the late fifties, boys and girls tuned in to coolness. Boys like me were groomed by older siblings. What were the fashions? Ducktail hairdo, Lee jeans, white t-shirts, Marlboros, black leather jackets and shoes with taps—all modeled from the now dominant media, television and movies. Think Marlon, Elvis and James Dean.

From Lead Us into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism, by James B. Twitchell, Columbia University Press, 1999.

What separates the way we live now from earlier times is that the style leaders tend to be younger than the style followers. Once kids were the only ones with sufficient disposable time and money to consume, once advertisers realized that you sell to those who have not made brand choices, and once television became the primary medium of learning, trickle down reversed directions and became bubble up. As you gradually captured the machinery of consumption and the delivery of entertainment, groundswells passed through commercial culture. What started in the 1920s, chronicled by Fitzgerald as the defining aspect of the Jazz Age, has become the norm: upper and lower crusts sprung unpluggable leaks.

Never underestimate television. In print/magazine culture you show a picture of a debutante or royal beauty puffing on your cigarette, or washing with your soap, and social aspiration does the job of inflating the diffusion bubble. With movies, so much the better, simply insert a movie star. But television is different. It is programmed by those who don’t care about diffusion theory, and this audience doesn’t know top from bottom. As Seinfeld, showed, the changes now jump all over the place, George is not the usual avatar of fashion.

To be sure, modern fashion has always been willing to absorb sideways influence, the look of the street. Where would high fashion be without prostitutes and perverts? Think only of how successfully the cosmetic industry adopted facepaint and lipstick of streetwalkers. Where do you think short skirts and four-inch stilettos come from if not from the red light district? Over the last thirty years, fashion designers have also spent many hours in the fetishist’s closet. How else to account for all the corsets, pointy bras, rubber macintoshes, frilly underwear, leather and latex gear, body rings, and tattoos? These appropriations have been so masterly that most trendy dressers who have adopted them have no idea about the fetishistic roots of their fashion. Meanwhile, there are doubtless fetishists running around fretting that their magical objects have been drained of the magical power.

The height of chic is cool, and nothing is more cool than to look poor, downtrodden, and beyond style.

Body piercing, scarification, nose rings, lip rings, unmentionable rings, plus that old standby, tattooing, are not so much the signs of rebellion as of the colonization of the personal space left. Quick! Brand yourself before the worldwide conglomerated package goods company headquartered somewhere out in the American Midwest does it for you.

This kind of self-customizing is stunning, literally. It is on the edge. The epidermis, which the ancient Romans branded as punishment for disobedience (a stigma, literally a brand), has come full circle with self-stigmatization. In a world where second-hand smoke, sugar, saccharin, and asbestos are the hobgoblins, in a culture that spends part of its energy telling kids how great they are and the rest saying there is no room for them at the inn, in a commercial world in which adolescents can drive the car, but only to the clotted mall, it is not unreasonable that youngsters should turn to such rites of self-imposed initiation. Where is the risk of danger in a world of air bags, training wheels, and curbs on sidewalks? Such self-branding seems to say, “been there, done nothing, don’t care, on my own.”

White Flight from Reinhardt

2008-01-31T11:46:00.000-08:00

Originally, Martin Luther King Jr. Learning Center was named Colonial Hill. It was built in 1902 and was named after the affluent Anglo-American community it served. In the mid-fifties, the neighborhood experienced a transition as the population became increasingly African-American. The transition in the community led to African-American students being assigned to the school which was renamed Colonial Elementary School in 1957. Colonial Elementary served grades 1 - 8.

The Colonial attendance zone has experienced many changes under several court orders. From 1964 until the 1976 court order, Colonial served grades 1 - 6. In 1976, students in grades 4-6 were reassigned to Reinhardt Elementary.
http://www.dallasisd.org/SCHOOLS/es/i_l/mlk/history.htm

Perhaps the most significant problem was the flight of whites to the suburbs: in 1970 the Dallas school district was 58% white, 34% black and 8% Mexican American. Seven years later whites numbered only 35%.

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,919609,00.html

The Year BA Desegregated

2008-01-31T09:35:00.000-08:00

Learning from the Past
By Christopher Dill

I attended Bryan Adams High School in Dallas, Texas from 1971 to 74. Court ordered busing was instigated my first year with about 600 inner city blacks bused in to a predominantly white school of about 3,000.

Everything was fine for the first few months Then there was the first fight between a black and white student at lunch time. The brothers of both fighters jumped in and it quickly spread but was stopped minutes later.

However, the line had been crossed and at lunch the next day, two groups of white and black students faced each other across the tennis court, which was basically our quad. Security, coaches and some teachers kept the two groups apart. You could slice the tension it was so thick.

Suddenly, two senior hippies (yeah, this was back in the days) walked out onto the center of the tennis court and began circling each other, like WWF wrestlers.

Nobody, including the staff knew what they were doing until they began 'wrestling', including, head locks, begging for mercy, etc. Both groups of whites and black were roaring with laughter, cheering these two clowns on. Totally broke the ice.

There were no more problems the rest of the year, until the last week of school. Then some trouble maker put up racist flyers and we had our first full on riot the last day of school involving upwards of 200 students. Kids got hurt, but school was over for the summer.

Unfortunately, the black students took it on the chin that day, so the first day of school the following year, a large group of black students, about 80 -100, attacked a group of about a dozen white students. Ironically, the white students were hippies and I was one of them.

They backed us up into the lunch room where the majority of students were still eating lunch. The fighting spread into the cafeteria, then throughout the school. The papers said 500-700 students were involved. I thought that was conservative considering the scope o f the riot. This was the worst rioting ever at a US high school, before or since. Worse than South Boston, worse than Central High in Arkansas.

Ambulances pulled up to the back of the school and I carried a buddy down to the clinic. We played on the soccer team and his face was cut open by a belt buckle. I then snuck out to the parking lot with some other friends to get away. We saw students getting jumped by roving gangs of other students as we drove off, an unforgettable image and memory.

The next day, the riot squad, or swat team, was stationed at our school. There were at least twenty police cars parked around the perimeter and every hallway had at least two, sometimes four uniformed and plains-clothes policemen. This level of security remained pretty much in place for the first semester, then was scaled back for the second semester. Suffice to say, there was no fighting the rest of the year.

When I returned my senior year, everyone pretty much thought the problems were over. Security was greatly reduced and things remained calm...until the last week of school when tensions began to mount.

There were a couple of incidents, then the last day got real ugly. A large group of white students from other schools and white non- students from outlying areas showed up with bats, clubs, etc., to confront the blacks getting on the buses. These same buses had been stoned a year earlier in an 'ambush' of sorts.

The police were there this day, but not nearly enough to contain the situation. Fighting broke out, debris was thrown, but the black students got onto their buses and escaped this mob. I will never forget the look on some of their faces. Fear mainly, which no doubt later turned to anger.

I graduated, there were a few incidents the next year and not long after court ordered busing ceased in Dallas at any rate. All in all, it was a disaster for most of the white students I talked with years later (I never ran into any black students). People were embittered by the experience and only had their prejudices reinforced, certainly not healed.

It took me quite awhile to get over it and I now realized just how much my high school years were affected by the turmoil, especially academically and socially. The atmosphere was poisoned by the violence.

The administration carted out the usual standard ineffective solutions such as forming endless committees and discussion groups to improve race relations and “move forward.”

The same people who participated in these charades had absolutely no influence or credibility amongst the student population who probably viewed these students -- as I did – as opportunists simply padding their resumes for college. You never saw these kids out trying to break up fights or stave off potential fights, like me and my hippie friends did later, once we were seniors.

By the way, I spoke with some blacks after we hippies were attacked and asked them why we hippies WERE attacked -- since we were the ones who were actually cool with blacks being bused into the school, compared with the redneck types who were typical southern racists and against it.

I was told it was because we had long hair and "looked like girls." I was baffled then. Now, I think it was a merely a lack of REAL communication and interaction between the two cultures. In other words, I think if we had parties with these same blacks... there would be no problems.

How could this be done now? Don't get me started, but you can't simply get a small diverse group of smart students together in a classroom to come up with simplistic solutions to very complicated problems, and the problem of race relations in greater Los Angeles is much more complicated and evolving.

There has to be an active change in the culture of the school. You have to get very large groups of students, say the entire grade together, in Barnum Hall and get the students up on stage who are causing the problems and let them answer to their peers. Most likely, it would be a humbling experience.

Also, the administration has to be clever. The two seniors who staged the mock wrestling match probably had a greater effect at diffusing tension than all the security, committees, and endless discussions combined.

The administration might want to consider a similar tactic though I doubt they will, but keep in mind, as Mark Twain said, nothing stands against the onslaught of humor. Get students laughing together and they may Not take themselves and their conflicts so seriously.

Another idea is to play classical music at lunch time. Police departments are starting to do this in major cities in the US and Europe and it has proven to be effective in reducing crime and cleaning up crime ridden areas. It has a soothing effect on people. Some don't like it, but it will definitely set a particular tone that may be conducive to non-violence.

At any rate, do not play rap on campus, or any other popular music for that matter. The students can and will listen to that stuff all they want outside of school. Introduce a little mainstream culture, I say.

Another suggestion... recently my son went to the SAMOHI Alumni Awards and spoke with a '65 alum. She told him that back then, they got 1 hour and 15 minutes for lunch and most kids would go down to the beach and hang out, swim, surf, just generally have a good respite at the beach.

My own personal suggestion -- a big beach party for the entire school, well supervised and organized with food, games, music (reggae), etc. In fact, the SAMOHI Surf Club put on such a party last summer at the end of school. Hardly anybody from the school showed up but we had a blast anyway.

But what do I know...I'm just a surfer. I can't even get my calls returned by the administration or district concerning the surf program at SAMOHI. I doubt they would be interested in what I have to say about the current problems on campus. I'm sure they don't need my help.

Do I think these problems will get worse? I have no idea. Did I see it coming? I did indeed. My kids tell me about every fight and altercation because they know what their dad went through.

I do know one thing... each time my kids tell me about a fight or altercation, the incidents seem to get worse and worse...and this DOES remind me of my high school years. So, if anybody does has a line in with the district or administration, feel free to forward my opinion... for what it's worth.

Christopher Dill has two children at Samohi and is a volunteer surf coach.

http://www.surfsantamonica.com/ssm_site/the_lookout/letters/Letters-2005/April-2005/04_21_05_Learning_fron_the_Past.htm

http://www.flickr.com/photos/therefore/18636595/

Oilmen, Policemen and Nightclub Owners in the Suburbs

2008-01-16T11:39:00.000-08:00

One aspect of growing up is making sense of your place in the world based on what your parents do for a living. In the suburban neighborhood where I grew up in the fifties, my daddy was a businessman who went to a downtown office building every day. He often worked late into the night and through the weekend. By late teens, I had categorized him as a computerdooter—he managed the accounting and tax records for bigtime oil men like Clint Murchison and Jake L. Hamon.

IBM programmer and machine operator with IBM motto circa 1950s

Many southwest daddies made their livings connected somehow to the oil industry. On the street where I grew up, we had two other types of daddies who seemed strange and alien to me. Two families had daddies who were policemen and one family had a dad who owned a bar with pool tables down on East Grand.

In the last week or so I’ve found much info on the web about the lives of Dallas oilmen, policemen and nightclub owners in 1963. Why? Because the President was assassinated here. Not only have numerous governmental agencies investigated the city, but thousands of conspiracy theorists and even Hollywood continue to spend much time obsessed with this time in U.S. history.

I was too young to have had a chance to visit Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club, but here’s a clip of a Hollywood rendition of what went on. The dancer is a fantasy combination of Candy Barr, Judith Campbell Exner, and Marilyn Monroe. In the last scene, Ruby defends working gals and the American Guild of Variety Artists.

Click below for photos from Carousel:

http://s194.photobucket.com/albums/z214/diocynic/Carousel/

Here's more on Candy Barr:

http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/celebrity/candy_barr/1_index.html

By 1966 or so, I was old enough to go from Dallas to Ft. Worth with a carload of high school friends to visit the Cellar. The dancers removed their bottoms as well as tops. They had lights and buzzers to warn if a police raid was occurring.

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/TT/xdt1.html

If you misbehaved bad enough, the bouncers would throw you down the stairs just like Jack Ruby had done at the Carousel. [Here’s a link to descriptions of Ruby’s abilities as a bouncer of drunks from his club:

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ruby5.htm

] Supposedly the Cellar didn’t have a liquor license at the time I visited, so you could buy whiskey-flavored drinks for $4 each. By 1 am or so, I was becoming a bit sleepy from the drinks and endless naked bodies. Sitting Indian-style of the floor , I laid back on a cushion. One of the barmaids kicked me in the head—they were much rougher that Reinhardt teachers—notifying me that I had better sit up and behave.

In the early 70s, I had a friend who took me to the Busy Bee on South Industrial and the Fare on Greenville. Busy Bee was a traditional burlesque joint. The dancers were older and obviously skilled dancers who could do amazing things with their breasts. The Fare had skinny, young go-go dancers.

At this link, Joe Bob describes some of the later history of exotic dancing in Dallas:

http://www.joebobbriggs.com/misccolumns/newpuritanism.asp

Several years ago, the Dallas CVB suffered scandal in part because bed tax funds were used to take convention planners to Dallas strip clubs.

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~clj5/Ethics/articles/Isbell31.pdf

A criteria for many meeting planners is if their conventioneers will find a good selection of strip clubs in the city where they hold their convention—same as in Jack Ruby’s days. And I’m sure there are some Dallas policemen who have complex relationships with the nightclub owners. The national association of gentlemen's club owners recognizes Dallas's important role in this trade group. http://www.acenational.org/default.aspx

Big oilmen in Dallas continue to run many things, just like H.L. Hunt and Clint Murchison used their power in Dallas 1963. Arkansas oilman Jerry Jones follows Bum Bright and Clint Murchison (both of whom helped pay for the DMN Kennedy Questions ad the morning of the assassination) and Lamar Hunt, son of H.L. Hunt, in their hobbies of prime time sports glamour. Check out conspiracy theorists' stories about Murchison, Hunt and Bright at

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmurchison.htm

And what LBJ’s "girlfriend" had to say about Dallas oilmen at

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/august2006/300806jfk.htm

John Birchers and Bridge Ladies in the Suburbs and Phyllis Schafly Fighting ERA

2008-01-07T12:06:00.000-08:00

In previous blogs about my experiences growing up in the suburban East Dallas in the fifties and sixties, I’ve examined blue collar workers, white collar workers, organization men, creeps, and bridge ladies in the suburbs.

I have not addressed another category—John Birchers in the suburbs—and a political connection that is old news to many but interesting to a straight white, oblivious boy like me.

Flyer anonymously printed and distributed in Dallas just before Kennedy's visit

We all remember Kennedy’s assassination and the worldwide incrimination of Dallas as a “city of hate” that somehow fostered the killing. When Kennedy began his morning at a Fort Worth hotel, he considered the hostile Dallas political environment, as shown in a Dallas Morning News advertisement published that morning.

In the aftermath, the Warren Commission found that both the DMN ad and the flyer were irrelevant; the ad was created and funded by Birchers and wealthy Dallas businessmen, including Bum Bright. The John Birch Society, which had a strong following in the fifties and sixties in the wealthy, white Dallas suburbs, claimed the assassination bolstered their conviction that a communist conspiracy existed in the U.S. http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/birch.htm

I’ve never had much interest in JFK assassination theories or the history of the Equal Rights Amendment, but reading Barbara Ehrenbach's The Hearts of Men [which though published in 1983, stands credible and current today] has drawn for me a connection between the conservative businessmen and their bridge-playing, stay-at-home wives, on the one hand, and the defeat of the ERA in the early eighties.

. . . Phyllis Schafly was not one of those housewives who, as Betty Friedan observed, let homemaking “expand to fill the time available” and crowd out all youthful ambitions. Sheltered by Fred Schlafly’s more than ample income and assisted by a part-time housekeeper, she developed a new career as a one-woman propagandist for far-right concerns, publishing (and in some cases self-publishing) eight books on the twin menace of the Soviet Union and its domestic dupes. Politically, she kept one foot in the right-wing of the Republican Party and the other in the nether world of paranoid, evangelical organizations which made up what was then known complacently as the “lunatic fringe” of American conservatism. She ran for Congress as a Republican and wrote a best-selling book (A Choice Not an Echo) endorsing Barry Goldwater as the Republican candidate in 1964. At the same time, she believed that the party had been taken over by a “small group of secret kingmakers using hidden persuaders and psychological warfare techniques” to advance the interests of the “Red Empire.” If this sounds like a highly imaginative view of the Republican Party, it was by no means unique to Phyllis Schlafly. The John Birch Society, a semi-secret, right-wing organization that gained a sizable rural and suburban middle-class following the early 1960s, had consistently warned that the United States was already “50%-70% Communist-controlled.” Like Schlafly [a St. Louis, not a Dallas housewife], the Birch Society saw evidence of Red manipulation in any statesman or politician whose military aspirations fell short of nuclear Armageddon. In 1960, for example, the society’s founder and director, Robert Welch, made the surprising announcement that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was himself a Communist operative.

. . .
In 1972, both the Birch Society and Schlafly’s newsletter flagged the ERA—which at the time was solidly backed by the Republican Party—as a major new political target, and within a few months, Phyllis Schlafly emerged as the leader of a national campaign to stop the ERA. The most obvious reason for this sudden surge of right-wing interest in a feminist issue was that, by the early seventies, the old issues were not selling as well as they once had. Charges of communism in high places sounded quaint in an America that had had its own highly visible and hardly conspiratorial New Left. Détente was in progress, anticommunism was on the decline, and sheer opportunism would have impelled the right to exploit the new issues arising from social changes of the sixties—school busing, affirmative action, abortion and equal rights for women. For Schlafly, in addition, as her chronicler Lisa Wohl suggests, the ERA presented an opportunity to “enter the mainstream,” that is, to gain national attention around an issue that had no apparent connection to the tired themes of far-right paranoia. Others on the pro-ERA side made the same assessment of the right-wingers who were beginning to appear reborn as antifeminists. Pointing to the connection between anti-ERA activism and the far-right American Independent Party (which ran George Wallace for President in 1968 and Birch-affiliated John Schmitz in 1972), Congresswoman Martha Griffiths charged that the anti-ERA effort was really “a means of building a right-wing political organization among women.” But if this was opportunism, it was hardly unprincipled: The major themes of the right-wing assault on feminism were latent in far-right anti-communist ideology before feminism became a force in America.

www.phyllisschlafly.com/
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/coulter071802.asp

These guilts by association--John Birch Society related to Phyllis Schaffly related to anti-ERA politics--have exact parallels in attacks against Betty Friedan, that in her early 20s in the late forties, she was a socialist. Both women had need to dissemble about their previous political associations as their new political careers developed. As we near the 2008 Presidential elections, one cannot ignore the vicious political divisions in our country--and as Hillary said this week, that politics and the nation may be on the edge of "spinning out of control." But in some ways, this is old news when one considers the hostile political environment I grew up in during the cold war fifties and early sixties. Let's elect a President who will work to put the ERA back on the table and/or encourage social programs for our distressed citizenship--hardly a frightful possibility compared to rocketing multimegaton nuclear warheads into North Korean or Russian cities.

YouTube has a couple of videos that focus on Dallas news footage of Birchers from the early sixties, including the exploits of Edwin A Walker:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKwalker.htm

Once I had a driver's license, in the late 1960s, I remember driving by the John Birch Society's headquarters, which I believe was at the intersection of Blackburn and Oak Lawn. Jack Ruby supposedly frequented Phil's Delicatessen down the street. After he was arrested, he was certain the Birchers were out to get him.
http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/Issues_and_evidence/Jack_Ruby/Timeline_of_Ruby.html

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/testimony/ruby_j1.htm

More sixties Dallas trivia--about connections among right wingers, organized crime, and strippers such as Candy Barr and Chris Colt and her 45s can be found at

http://www.lotuseaters.net/jfkdad.shtml

http://www.jfklancerforum.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=3&topic_id=19378&mesg_id=19378&listing_type=

Hefner and Kerouac

2008-01-03T19:00:00.000-08:00

As I’ve worked on my blog over the last seven months or so, I have had in the back of my mind that I must take another look at Hugh Hefner. Boys like me who grew up in the fifties and sixties cut their teeth (and some beat their meat) on his magazine.

My dad, a very modest and conscientious man, had a subscription to Playboy through the sixties. With two teenage sons, he did not work too hard to hide the incoming, brown-paper-wrapped magazines, and my brother—five years older than me—and I had such wonderful, monthly opportunities to spend several hours poring over the latest issue.

Playboy in the sixties had among the highest subscription bases in the USA. It peaked in about 1971. As a proof of its mainstream-ness, consider this ad in a 1968 Christmas edition from Sears & Roebuck.

And consider the literary quality of contributors listed on its cover.
[Click on the picture to make it larger]

Hugh Hefner and the Playboy phenomenon is a complex topic that deserves many book-length studies. Not that Hefner intellectually was and is a very complex man. Rather, he rose to celebrity status and became wealthy at a particular point in American cultural history. By the late sixties, his only work duty was to edit incoming cartoons—of incredible adolescent and misogynist acceptability—and 18-year-old tits. His early authority figure was that celebrated and possibly clinically perverted, scientific expert Alfred Kinsey http://www.leaderu.com/jhs/reisman.html, and as a post-WWII GI early on Hefner entered into a failed marriage with a woman who cheated on him. He was an angry man, and most commentators agree that his magazine was not so much erotic as a sophisticated marketing medium that promoted a bachelor, hedonist lifestyle—not the True magazine image of the man on the hunt in the woods--but the cultivator (consumer) of the bachelor pad, jazz high-fi, culinary arts, European sports car, businessman but not organization man, lover of slam, bam, thank you, ma’am, with complexion color-corrected, young, next-door-innocent females, and with a big payoff from Madison Avenue.

As is my habit, when studying a new subject, I write relatively few words and study the smartest researchers, present and past, two of whom are

Entertainment for Men: Playboy, Masculinity, and Postwar American Culture, by Elizabeth Fraterrigo, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Loyola University, Chicago, April, 2004

and

The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, Barbara Ehrenreich: Anchor Books, 1983.

Ehrenreich draws this interesting connection between the influences of Hugh Hefner and Jack Kerouac in the 1950s:

Playboy’s assault on the Beats was complicated by an ill-concealed sense of rivalry. Hefner grudgingly acknowledged the Beats as fellow rebels against conformity. He implied, however, that they were faint-hearted allies: “. . . modern-day nihilists for whom it was enough, apparently, to flout and deny.” While the beats dropped wearily from the line of the march, the playboys had gone tearing ahead. The difference, he argued, was that the playboys were ambitious; they wanted clothes, cars, fancy girls and they had the energy to find them. . . .

The Beats, whether celebrating [the working class and disenfranchised] like Kerouac or demanding an “affirmation of the barbarian” in all of us, as the briefly Beat Norman Mailer did, were an unwanted reminder of the invisible class outside and the repressed masculine self within. If they had been political in a conventional sense, offering themselves as champions of the proletariat, they would have been less, not more, subversive in an America that knew how to label, file and dismiss its pinko’s and Communists.

I'm Feeling the Christmas Spirit

2007-12-19T15:50:00.000-08:00

And the retailers are drawing me to the buy-hole.

Consider Christmas Giving—though it can hardly be called giving in any traditional sense of the word—is the essence of this secularized festival of consumption. What is given is usually of low utility. In fact, economists call such objects deadweight gifts. “Deadweight” is short for “deadweight loss,” which is the difference between what a gift giver has spent and the value the recipient places on it. Joel Waldfogel, a Yale economist, has estimated that up to a third of the gifts given during Christmas are in this category. Billions of dollars are “wasted” each Christmas as Uncle Louie receives an unwearable Countess Mara necktie from his niece to whom he has sent an unusable Fendi purse. Both parties would be better off giving cash. But they don’t and that is what makes the transaction so interesting to economists and students of luxury.

Living It Up : America's Love Affair with Luxury
by James B. Twitchell

North Dallas Special

2007-12-18T08:38:00.000-08:00

In 1952, my parents bought the home I grew up in for about $12,500. As a WWII veteran, my dad was eligible for a no-down-payment, low-interest, fixed-rate loan, and buying the Fox & Jacob's "cookie cutter" suburban house was just as cheap as renting. It had 945 sq. ft., three bedrooms, one bath, a one-car garage, and no air conditioning.

In 1953, my dad bought his first new car, a 1953 Mercury sedan. We were a one-car family, and he joined a carpool with other downtown workers in the neighborhood so that my stay-at-home mom could have a car for her activities during several days of the week.

Today, young parents of comparable economic footing to my parents would shop for a "North Dallas Special." Cynical homebuilders and realtors know they only have 20 minutes to establish curb appeal and other warm status fuzzies to potential buyers. Gaudy McMansion architecture, with complex, ornamental roof structures, "grand" entrances, and cheapness hidden in sides, rear, and general home engineering are what will make the sale to the three-SUV families.
$207,990, 3,277 sq. ft. Fox & Jacob (Centex) home in Rowlett, TX.

Available with no-down-payment, no principal payment, adjustable, Wall Street "guaranteed" mortgage

The crosses indicate a family moved by the Holy Spirit lives in this home

North Dallas Special
A type of house laden with the architectural symbology of upper class inhabitation, displayed in grossly exaggerated form for the purposes of marketing. The term refers to the particular concentration of this mutation in the suburbs north of Dallas, although the phenomenon is by no means confined to this region. The manifestation consists of a very complex roof form, a great deal of articulation in the plan ("breaking the box"), the use of a great variety of window shapes with arches in abundance; a double height portico ("entry feature"), a more expensive material on the front facade (brick, stone) with cheaper cladding (vinyl) to the sides and rear, and a thin veil of classicism (coins, entablatures, pediments, columns) following no known canon. Certain compositional flaws are the consequence of the attempt to incorporate the variety of a large mansion into a house of middling size. The marketing is referenced as "Curb Appeal" which thrives on first impressions projected onto the approach of the customer. The negative consequences of curb appeal are first, that the spatial enclosure is dissolved by the excessive articulation of the facade, and second, that the construction budget is exhausted by the semantics with scarce resources remaining for articulation at the rear yard where it might create some privacy by deploying a back building.

http://parole.aporee.org/work/print.php?words_id=515
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=North+Dallas+special

The North Dallas Special: a single home attempts to create the skyline of an entire village. It is meant to stand alone.

Homebuilders at the upper end of the market appear to be equally misguided in their approach to building design. Pictured here is what has come to be known as the “North Dallas Special,” or, less affectionately, as a “house on steroids.” Despite all its cartoonish qualities—its variety of window types, it overwrought trim—this house represents the industry standard for luxury. The design technique is straightforward: concentrate the budget on extra corners and exaggerated historical references, all in the name of “curb appeal.” Never mind that one practically needs a Ph.D. in physics to assemble this roof; this technique is what developers learn at homebuilding conventions, and what realtors have come to call the “twenty-minute house,” . . . refers to the fact that a house has only twenty minutes to win the affection of a potential buyer, since that is the average length of a realtor visit. The building industry is at its best for the first twenty minutes that one is in it. Specifically, the house is usually organized around a tall “great room” from which, immediately upon entering, the potential buyer is astounded by partial views of almost every room in the house. The disadvantage of this organization is that there is no acoustical privacy for the individual rooms, something that is not discovered until after moving day. Similarly, because so much of the budget is spent on the front of the house (much to the detriment of the street space), the back of the house ends up being a few sliding glass doors in a dead-flat wall, such that the backyard offers no privacy either. You exit the rear door to find yourself completely exposed in a windswept lot, directly visible to the occupants of the five other houses identical to your own.
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck

Through the fifties and sixties, white flight to the suburbs laid waste to our inner urban centers, creating a "white noose." Dallas has fared better than many due to Texas laws allowing municipalities to aggressively annex outlying suburbs.

Anybody who travels back and forth across the Atlantic has to be impressed with the differences between European cities and ours, which make it appear as if World War Two actually took place in Detroit and Washington rather than Berlin and Rotterdam
James Howard Kunstler, Home from Nowhere (1996)

Why I Am a Drug Addict

2007-11-24T00:02:00.000-08:00

I need relief from headache, tension. depression, irratibility, neuralgia and/or neuritis, without stomach distress, like I get from taking peyote.

Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates Agency claims credit for this series,

which increased sales from $18 million to $54 million in just 18 weeks, so he bragged to The New Yorker that just the spot with the skull bangers "made more money for the producers of Anacin in seven years than Gone with the Wind did for David O. Selznick and MGM in a quarter of a century." Twenty Ads That Shook the World, James B. Twitchell

Maybe I should just take a Bufferin and go to Starbucks.

I’m Trying To Decide What Parts To Botox

2007-11-17T10:52:00.001-08:00

Wow, some of these are issues that Botox won’t fix. I might have to go directly to a surgical face lift for those dropped jowls and neck bands. I’ve lost so much fatty tissue under my cheeks that they might have to insert or inject something big to push them back out.

But I don’t have enough money for all of that so I think I will just work on some of the wrinkle areas.

I really hate those horizontal forehead wrinkles--worry lines. They're there all the time and make me look like I'm anxious, interrogative or frightened.

Dang, the wrinkles in my forehead are also going up and down. That frown furrow makes me look mean, but I want to look nice.

Those eyes look narrow and suspicious. The crow's feet are looking more like ostrich feet. Those cholesterol deposits on my eye bags look like zits.

Man, that nose looks like it's been used as a punching bag. That will be an operation in itself.

Those nasolabial folds really make me look old and gaunt. I don't think I'm a particularly bitter person but looking at my mouth would make one think so.

Sucking on those cigarettes also is hurting my facial appearance. If I don't stop soon, my lips may look like this, with vertical smokers lines around the mouth:

Here's my shopping choices. I think I will sleep on it.

Frown Line Fader – The area at the top of the nose and between the eyes is known as the glabellar area. Vertical lines here make one appear angry or worried. Frown Line Fader gives one a more peaceful and pleasant appearance. $280 & up.

Crows Feet Clean Up – Lines at the outer edges of the eye caused by squinting can make one appear mean, exhausted or skeptical. Crows Feet Clean Up restores a young, rested and kind persona. $336 & up.

Forehead Finisher – Horizontal creases on the forehead may cause an aged, questioning or scared expression. Forehead Finisher relaxes these lines, resulting in a serene, youthful and smooth finish. $224 & up.

Lip Line Eliminator – Vertical lines around the lip make one appear harsh and bitter. Lip Line Eliminator eases these lines and makes the person look as though they have a sweet, gentle demeanor. $112 & up

Choice Chin – Uneven muscle tone in the chin area may cause asymmetry and unwanted dimpling. Choice Chin will relax the muscles, resulting in a smoother and better-proportioned chin. $56 & up.

Botox Brow Lift-A small amount of Botox can block the depressor muscles of the eye and give a slight lift to the eye. $168 & up.

http://www.bodyperfectusa.com/menuofservices.html

A Reinhardt of the Mind Poetry Corner

2007-11-14T20:01:00.000-08:00

Pied Beauty:

More of this reader's work can be found at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqiU2i2No-8

This one is worth further study:

One of the Beatles' later recordings, from Magical Mystery Tour:

Time and Gravity Weigh Down on Reinhardt Kids

2007-11-13T18:19:00.000-08:00

I've had several acquaintances say to me in recent years that the best time of their lives was when they were seniors in high school. At the time, I thought this was odd--that my life has been getting better since high school, that age 17 and 18 was not my best time.

But in retrospect, it makes sense. We are at our prime in high school physically and mentally. It is a fun and adventurous time for most.

And this cold, cruel world can be hard on us as time goes by.

Gravity too takes its toll.

In a previous post, I have examined how physiognomy had some influence on our adolescent social competence. Here, I explore how aging and gravity affects our faces.

In the subject below, we see the effects of age from age 18 to age 58. Note some specific changes:

The nose continues to grow and flatten as we age. (Thus having delicate feature when young can be an advantage toward older attractiveness). Eyebrows tend to thin and turn grey in color. Ears lengthen too. Elasticity of the skin weakens, and cheeks drop into jowls. For most adults, eyes tend to narrow as we age, due to brow dropping and flattening, but in this subject, the youth picture shows a certain look of "bedroom eyes" not apparent in the older photo. I learned the term "bedroom eyes" from a high school girl friend; it denotes a placement of the pupil high in the eye socket and covered slightly by the eyelid.

Generally, eyes tend to narrow with aging and also drop somewhat into skull, as brows fall and fatty tissue declines. Chins tend to broaden.

Here's another subject:

In this case we again see the broadening and flattening of the nose. Smile lines become accentuated and cheeks fall with loss of elasticity. Brows drop somewhat, become depressed, and crow's feet wrinkles become apparent at outside edges of eyes. Upper and lower eyelids show some drooping, and development of eye bags is apparent. Dropping cheeks create appearance of broader face. Lips lose some prominance due to decline in fatty tissue.

Many of our facial features are tied to our faces' underlying musculature. Our intricate muscles pull facial skin as we age. Botox treatments are a popular method of disconnecting our brains, muscles, and facial skin. To understand better facial changes in the above two subjects, it is helpful to study the muscles of the human face.

Each of the labeled muscle zones can create dynamic wrinkle areas to cause crow's feet, bunny lines on nose, frown lines, horizontal forehead wrinkles, vertical wrinkle on the upper lip, etc. More about types of wrinkles in a future blog.

Here's another subject showing more pronounced effects of aging:

Nose growth and flattening in this subject are apparent. Smile lines show lack of symmetry due to plastic surgery on right side of face to remove malignant skin cancer on nose. Thinning and flattening of lips can be detected. Upper front teeth show deterioriation (bruxism)from years of nightly grinding while dreams help work through daytime work and home stress. Neck tissue weakens and falls with gravity, creating a double chin. In the upper half of the face, marked assymmetry and aging effects are prominent. Drooping lower eyelids and eye bags are accentuated from deposits of cholesterol due to creeping arteriosclerosis and from emergent liver spots. Crow's feet wrinkles grow at outside edges of eyes.

This subject, though obviously a whole brained person, has had accelerated activity in the left brain executive function of the cerebral cortex, due to job and family stress, which is projected in the enlargened right eye and the upsloping of worry lines in the right side of forehead Inherited pattern baldness led to this poor man's loss of head hair by age 30.

Ears and nose exhibit growth of strong black hairs. Ear wax has less liquidity and requires regular physician extraction. Spots of forehead (actinic keratosis) may at any time turn malignant.

Wrinkling of facial features can follow emotions, and this face shows some indication of continuous feelings of repugnance and horror.

As mentioned in previous blogs, females of the species typically control pair bonds, wavering between potential mates with strong testosterone markers vs. potential mates with willingness/ability to invest in progeny cultivation. Another factor is heterozygosity--that young adults have an ingrained inclination to selecting potential mates that mix up the genes--that diversity of gene stock leads to stronger offspring.

Check out these offspring:

Isn't it marvelous that as humans we have such acuity in discerning the features of fellows of our species?

Praise God for heterozygosity.

I Learned What I Could About the Facts of Life From the Sears Catalog

2007-11-07T19:35:00.000-08:00

I suspect that most school-aged children today (sadly) learn about the differing body parts of adult men and women, not to speak of varied adult sex acts, from repeated exposure to Internet pornography. When I was growing up in the 1950s, we learned what we could by looking at the Sears catalog.

At about age six, I was introduced to the undergarments section of the Sears catalog by a six-year-old girl whose family my parents were visiting. She also introduced me to some explicit doctor games for which we were punished.

Dr. Spock, in his 1950s edition of Baby and Child Care, had devoted seven pages to teaching children about “the facts of life.” He takes a very liberal and reasonable position that curiosity about sex is normal and also advises on how to provide various age groups with information about why boys and girls are different, where babies come from, and how and why our bodies change during adolescence. I think my parents must have missed that chapter.

They did not restrict our access to the catalog, however, and many hours were spent studying not only the women’s undergarments section but all the models of all ages, various curious health appliances, shoes, record players, sporting goods, musical instruments, toys of all types and many other objects that made up fifties consumer culture.

Of course, the Sears catalog undergarment section was primarily aimed at the fifties women who purchased them. Psychoanalyst and fifties motivational researcher Ernest Dichter, under contract by the undergarment and cosmetics industries, as always did his best to translate American consumer mentality for the folks who had something to sell .

Brassieres. Contrary to the dreams of the male copywriter, bras to most women are a rather sober tool of support. Such support is on the one hand a necessity for well-fitting clothes and at the same time a very important aspect of a youthful appearance. Furthermore, it provides the wearer with a definite feeling of security comparable to a corset or girdle. Motivation studies showed that women expected three major services from well-fitting bras:

--To be made sexually more attractive
--To be eligible for compliments
--To be able to translate and manifest personality through them.

Women felt that the bra should be both noticeable and unnoticeable, that it should accentuate flirtation qualities but not the deeper meanings of the female breast such as passion or motherhood, that it should communicate with the man be remain strictly in the feminine domain.

Girdles. If you ask a woman why she wears a girdle, she will tell you that it is to improve her figure. . . . Only gradually over the last few hundred years has the girdle become a female garment. A tight-laced person is an insecure and inhibited person who at the same time is trying to simulate strength. Modern advertising of girdles stressed the fact that they give firmness and at the same time permit great activity and flexibility. Comparable to bras, girdles represent a female tool that does not have erotic attraction in itself.

Lipstick. Over 67 percent of women regard lips primarily as indices of individual character and individual personality. Shape is esthetically only of a secondary importance to them. Most women clearly link lip shape and desired lip shape for desired personality to attributes of warmth, generosity, friendliness, and humor.

Each day the modern woman is confronted with the gap which exists between her mental image of herself and what she sees in reality in the mirror before her. Her desires and frustrations about herself, her personality and physical attractiveness, and her use of cosmetics to fulfill the desires and limit the frustrations determine in the last analysis the importance of specific cosmetics. Lipstick represents one of the most important allies in achieving this desired goal. Some women indicate that they only use lipstick and no other cosmetic, while others feel that, of all cosmetics, lipstick is the most vital.

Perhaps the most frequent image used to describe feelings about lipstick is indicated in the following quote: "I must use lipstick because if I don’t have it on I feel as if I’m not dressed. I feel drab and lifeless and lipstick just hits the spot. It really is something what lipstick will do for you."

The explanation for such an attitude seems to be twofold. People feel that their lips are the most intricate part of their personality and, at the same time, that they have to be covered up to hide inner hopes and fears. There is a desire to protect one’s real self, a desire to prevent self-exposure. Lipstick has a deep, psychological role in creating an emotional tone and mood. It has many facets, from the morning uplift when cheerfulness is induced by seeing a bright face in the mirror rather than a drab one, to the more complicated emotional role of providing self-confidence and helping to create a façade to greet the public; it renews one’s self confidence and refreshes one’s self-image.

Sleep actually shatters defenses and barriers against a hostile world. Dressing and the application of lipstick serve to mend the walls, re-erect the barriers, and assemble the scattered units of personality into one whole piece to meet the oncoming day.

Handbook of Consumer Motivations.

Everything you always wanted to know about mid-twentieth century catalog undergarment advertisements can be found at:

http://www.corsetiere.net/Spirella/George/Gontents.htm

The Consolation of Philosophy, Psychology and Magic

2007-11-06T07:59:00.000-08:00

The new biological research into genes and brain chemistry offers amazing insights into ourselves. Often, however, there is a disconnect between describing something scientifically and explaining its function.

New findings from biology can be a consolation to parents and young people suffering from psychological illness. For instance, a family with a daughter who has life-threatening anorexia can be soothed somewhat with explanations that the disorder is caused by genes inherited from grandma or brain chemistry gone awry which can be fixed by medications, not by bad mothering or cultural madness.

From another point of view, these new sciences have yet to provide many cures or life-changing understandings of sickness and health. When merged with formerly popular schools of psychology such as psychoanalysis, behaviorism, humanistic psychology, cognitive-developmental theory, etc., recent scientific investigation only adds new overlays of variables. When scientists are pressed to explain how a gene came to be or what impact brain activity in a particular area has, they often lapse into the latest explanatory fashion, evolutionary psychology mumbo jumbo, and make wild speculations likely to be no more accurate than Freudians made seventy years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolation_of_Philosophy

Mignon Lied to Her Mother because of Synaptogenesis in Her Prefrontal Cortex

2007-11-05T15:34:00.000-08:00

Age 15 ½ brought new social status to kids like me who now had a driver’s license and parents who would let me use their car. Adolescence is a time to pull away from parents and home, to drive cars, with brains drenched in dopamine, to establish an independent self, to explore the world and to take risks.

In early teens, many of us prevaricated somewhat with our parents in describing our evening itineraries. A group of twelve or so formed a plan to meet at the Big Town Bowling Alley [http://mallsofamerica.blogspot.com/2006/08/big-town-mall.html] for some mixed team games—a relatively risky venture for this group of late blooming 15- and 16-year-olds.

And I can’t think of a more wholesome activity for young people than bowling. As Ernest Dichter, fifties marketing consultant, explained to the bowling alley industry:

The efforts and achievements of the bowling industry in modernizing their establishments and upgrading their equipment is a tribute to their foresight and
perception in understanding the growing leisure needs of people today. . . . Bowling . . . represents a rare combination of a sport, a game, and a highly desirable and enjoyable social activity. Furthermore, the fact that people of varying degrees of skill and proficiency can easily participate in bowling without being subjected to outside pressure or criticism from teammates has made this sport one which enjoys the maximum amount of universality. . . . [Bowling] is among the few athletic social activities which are not only acceptable to but particularly enjoyable for both men and women. Handbook of Consumer Motivations

But Mignon’s mother did not want her to go—I’m not sure if she disliked bowling (that beery, blue collar activity) or boys more—and Mignon had to tell a fib. Her mother suspected monkey business, found her out at the bowling alley, and escorted her home.

Here’s what modern neurobiologists tell us was happening in Mignon’s brain:

The remodeling of the adolescent brain—a brain that science had considered largely finished—spreads over such a wide range of systems that we need to rethink how we think of teenagers altogether. Over a span of ten to twelve years, the adolescent brain, through a series of sometimes subtle and something breathtakingly dramatic shifts, is transformed from child to adult. The grey matter of an adolescent’s frontal lobes grows denser [synaptogenesis] and then scales back [pruning], molding a leaner thinking machine. The teenage brain fine-tunes its most human part, the prefrontal cortex, the place that helps us cast a wary eye, link cause to effect, decide “maybe not”—the part, in fact, that acts grown up. The brain of the teenager undergoes a proliferation of connections for dopamine, a neurotransmitter important for movement, alertness, pleasure—high levels that may have evolved to help adolescents of many species take the necessary risks for survival, from exploring new fields for food to asking that saucy girl to dance. . . .The long, thin arms that connect brain cells are coated with insulation [myelination] that speeds signals in brain regions devoted to such fundamental capacities as emotions and language.
The Primal Teen by Barbara Strauch

More specifically, Mignon recently had experienced a flourishing or exuberance of her prefrontal cortex, its volume increasing by 5-10 percent from middle childhood; then her brain began a rapid pruning back, losing one percent of synapses per year until age 18 and beginning a gradual myelination and rigidifying of those neural pathways that had worked well in her adaptation. One of her experimentations was likely a simple synaptic lie to mom, which from the long evolutionary view, was an effective way to solve a problem and get what she wanted—it’s future oriented thinking. But mom likely corrected that neural pathway before it was set in myelin.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/work/adolescent.html

More about Big Town:
http://davenportandwiggins.com/_wsn/page10.html
http://deadmalls.com/malls/big_town_mall.html
http://big-town-mall.blogspot.com/2006/09/where-was-big-town-mall.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Town_Mall

Adrenarche and Puppy Love at Reinhardt

2007-11-04T14:57:00.000-08:00

When did I have my first crush?

Dang if I can remember, but according to a hormone researcher at Univ. of Chicago, Martha McClintock, nearly everyone, male or female, when interviewed at a young age, reports having a first crush at age 10, in the fourth grade, well before testosterone or estrogen have reached adolescent levels for nearly all children. At around ten, children do have an early rush of androgens produced by the pituitary gland and enter the stage of adrenarche.

At 15, why did I fall in love so quickly while jumping on the trampoline with a girl I had previously been unattracted to?

From The Primal Teen by Barbara Strauch:

[Arthur Aron's] research has repeatedly shown that people fall in love more readily if they're already in a physically aroused state. That doesn't mean only a sexually aroused state, but any activity that gets the blood running high. For instance, two people who meet in a scary place, like on a high suspension bridge, or who think they're going to get an electric shock in a lab experiment, or who've been running on a treadmill . . ., are more likely to become attracted to one another.

Monkey Business at Reinhardt

2007-11-01T16:56:00.000-07:00

I learned some of my first lessons about upcoming adolescence in youth activities at the now defunct Lakeview Christian Church. As a tag-along to the Art Williams family, I participated in Sunday School, Scouts, baseball, basketball, Wednesday night church and summer church camp. In the fifties high-growth suburbs, the principal activity in the neighborhoods was raising children. Most parents had moved to the suburbs away from their own parents and extended family influences, so parents could shop around for new churches, often shifting denominations. For example, my parents half heartedly explored a status move to the Presbyterian church from the church of their mothers--Methodist. Art Williams chose a nondenomational church that attracted arch conservative businessmen. Down the street on Old Gate Lane were White Rock United Methodist, St. Bernard's Catholic and Lakeside Baptist Church.

Lakeview Christian Church had a small library for its youth group, and I was able at age 11 or so to check out a facts-of-life paperback. In more recent years, the church pastor (a 1966 BA grad, by the way) has taken a more personal interest in sex education for his flock:

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/110107dnmetminister.2dac26c.html

White Rock United Methodist had the largest and most active youth group. By age 12 or so, we at Lakeview were hearing rumors that the Wednesday night Methodist Church service had rampant petting taking place in the parking lot.

Just as I learned about Christian love and animal sex competition at church, in my secular school system, I also could see the diverse physical changes going on in the bodies of my classmates. Suburban public schools in the Dallas fifties might have 100-150 students per age group in elementary school, feeding into junior highs with 500-700 per class, then feeding into the mother of all high schools with 4,000 students. Bryan Adams High School through the sixties was one of the largest in the state (and history of the human race) with senior classes holding more than 1,000. Today, that high school only has 2,300 students.

Adolescence for many of us began in the sixth and seventh grades. In previous grades, our peer status was to some extent controlled by teachers, who doled out rewards and withdrew status on the basis of things like cooperation, academic performance, sports, and other adult-controlled activities. Beginning with adolescence, much turmoil occurred within peer status networks. The early bloomers, who according to this research had the pick of the "dating litter," began to assign status on the basis of masculine and feminine physical characteristics, especially facial features.

Actually, precocious puberty did not always lead to picking from the litter. Being taller, broader or hairier than your classmates could lead to awkwardness and self consciousness. There is little

evidence that precociousness, per se, leads to promiscuity. Some studies do show that girls in high-stress homes, including homes with an absent father or a stepfather, have accelerated puberty. What does a biological father in the family have to do with it? Perhaps his pheromones have an effect. Precocious puberty can lead to shortened stature, a limitation especially to the male. Teenage girls on the average mature earlier than boys and often prefer boys a year or two older, more equal to them in physical maturity.

Evolutionary psychologists tell us that our adolescent hormones were leading us to pair bonding preferences based on factors such as body symmetry, averageness and sex hormone markers. Let’s look at a few:

We can detect some marked asymmetries in facial features of this subject. Note the left eye is narrower than the right. Eyebrows do not match. One side of the mouth and lips is broader than the other. The left side of the chin and jaw are much more pronounced than on the right side.

Why would we prefer symmetry? Perhaps we instinctively recognize it as an indicator of developmental stability--someone whose genes are to be preferred in a baby we make.

Here's two chimerical symmetric composites of the male face:

A related factor is facial smoothness.

In the male figure we can detect active acne and acne scars. In the female figure a paleness, lack of uniformity in skin coloration, and lack of oil glow may indicate disease histories or genetic disabilities opposed to our preference for gene health.

Here we see two subjects with strong markers of symmetry, averageness and sex hormones. Note the male's strong, low brow; broad chin; narrow depth between brow and bottom of nose; and relative thinness of mouth. Features appear symmetrical, and no particular feature seems out of average. In the female, we note estrogen markers such as large eyes; high, up-sloping brows; full lips with modest teeth prominence; high cheekbones; and more pointed jaw. In person, both subjects likely displayed genetic and health markers such as clear, consistent complexion glow, framed within a hairset exhibiting luster and averageness.

Let's look at one more set:

Recent research confirms that females when horny (at a certain point in menstrual cycle) are attracted to strong testosterone markers such as seen in the second subject. Females control most pair bond choices and also prefer at other times in their mental life men with more feminine facial characteristics such as seen in the first subject. Will he invest in my progeny?

http://www.livescience.com/health/070102_facial_features.html

More about averageness and hormone markers, synaptogenesis, and the importance of hip-waist and chest -waist ratios in future blogs.

Advertising Made Me Do It

2007-10-31T16:33:00.000-07:00

My 31-year-old daughter said to me recently that she could not fathom what was going on in her mind when she was 13 years old. I took this as the obligatory apology for adolescent bad behavior that children give their parents once they reach their late twenties and the myelin in their brains has tightened up.

Psychoanalysis posits a fairly uncontroversial theory that children experience a period of latency during middle childhood—a relatively stable progression between the psychosexual conflicts of early childhood and adolescence. Of course, children in the middle ages of childhood do have curiosity and some experience of sexual feelings. In many fifties families, even those who followed Dr. Spock’s permissive doctrines, an exception was made when children showed curiosity about the sexual organs of the opposite sex, witness the belt scars on my ass at age six after being caught playing doctor with a family friend.

Puberty came at Reinhardt to many, and we likely were influenced by media sources, such as advertising:

James B. Twitchell in Adcult USA describes two types of magic central to our culture which we find in advertising—contagious and imitative.

The contagious is the basis of all testimonial advertising—the explanation of celebrity endorsement—and has its religious counterparts in such matters as the relics of Christ. If you use this product, if you touch this stone, if you go to this holy place, if you repeat this word, you will be empowered because the product, stone, place, word . . . has been used by one more powerful than you. Imitative magic, on the other hand, is a variation of circular thinking. Because the product is made of something, you will be likewise if you consume it. So Africans use the powder of rhino horns, the Japanese crave certain mollusks, and we deodorize our bodies and then apply musk (from the Sanskrit for testicle) perfume. Then all over the world we get into a car with an animal name (yet more imitative magic) and go on the prowl for mates. Magic is such second nature that even when advertising sticks it in front of our noses, we are not stupefied.

. . . Naturally enough, the advertising directed at the adolescent is invariably the most drenched in libidinous magic oil. Look at any magazine from Details to Rolling Stone, and you will see more adolescent hands in other people’s pockets and down their trouser fronts, more faux intercourse with motorcycles, automobiles, and cigarettes, and more simply lewd positioning of the human form than in any R-rated movie. What do we expect? In adolescence we lather our bodies in unguents, slither into the most uncomfortable clothing, perform ritualistic dances that often include slamming into immovable objects, drive hunks of pig iron at breakneck speeds, and ingest poisons, until finally we exchange amulets, repeat mystical vows, and at last get on with it. All the time we are quite unaware of the authority of such behavior, and later when our children start to consume the same magical mumbo-jumbo, we say, “My, my, isn’t this advertising dreadful. It’s making Missy and Buck behave so badly.”

Adolescence is a time of life that we do not forget as we get older. As our little child bodies changed week by week and new peer social hierarchies provided revolution to our self image, we knew what was going on—that our bodies, our skins, was who we were, for better or worse. At some level, we knew about the subject of my next blog:

Synaptogenesis, Estrogen and Testosterone at Reinhardt

I Wanted To Watch Ted Koppel, But All I Could Find Was Nancy Grace and Entertainment Tonight

2007-10-24T16:07:00.000-07:00

We’re in the business of selling audiences to advertisers. They [the sponsors] come to us asking for women 18 – 49 and adults 25 – 54 and we try to deliver.
Robert Niles, NBC VP of Marketing

In an earlier blog, I reviewed some of the social class theory developed in the 1950-60s to help better understand my parents, neighbors, and the families we grew up in within what were extremely homogenous, lily white suburbs of East Dallas. In the new millennium, social class is much harder to define. Whereas Herbert J. Gans in The Levittowners could provide some fairly salient generalizations about marriage, family life, parenting attitudes, and civic participation of blue collar, lower middle class, upper middle class, etc., today categories of age, income, ethnic background and educational level can explain less.

Here’s a quick assessment of how one might be classified today for the purposes of consumer marketing demographics. This online assessment only takes a minute and provides immediate results.

http://www.sric-bi.com/VALS/presurvey.shtml

I come in as an Innovator (Actualizer), Thinker (Fulfilled).
http://www.sric-bi.com/VALS/types.shtml

The following is a description of the VALS categories by James B. Twitchell in Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture, 1996. He is more entertaining than the SRIC website in his descriptions, though his book is a bit dated.

The psychographic system of SRI is called acronymically VALS, short for Values and Lifestyle System. Essentially this schematic is based on the commonsense view that consumers are motivated "to acquire products, services, and experiences that provide satisfaction and give shape, substance, and character to their identities" in bundles. The more "resources" (namely, money, but health, self-confidence, and energy also figure) each group of consumers has, the more likely they are to buy the "products, services, and experiences" of the group with which they associate. But resources are not the only determinant. We are also motivated by such ineffables as principles, status, and action. When SRI describes these various audiences, they peel apart like this (I have provided them with an appropriate car to show their differences):

Actualizers [Changed to Innovators in the current VALS terminology]. These people at the top of the pyramid are the ideal of everyone except advertisers. They have "it" already or will soon. They are sophisticated take-charge people interested in independence and character. They don't need new things; in fact, they already have their things. If not, they already know what the finer things are and refuse to be told. They don't need a new car, but if they do, they'll read Consumer Reports. They do not need a hood ornament on their car.

Fulfilled [Changed to Thinkers in the current VALS terminology]. Here are mature, satisfied, comfortable souls who support the status quo. Often they are literally or figuratively retired. They value functionality, durability, and practicality. They drive something called a town car, which is made by all the big auto makers.

Believers. As the word expresses, these people support traditional codes of family, church, and community, wearing good Republican cloth coats. As consumers they are predictable, favoring American products and recognizable brands. They regularly attend church and Wal-Mart [buying Chinese goods if they are a value], and they are transported there in a mid-range automobile like an Oldsmobile. Whether Oldsmobile likes it or not, they do indeed drive "your father's Oldsmobile." [Can't find Olds anymore; better buy a Buick.]

Achievers. If consumerism has an ideal, it is achievers. Cha-ching, goes the cash register. Wedded to job as a source of duty, reward, and prestige, these are the people who not only favor the establishment, they are the establishment. They like the concept of prestige. They demonstrate their success by buying such objects as prestigious cars. They like hood ornaments.

Strivers. Young strivers are fine; they may mature into achievers. But old strivers can be nasty; they may well be bitter. Because they are unsure of themselves, young strivers are eager to be branded so long as the brand is elevating. Money defines success and they don't have enough of it. Being a yuppie is fine as long as the prospect of upward mobility looms. Strivers like foreign cars even if it means only leasing one.

Experiencers. Here is life on the edge--enthusiastic, impulsive, and even reckless. Their energy finds expression in sports, social events, and "doing something." Politically and personally uncommitted, experiencers are an advertising dream come true, because they see consumption as fulfillment and are willing to spend a high percentage of their disposable income to attain it. When you wonder who could possibly care how quickly a car will accelerate from zero to sixty miles per hour, it is the Experiencers.

Makers. Here is the practical side of Experiencers; Makers like to build things and they experience the world by working on it. Conservative, suspicious, respectful,
they like to do things in and to their homes, like adding a room, canning vegetables, or changing the oil in their pickup trucks.

Strugglers. Like Actualizers, these people are outside the pale of Adcult, not by choice but by economics. Strugglers are chronically poor. Their repertoire of things is limited because they have so little. Although they clip coupons like Actualizers, theirs are from the newspaper, not from bonds. Their transportation is usually public, if at all.

The categories are very fluid, of course, and we may move through as many as three of them in our lifetimes. So, for instance, from ages eighteen to twenty-four most people (61 percent) are Experiencers in desire or deed whereas fewer than 1 percent are Fulfilled. Between ages fifty-five and sixty-four, however, the Actualizers, Fulfilled, and Strugglers claim about 15 percent of the population each, whereas the Believers have settled out at about a fifth. The Achievers, Strivers, and Makers fill about 10 percent apiece, with the remaining 2 percent Experiencers. The numbers can be broken down at every stage, allowing for marital status, education, household
size, dependent children, home ownership, household income, and occupation.

So I can understand that as an Actualizer, Thinker (and Maker in the making) and old, overeducated semi-retiree, I should not expect anyone to program television, radio, movies or periodicals for me, since I rarely buy anything. It should be no surprise to me that I find the mass media to be a great wasteland. But I’m not complaining. I actually like Nancy Grace on occasions. I understand there are millions of overworked, underpaid, big-spending, young moms who deserve a break in the evening to see some tabloid titillation and pervert perps brought to justice. And only in America can old nonspenders like me still find plenty to entertain ourselves with given that there is so little to find within the media.

A Reinhardt of the Mind Poetry Corner

2007-10-17T08:29:00.000-07:00

Epistle To Be Left In The Earth
by Archibald MacLeish

...It is colder now
there are many stars
we are drifting
North by the Great Bear
the leaves are falling
The water is stone in the scooped rocks
to southward
Red sun grey air
the crows are
Slow on their crooked wings
the jays have left us
Long since we passed the flares of Orion
Each man believes in his heart he will die
Many have written last thoughts and last letters
None know if our deaths are now or forever
None know if this wandering earth will be found

We lie down and the snow covers our garments
I pray you
you (if any open this writing)
Make in your mouths the words that were our names
I will tell you all we have learned
I will tell you everything
The earth is round
there are springs under the orchards
The loam cuts with a blunt knife
beware of
Elms in thunder
the lights in the sky are stars
We think they do not see
we think also
The trees so not know nor the leaves of the grasses hear us
The birds too are ignorant
do not listen
Do not stand at dark in the open windows
We before you have heard this
they are voices
They are not words at all but the wind rising
Also none among us has seen God
(... We have thought often
the flaws of sun in the late and driving weather
pointed to one tree but it was not so.)
As for the nights I warn you the nights are dangerous
The wind changes at night and the dreams come

It is very cold
there are strange stars near Arcturus
Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky

Magic in the Postmodern World

2007-10-16T18:15:00.000-07:00

From Adcult USA, James B. Twitchell, 1996, Columbia University Press.

The magi were the ancient Zoroastrian theurgists whose actions animated the universe. They were the ones who knew the buried codes. Little wonder, then, that it was members of this caste who traveled to Jerusalem to bear witness to one of their own--the Christ child, the new and improved magus. And little wonder that the modern magi are in advertising around the globe, adding "value" to interchangeable objects. They make disposable goods into long-lasting charms. It is the ad execs who produce Budweiser beer trucks in the middle of the desert, transform monsters into gentlemen hulks with a spray of Right Guard, activate those cute scrubbing brushes for Dow Cleanser, put a smile on the pitcher of Kool Aid, change a deep-swimming shark into a Chevrolet Baretta, and make millions of pimples disappear in the mirror . . . like magic. . . .

How do we think things work if not through the powers of magic? Why should we think that ours is an age of reason, an age of scientific observation, an age devoid of wishful thinking? The days of the Inquisition, Ponzi schemes, rain dances, the South Sea Bubble, witchcraft, and Dutch tulip mania are hardly over. In their place we have the stock market, state-supported gambling, chain letters, abstract expressionism, credit cards, national debt, filter tips, premium gas, anorexia, vitamin supplements, Amway, Lourdes, horoscopes, social security, trickle-down economics, leveraged buyouts, long-range weather forecasting, higher education, installment buying, the rhythm method, UFOs, hedge funds, eat-more-but-lose diets, the value of diamonds, astrology, prayer, [blogster emendation: blow jobs that lead to impeachment; smart bombs aimed at Bin Laden; removing shoes at airport security; launching war against terrorism; Internet pornography growing within the ghost of the dot.com bust; no-down-payment, no-principal-payment, adjustable home loans; Enron stock; thirst for democracy; vicarious TV life with sports stars and other celebrities as well as news programming aimed at the buying middle-aged woman's concern about sex perverts; 401Ks to replace pensions; U.S. Corps of Engineers levees and dams; paying $1,000 a year out-of-pocket for Pfizer's Lipitor to prevent sudden death from heart attack; voting in the 2008 Presidential elections] language, and, of course, almost all advertising. Economists like John Kenneth Galbraith make careers by pointing out how American economic culture is based on various pipe dreams, but they also forget that without the magic of these dream worlds we would not have "reality."

The Soul of Sliced Bread and Breakfast Cereal

2007-09-28T10:24:00.000-07:00

An area where psychoanalysis still holds sway is eating disorder therapy. Moms can transfer neurosis to children through the way they manage the child’s diet. I have no particular knowledge of the intricacies of this problem--I’m fortunate to have not been touched myself or within my close family by this disease--but in reading Ernest Dichter’s marketing research, I have a new interest in how my mother managed her kitchen.

I think my mom was fairly tidy in her packaging of my school lunchbox, but there were times I could tell she was falling in a rut. After three straight months of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and potato chips, I was bored to death with lunch. I think we came to a mutual agreement that it would be better for us both if she just gave me a lunch allowance to eat from the school cafeteria.

According to Dichter in Handbook of Consumer Motivations (he’s writing about 1950s homemakers) moms take special care in packing their children’s school lunches. “Food wrappings are a demonstration of the concern and affection in which the members of the family are held. . . .Women respondents wrapped the package in a certain way to make sure that it was secure. Many women would run their hand over it. They would do it several times. It was as if they could seal the wrap by the magic of touch. Among other respondents it was noted that when they had finished wrapping an item, they tended to square the package. These homemakers felt that the better the shape of the package was, the more securely it was wrapped.”

Through my mother’s example, I have always had brand loyalty to Mrs. Baird’s white bread. It’s been banned from my home for twenty years or so as an empty carb food, but if I were to buy a loaf of white bread, I would buy Mrs. Baird’s.

Anyone who grew up in the Dallas area knows that Mrs. Baird was a grandmother who baked bread and delivered it in a buggy. Many of us children toured a Mrs. Baird’s baking plant as a field trip within scouts or some similar children’s activity. We remember the wonderful aroma of the plant and getting to eat a slice from a fresh baked loaf covered in melted butter.

The Baird boys, I’m sure, had a marketing department that helped establish the “image” (Dichter’s term) of the product. They were pleased with the nostalgic grandma image and also approved and maintain today the advertising line that Mrs. Baird’s “continues the tradition of hand twisting each loaf of bread, a special commitment to quality.” According to one Dichter study, consumers “preferred bakeries where workers did touch the dough and where the bakers acted as if they were baking bread for themselves at home.” Robotic man hygienically covered to prevent his germs from contaminating food product at Lubbock Mrs. Baird's plant

Mrs. Baird’s is now owned by Bimbo Bakeries. I can imagine the owners eating lunch at their country club and fretting over the regional baking business. My recommendation to them is that they buy machines to twist the bread, give the poor man above a decent job, and lay off several of their marketing dick executives to pay for it.

The sale to Bimbo was tied to misbehavior of Vernon and Carroll--Ninnie would have been ashamed of them. http://www.answers.com/topic/mrs-baird-s-bakeries?cat=biz-fin

Other fifties moms preferred breads like Wonder Bread and Sunbeam that promised energy from space-age nutrients. Breakfast foods, too, promised powerful ingredients to provide strength. Regarding breakfast, my mom fit Dichters’s observation that at breakfast not only do we need to “replenish the sources of our bodily energy physically,” but psychologically, breakfast is “ a rehearsal for coming battles, a stocktaking of our resources and a tuning of our senses to the world at large.” We want crunchy cereals because we “look upon breakfast as a sort of adversary that has to be conquered.” For those of a less pugilistic spirit (I’m one of these), we prefer crunchy cereals rather than mushy soft cereals because crunchy cereals “fulfill our tactile curiosity. You can play with cereals in an oral fashion. They have interesting shapes that can be cracked with a snap, crackle and pop.”

Kellogg's Frosted Flakes' endorsement by Superman matches Nike's use of Michael Jordan, but probably at a much smaller cost.

For more about the gender of cereals and sandwiches, including Rice Krispies, see this article.

According to Dichter, "the future trend will not be a supermodern pattern of “atom-powered” cereals. The truly modern cereal will combine all the warmth and affection of the substantial old-fashioned cereal with the fun, lightness, and convenience of modern dry cereal.” (He was right on target here.)

Many of the fifties families in my neighborhood could be classified as lower middle class restrictive or lower middle class expansive. (Click here to see previous blog on fifties suburban social classes.) Use of sugar at breakfast may be a litmus test of our families’ social class. According to Dichter, “sugar is a conflict product. We need it and want it and at the same time we are often afraid of it. . . . Every time the housewife reaches for a package of sugar, . . . she is subject to conflicting feelings of varying intensity.” Moms can basically be classified as sugar hedonists, sugar moderates, or sugar puritans.

I commend my mother (who has never had a weight problem) for being a sugar hedonist, but doing it in such a way that it was no big psychological deal. Despite her Twinkie- and cookie- and Coke-filled cupboards, I’ve always been able to stay away with no effort from all sugar-based, refined products.

We Thought We Were Providing Our Children With Paradise, and They Found It To Be Hell

2007-09-23T14:26:00.001-07:00

Mine was not always a happy childhood, and I sometimes blamed my parents for selecting our family home in the bland, sterile neighborhoods of Casa View. If I were asked, “What would have been the right and best place to grow up?,” I would have stumbled in confusion. Perhaps an extended rather than a nuclear family, in neighborhoods reflecting the range of diversity in races, ethnicity, and income levels. Where everything was not new—such as in a dense city with a history of place and with a long development of commercial and social systems. Or perhaps on a farm, close to nature and exempt from consumer shopping and materialist concerns. Or in a place where there were not so many kids banging up against one another in overcrowded schools.

Herbert Gans, in The Levittowners,(1967) points out that nonsuburban types of homeplaces had their owns sorts of unpleasantness.

Yet even though Levittowners and other lower middle class Americans continue to be home-centered, they are much more “in the world” than their parents and grandparents were. Those coming out of ethnic working class backgrounds have rejected the “amoral familism” which pits every family against every other in the struggle to survive and the ethnocentrism which made other cultures and even neighborhoods bitter enemies. This generation trusts its neighbors, participates with them in social and civic activities, and no longer sees government as inevitably corrupt. Even working class Levittowners have begun to give up the suspicion that isolated their ancestors from all but family and childhood friends. Similarly, the descendants of rural Protestant America have given up the xenophobia that turned previous generations against the Catholic and Jewish immigrants, they have almost forgotten the intolerant Puritanism which triggered attacks against pleasure and enjoyment, and they no longer fully accept the doctrine of laissez faire that justifies the defense of individual rights and privileges against others’ needs. . . . These and other changes have come about not because people are not better or more tolerant human beings, but because they are affluent. For the Levittowners, life is not a fight for survival anymore.

When it came time to find a homeplace for my own brood of four children, my wife and I picked a small, college town. For many years, we lived within a block of the downtown courthouse square. Residents in our neighborhoods were of diverse backgrounds. The smalltown community, and the nearby large cities, provided abundant social and cultural capital. We later moved a bit out of town to a 1912 farmhouse, with farm animals, and thousands of acres of parkland. All proved boring to my brood.

So it goes that, according to my kids, I failed them just as my parents failed me. By the age of 18, my daughter was dead set that she was going to get out of her boring hometown and never come back. My son, attending his tenth year high school reunion recently, remarked on the general contempt many of the graduates (those who had moved to other parts of the country) felt toward their hometown.

Jesus, If Market Researchers Can Figure Out Motivation, Why Don’t Just Rule The World?

2007-09-23T13:59:00.000-07:00

The infamous Virgina Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho was analyzed by the media and its experts from many points of view, including psychoanalysis. Psychologists and psychiatrists disagreed concerning whether the best diagnosis for Cho was autism, Aspergers, or paranoid schizophrenia. Some of a psychoanalytic bent explored Cho from the viewpoint that he might have been a repressed homosexual. In response to various speculations about Cho’s psychosexual problems, one writer commented that (in 2007) psychoanalysis is an unproven and discarded theory.

If I were forced to read today book after book of psychoanalytic theory, I would be bored to tears, in part because I would find speculation after speculation to be lacking in scientific proof but also unable to subjectively ring true to my understanding of myself and the people around me.

I do find today some benefit from reading books that contain psychoanalytic speculations on my motivations toward consumer products. Whatever their orientation, most psychoanalysts writing during the first half of the twentieth century were shooting from the hip with little accuracy, missing their mark as often as hitting it. The researchers on the individual’s relationship with inanimate objects, that is consumer goods such as autos, soaps, toothpaste, and cake mixes, used methodologies that would hardly pass muster in any graduate level university research program today.

The leading depth boy or the 1940s-1960s, Ernest Dichter, was trained under some of the best scholars of pre-war Vienna. Psychoanalysis was not taught and even banned as a subject of discussion in the university program he attended. But as a sort of sideline, he did go through analysis and practice for a short time as a therapist.

In the U.S. for his corporate clients, Dichter approached each project with a variety of study approaches, usually a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods. He basically invented the use of focus groups as a technique of marketing research. He is credited with making first use of the term “image” to describe the important brand qualities that must be developed to distinguish commodities.

In earlier blogs, I’m mentioned many of his insights. Here’s a few more worthy of consideration.

--Why do cake mixes usually require that an egg be added?
The manufacturers could easily include the egg or a substitute as part of the dry mixture.
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.cooking-chat/msg/e4ae9f3134d5b3c4
http://books.google.com/books?id=yzIm-oJyXNkC&pg=PA168&lpg=PA168&dq=dichter+%22cake+mix%22+egg&source=web&ots=aJyER84A-O&sig=KSSzDEX71YDe7P0DZM5ujqPJlQo
Dichter found housewives have a need to put a cook’s touch to the cake. An egg is a symbol of fertility.

from Dichter's Handbook, 1964

Baking provides a feeling of love and security. Aroma and odors pervading the house when mother was baking are fondly remembered. The most fertile moment occurs when the woman pulls the finished cake, bread loaf, or other baked product out of the oven. In a sense it is like giving birth. How did it turn out? Did it fulfill expectations? Once the baked product is placed before the family a good part of the interest of the housewife has been lost.

--Who buys new automobiles and why?
Ernest Dichter’s research for the auto industry set the tone for much fifties and sixties advertising. In a previous blog, I have mentioned several of his findings—that people have fond memories of their first cars, that cars are an expression of freedom and independence for housewives. The commercial from the previous blog is scripted from Dichter’s playbook—that wives usually make the final purchase decision. Dichter also found that car owners associate a car whose doors close firmly and securely with a well made vehicle. Americans also have a mystical attachment to family road trips.

--Who drank my dad’s Chivas Regal?

According to Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction, 1973

Market research on Scotch drinkers revealed that individuals who drink Chivas Regal rarely serve it to friends. At best, these scotch drinkers, even those at the very high income level of over $25,000 per year, will keep Chivas Regal for only their bery best friends, clients, or special guests whom they are trying to impress. Chivas drinkers usually keep less expensive brands of Scotch around the house for general guests or casual or lower station visitors.

Key, a notorious quack, paranoid, and pervert [who sees vaginas, penises and the word “Sex” in anything, but especially advertising], goes on to analyze that the ad above actually contains the subliminal picture of a dog (man’s best friend) which is intended to provide an unconscious stimulation to the purchase of alcohol.

--Jesus, If Focus Groups and Opinion Polls Can Figure Out Motives, Why Don’t Just Rule The World?

From The Assault on Reason, Al Gore, 2007

After a long and detailed review of all the polling information and careful testing of potential TV commercials, the anticipated response from my opponent’s campaign and the planned response to the response, my campaign made a recommendation and predication that surprises me with its specificity: “If you run this ad at this many “points” [a measure of the size of the advertising buy], and if Ashe responds as we anticipate, and then we purchase this many points to air our response to this response, the net result after three weeks will be an increase of 8.5 percent in your lead in the polls.”

I authorized the plan and was astonished when three weeks later my lead had increased by exactly 8.5 percent. Though pleased, or course, I had a sense of foreboding for what this revealed about our democracy. Clearly, at least to some degree, the “consent of the governed” was becoming a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder.

When Baby Boomers Meet their Maker

2007-09-21T09:05:00.000-07:00

I hope that entire industries must review their work products at the pearly gates.

I think the logistics boys—those whose careers have consisted of engineering smart distribution of products—will make it to heaven. They’ve done much to keep prices low during the last several decades.

And I think the bomb engineers may have a chance. When Ike or MacArthur pushed the button, they would indiscriminately kill tens of thousands. With smart bombs, Bill Clinton and George Bush can at least keep the target relatively small.

Everyone who has had anything to do with the U.S. chemical industry likely will go to hell, especially those chemists in white lab jackets who create the ingredients to packaged household goods such as insecticides, herbicides, detergents, beauty products, over-the-counter drugs, and packaged foodstuffs. I’m sure there are worse villains among the ranks of the Dow Chemicals and Procter and Gambles of the world, but the group in charge of consumer products have left whole continents of toxic waste behind them.

The hardware and software engineers likely will make it in. With Hollywood, the U.S. computer industry has been a key to the country’s maintenance of trade balances and prosperity.

Each Hollywood producer, director, and actor will have to state his case individually to St. Peter. The group working in this scene from Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing Charm School likely will make it in.

And also all dance instructors, including Mrs. Keeling, will find their places in heaven.

Hoover, FDR, Reagan, Bush and Reinhardt

2007-09-16T13:03:00.000-07:00

The explosive growth of Dallas suburbs in the fifties has explanations in some larger currents of U.S. history.

When my parents were young adolescents growing up in Tulsa, OK, they likely read in newspapers about the 1932 Bonus Expeditionary Force, a force of 15,000 veterans who marched across the U.S. and encamped in Washington DC to cash in veterans’ bonuses approved by Congress in 1924. General Douglas MacArthur, then Army chief of staff, brought in troops, some led by lower level officers Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton, to rout the Hooverville squatters.

Hoover’s hard line toward vets helped bring a new president into office, who took up the need for national support of veterans. In a 1943 fireside chat, FDR pledged that U.S. troops returning from WWII must never come home “into an environment of inflation and unemployment, to a place on a bread line or a corner selling apples. . . We must this time, have plans ready.”

Roosevelt signed the GI Bill of Rights in June 1944, providing returning vets with a goldmine of benefits, including tuition and living expenses for post-secondary education as well as government guarantee of mortgages for homes. In 1945, less than 5 percent of Americans held college degrees and less that two out of five had completed high school. It is estimated that U.S. education support for veterans provided nearly three years to the average vet’s education. Government support also helped finance nearly 90 percent of private homes constructed in the 1950s. The educated workforce was so widely productive that during the fifties the wage gap between social classes reached an all time low.

So my dad, coming out of an impoverished childhood during the depression and wartime military service, was fortunate to have a government which more or less slingshot him into middle class respectability, with a business school education and a new home and car. My family’s trajectory toward affluence was helped again by their use of expanding credit sources in the late fifties and sixties.

The GI bill was offered to all vets, regardless of station or race or creed [Rosie the Riveter got no such benefits], but the absence of government laws against discrimination led to patterns of suburban segregation difficult to overcome. By 1960, not a single black had been able to buy among the 82,000 new homes built in Levittown, New York (or Casa Linda/Casa View).

In 1967, Martin Luther King spoke of the 1932 Bonus Marchers when he called for hundreds of thousands of marchers to again make camp in Washington DC. He reminded Americans that, in emulating the Bonus Marchers, “The stirring lesson of this age is that nonviolent direct action is not a peculiar device for Negro agitation, Rather it is an historically validated method for defending freedom and democracy, and for enlarging these values for the benefit of the whole society.”

Since WWII, each succeeding decade has brought U.S. vets declining benefits. Bush’s National Guard forces in Iraq, as second class military, have taken over half the casualties in the war but are eligible to received only a third of the GI Bill benefits available to regular troops.

It is an irony that “The Greatest Generation” benefited so greatly from a political system that supported their economic growth, but under leadership of men like Reagan and the Bushes has undercut similar levels of support to their new generation of young warriors.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=20058

A Reinhardt Mystery

2007-09-14T15:22:00.001-07:00

According to Ernest Dichter, in The Handbook of Consumer Motivation, all boys and girls love their bicycles. “Together with the first dog owned, the bicycle represents one of the first symbols of independence and pride of possession. The bicycle is oiled and shined. The first trips taken with a bike are often symbolic demonstrations of growing maturity, or getting away from family.”

It was my love of bicycles—of taking them apart and rebuilding them with parts from other bicycles—that caused me to strike up a friendship with Burley Gilliam. Burley lived in a small frame house on a deadend street—Stevens Street, which I walked down most days on my way to and from school. The builders of Eastwood Park had created a small easement and sidewalk so that people could walk from Sylvia Dr. in Eastwood Park to the industrial area around Cayuga. Many early residents likely used the sidewalk to walk over to the old country store, Sullivan’s.

My memories of Burley are extremely vague. My main interest was the metal shed behind his house, where he had many junk bikes. I think I bought off of him a 26” two-speed bendix back wheel and hub, which I spoked into my 20” DIY prototype sting ray bike.

My general memory was that he came from a very poor family and lived in a very wild and crazy home at the end of Stevens.

As I often do when I research my blogs, I googled Burley Gilliam and have found an extremely notorious man within the U.S. criminal justice system. Various clues indicate this is the same Burley Gilliam who lived at the end of Stevens—and who seemed to mysteriously disappear as one of our schoolmates by the fifth grade or so. One clue is that Burley Gilliam is an extremely unusual name.

Here’s the Florida prison systems info on Burley:

DC Number: 097234
Name: GILLIAM, BURLEY
Race: WHITE
Sex: MALE
Hair Color: BLONDE OR STRAWBERRY
Eye Color: HAZEL
Height: 5'08''
Weight: 211 lbs.
Birth Date: 08/13/1948
Initial Receipt Date:
04/02/1985
Current Facility: UNION C.I.
Current Custody: MAXIMUM
Current Release Date: DEATH SENTENCE

Aliases: BURLEY GILLIAM

Scars, Marks, and Tattoos:
Type Location Description
TATTOO OTHER FLY ON PENIS
TATTOO RIGHT LEG COBRA LOWER LEG
Current Prison Sentence History:
Offense Date Offense Sentence Date County Case No. Prison Sentence Length
06/08/1982 1ST DG MUR/PREMED. OR ATT. 02/01/1985 MIAMI-DADE 8214766 DEATH SENTENCE
06/08/1982 SEX BAT/ WPN. OR FORCE 02/01/1985 MIAMI-DADE 8214766 SENTENCED TO LIFE

Note that he was born in 1948, just the right age to have been a schoolmate in the fifties.

Also, more google work and review of various legal transcripts indicates Burley had strong ties to Dallas, His first conviction for rape occurred in Dallas in 1969; in a transcript, he says his mother-in-law lived in Dallas.

Here’s a short summary of some of his early home life—all of which is in keeping with my minimal memories of his household on Stevens St.

Dr. Marquit testified to the following significant facts concerning Burley Gilliam's life: Burley was abused by his father who was an alcoholic (R. 2846); his mother was a "nervous-type" of person who could not control her children and was out of the house for long periods of time (R. 2846); as a result of his mother's inability to act as a parent, Burley, the oldest child, was forced to take care of the rest of the children, a responsibility for which he was not prepared to handle (R. 2847, 2855); when something went wrong involving the other children, Burley was punished (R. 2847, 2855); he had very little parental nurturing (R. 2847); he was a "very sickly child" who suffered a myriad of health problems (R. 2848); he had a learning disability (2848-9); his learning disability was neglected by his mother because she provided nothing in terms of parenting other than physical necessities (R. 2849); in addition to his father, his mother also was an alcoholic (R. 2849); he was beaten "considerably" by his step-father (R. 2850); he is not sadistic (R. 2860-1); and he does not hold a grudge against his mother or father for the fact that they were not good parents (R. 2860).

At the penalty phase, before the jury, Koch relied on guilt phase testimony from several of Gilliam’s family members: Koch: Your Honor, we have no additional testimony to present. We likewise would be relying on the testimony of Kay Salem, John Beagle, Fay Beagle, and Dean Wilkins [sic].[13] The only evidence the State presented was a certified copy of Gilliam’s 1969 rape conviction in support of the prior violent felony aggravator. As did the defense, the State relied on the testimony adduced during the guilt phase: [State]: At this stage of the proceedings, the State would be relying on the testimony of Dr. Rao, Souviron, Wilder, and the testimony of Mr. Walter Burt, with particularity to the issue raised in this trial.

Gilliam’s mother, Ludine Wilkins, and sisters, Cecil Faye Beagle and Kay Salem, testified during the guilt phase that Gilliam’s stepfather brutally beat him as a child.

Appellant's sister, Erleni Salem, testified that their mother was not home "much of the time" to supervise her brother Burley Gilliam and the other children. She testified that their mother worked during the day and evenings and "partied the times she wasn't home" (R. 2886). Ms. Salem described how Appellant was the saving grace for her son Lloyd after her husband's death (R. 2888-89).

For the gruesome details of Gilliam's 1982 crime, click here.

Is this Burley Gilliam the boy at Reinhardt whom I bought my bike parts from?

Creeps in the Suburbs

2007-09-14T12:57:00.000-07:00

William H. Whyte, in the 1956 book The Organization Man, devotes more than 100 pages to examining the influence of corporate men in fifties suburban neighborhoods. According to him, those mid-level managers, technicians and salesmen set the tone in the neighborhoods and were looked up to as opinion leaders.

I'm not sure they all were so special in the opinion of my mother. As she looked across the neighborhoods and rated the male breadwinners, she used a more complex set of criteria. Mr. X. was a creep, even though a high earner, because he was a dictatorial overcompensator with his wife and children. He even insulted the other bridge ladies when he found them at his home, making everyone feel that they were below him and his doormat wife in social class. Mr. Y was an atheist, and did not even go to church each Sunday with his devout Baptist wife. Mr. Z. was a drunkard, yelled at his wife, and poisoned his next door neighbor's dog to shut up its barking.

For my mother, the dads that had status were good earners, but also caring husbands and fathers. They were hard workers, but also fun. I don't know if any of the men in our neighborhood passed her muster, including my dad. She let us know that the real love of her life was Dean Martin.

Even the organization men didn't necessarily have it easy in our neighborhoods. My dad was struck with a bleeding ulcer in the early 60s from all the stress his job and family gave him; the hospital had to give him 39 pints of blood to keep him alive. I wish he had watched this educational film:

If the player does not work, click here to go to the video.

American Men and Their Cars

2007-09-11T17:19:00.000-07:00

Around 1960, my friend Kenny told me that his dad had bought an unusual car, a Volkswagen Karman Ghia. He explained that his dad had questioned the new car salesman extensively about the car’s reliability and that the salesman had convinced him that the car could make it from Oklahoma—apparently where Kenny’s dad’s parents lived--to Dallas without any mechanical problems.

At the time I thought it was an unusual purchase. In reading Ernest Dichter’s Handbook of Consumer Motivations (1964), I found an explanation that makes sense to me:

The foreign car as a social introduction. Interviews with the owners of small foreign cars show that they welcome the many opportunities their car present for them to relate with other people. They like attracting attention, having people stop them and talk to them. They like being singled out and in such a way that the establishing of a personal relation, however brief, seems worthwhile. . . .They like the feeling of being members in a fraternity of foreign-car owners and drivers.

Mr. Jones, a college-educated man, made his fortune as a paper salesman. I think he enjoyed the attention he got from making sales calls in his Ghia—a not too dissimilar motivation from what likely prompted Mr. Goldstein to drive a station wagon with a machine gun mounted on the roof.

Ernest Dichter explains in The Strategy of Desire (1960) that American men treasure, nearly above all else, their memories of the first cars, and also, if it ever happened, their first new cars.

Here’s a video clip shot 25 years ago of my father describing his first car and his first new car.

Oh, I loved my first car—a 1961 Austin Healy bug-eyed Sprite. Without a girlfriend to distract me, I tenderly disassembled every piece of the engine. I soaked the carburetor in carburetor cleaner and forcefully injected every hole and crevice with a cleaning spray, then used a screwdriver to fine tune the engine so that it made a deep blah, blah, blah through the glass pack muffler.

My friend Jim soon gained a Sunbeam Alpine, and Tom rounded up an Austin Healy 3000 before stepping up to a U.S. muscle car—a new GTO. Unfortunately all three of us boys had wrecked or had blown up our loves within months of latching onto them.

By the late 1960s, I had been sucked in to the idea promoted by Doyle Dane Bernbach's advertising campaign that the VW bug was an anti-car, the "people's car" (yeah, of Nazism), and I remained loyal to that brand for several years.

Sociologist Hits Nail on Head

2007-09-10T12:23:00.000-07:00

Herbert J. Gans was a Univ. of PA sociologist who lived in and studied one of the largest suburban communities of the fifties and sixties—Levittown, PA.

When I child, I struggled to understand differences among the families in my neighborhoods. Gans’ descriptions of class subcultures seem a good fit to our East Dallas suburbs. He identifies five:

--Working class
--Lower middle class, restrictive
--Lower middle class, expansive
--Upper middle class, conservative-managerial
--Upper middle class, liberal-professional

My home was definitely lower middle class, expansive. Kenny’s was UMCCM, as were Steve Wil. and Dana. I knew several Roman Catholic families that were LMCR. Scotty, who lived down the street and had a policeman for a dad was definitely WC.

From The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community, by Herbert J. Gans, 1967

MAJOR SUBCULTURES AMONG THE LEVITTOWNERS
Statistics do not provide a complete picture of the Levittowners and how they vary, and figures must be fleshed out by ethnographic description. Age and life-cycle position are important sources of diversity in American society, but most Levittowners are young couples. Given the declining influence on behavior of regional origin, religious preference, and ethnic background, the crucial source of variety in Levittown is class and class subculture.

Classes are strata-with-subcultures that grow out of the structure of the national economy and society. By class subcultures I mean sets of responses that have developed out of people's efforts to cope with the opportunities, incentives, and rewards, as well as the deprivations, prohibitions, and pressures, which the natural environment and society offer to them.

From another perspective, subcultures are predispositions to behavior, ways of acting, to be followed when the social situation permits it. For example, the desire for community activity is a major source of differentiation between lower middle and upper middle class subcultures. People of the latter class are more predisposed to routine involvement in civic ventures; those of the former participate only when there is a political threat to their homes and families or when occupational roles require it, as in the case of a lawyer or insurance salesman who must advertise his services through community activities in order to earn a living. The social situations with which people must cope and the roles they normally play are, of course, the most important determinants of behavior, but cultural predispositions help to explain why people act differently in the same social situation or role.

Finally, subcultures are aggregates of predispositions, so that where one is found (for example, civic activity), another (buying gourmet foods or reading a magazine like Harper's) is also likely to be present. Predispositions are related or aggregated, sometimes into a fairly stable system, because the situations which people face and the responses they make are often similar, and it is these similarities which are estimated when class is measured by income, occupation, or education. At one time, occupation was an easy clue to the rest of a person's culture, but among the Levittowners education is probably the best index, for years of schooling and the quality of the school attended influence strongly the job for which a person is eligible, the amount of money he has to spend, the kind of woman he marries, and the way he and his family will spend their leisure hours.

The people who came to Levittown may be distinguished as "belonging" to three major class subcultures, which can be labeled as working class, lower middle class, and upper middle class. They must be described in very general terms, ignoring for the sake of clarity the many nuances and diversities which each individual, by virtue of his upbringing and experience, expresses in acting upon his own predispositions. At best, then, the descriptions that follow are brief profiles; at worst, they are only stereotypes."

Working Class
The way of life I call "working class subculture" is to be found not only among blue collar workers, but also among lower echelon white collar workers and among people who did not graduate from high school. In the white population, many are Catholics, and of Irish, Italian, and Southern or Eastern European peasant backgrounds. The vestiges of this origin are especially strong in family life. The typical working class family is sexually segregated. Husbands and wives exchange love and affection, but they have separate family roles and engage in little of the companionship found in the middle classes. The husband is the breadwinner and the enforcer of child discipline; the wife is the housekeeper and rears the children. Whenever possible, husbands spend their free time with other male companions, women with other women. Entertaining is rarer than in the middle class, and most social life takes place among relatives and childhood friends. When they are not available, there is occasional visiting with neighbors and also a tendency for husband and wife to draw closer to each other. Even so, it is significant that the first organization to be founded in Levittown was the Veterans of Foreign Wars, its predominantly working class membership quickly making it a suburban substitute for the city's neighborhood tavern.

Parent-child relationships are adult-centered. Children are expected to behave according to adult rules and are often disciplined when they act as children. Therefore, the young child is supervised strictly and his life is bounded by a large number of rules, deviation from which is punished affectionately but, by middle class standards, harshly. The main purpose of childrearing is to make sure that the child stays out of trouble-that is, does not get into difficulties with the school or the police. For this reason, working class parents expect the school to enforce discipline. Children react to these parental demands by seeking to get out of the house at an early age and to give up the family for the peer group as soon as possible. For some years there is familial conflict over this move, but, generally speaking, working class parents give their children freedom sooner than middle class parents do. They often expect the child to get into trouble by the time he reaches adolescence, and accept its occurrence fatalistically. By then the child, especially the boy, is expected to be a near-adult and responsible for himself.

Socially mobile working class families attempt to prolong adult control, especially over school behavior. Since parents know that mobility can only be achieved by educational success, they put pressure on their children to do well in school. Not being well equipped to help the child, however, they can only continually urge him to work harder at his studies. Often, this kind of pressure is ineffective, and mobile families find to their disappointment that the child does poorly in school. In nonmobile families, children are expected to finish whatever schooling is necessary to obtain good-that is, secure and stable-jobs. By now high school graduation is considered desirable, and if a boy is academically successful, the parents will make an effort to send him to college. However, there are usually so many opposing peer group influences and other pressures that by the time the child reaches college age he is neither able nor willing to go on.

Working class culture provides few of the skills and attitudes needed for organizational activities. People find it extremely difficult to accept the validity of values and interests which conflict with theirs; they have trouble relating to strangers and making decisions in a group-or for the group. Also, they tend to view political and other organizations with the same moral measuring stick as the family, and expect similarly altruistic behavior from such, organizations. This produces a highly personalistic view of government and associations, and when their actions are undesirable, they are seen as tools of unscrupulous individuals out for personal gain. More generally, working class people believe-with some justification-that these agencies are established to benefit the business community and the middle class, and to deprive "working people" of their rightful share of goods and privileges. As a result, they are highly suspicious of private and governmental organizations and reject them when their aims do not accord with working class priorities. In a middle class community then, people of working class culture stay close to home and make the house a haven against a hostile outside world.

Lower Middle Class
Probably three quarters of the Levittowners follow the predisposition of lower middle class culture. They are some of the blue collar workers, the white collar ones, and even many of the professionals; they are people who have completed high school and perhaps a vocationally or a nonintellectually-oriented liberal arts college.

The lower middle class family is sexually less segregated than the working class one. Husbands and wives are closer to being companions, for both sexes have learned to share a few common interests and to participate to some extent in each other's world. Since neither man nor woman is likely to have an intense outside avocation, the home and the family are the focal point for mutuality. Partly because the common interest is in the home, the lower middle class family is child-centered. This characteristic must not be exaggerated, however, for the image so popular in the mass media-of impotent parents dominated by their demanding children-is inaccurate, except perhaps among families from extremely poor beginnings, who want their children to have everything they missed and then cannot cope with their ceaseless requests. Most lower middle class families are childcentered only to the extent that the home is run for both adults and children, and the children are allowed to be themselves and to act as children. At the same time, they are raised strictly, for parents are fearful of spoiling them. Lower middle class parents play with their children much more than working class parents do. Partly for this reason, they do not relinquish control over their children so quickly. They believe in the value of school and church, but do not want these institutions to transform the child or to make demands that would alienate it from the home. The working class sees these institutions as keeping the child in line; the lower middle class wants them to support the home and its values.

In education the lower middle class prefers a modern approach without undue pressure on the child, with every child treated as an individual-but not as a unique or different one, as upper middle class parents favor. Social adjustment is as important as academic success: it is hoped that the children will be accepted by peers of equal status. Educational achievement is important; lower middle class parents want their children to go to college, because higher education is a prerequisite to a respectable and well-paid job and a good marriage.

One reason for the child-centeredness of the lower middle class family is that such a family type is nuclear-that is, consisting only of parents and children. In America, the clanlike extended family is highly valued only in the working class, in some ethnic groups of all classes, and for other reasons, in the upper class. Lower middle class people still love and visit their relatives, but if they are too far away to visit, they are not especially missed, for lower middle class people are able to make friends. Their social life is informal and involves primarily neighbors and friends met through organizational activities.

Many lower middle class people are also active in church and in voluntary associations. The church reinforces their view of the world as run by morality, in which goodness, kindness, honesty, and altruism are important motive forces to action, and evil is the result of evil impulses. Of course, the church is important also as a source of fellowship; here people can find friends with similar viewpoints, and of similar class level as well, and without having to admit this aim as a motivation. Parents support such organizations as the PTA and the Scouts, which uphold the cultural values of orderliness, self-reliance, constructive leisure, and above all, the primacy of the home and its moral strictures. People also belong to purely adult associations, many still sex-segregated, which combine sociability with community service. As in the case of the working class, the lower middle class normally has little interest in government. The working class distrusts politicians because they are seen as enriching themselves; the lower middle class is wary of politicians as dishonest and opportunistic. If government is immoral, the best solution is to keep its functions and power minimal; the ideal is a businessman or a city manager who will do away with politics and will also keep taxes low.

Today, the lower middle class must be divided into restrictive and expansive subgroups. The former includes most Protestants and those Catholics (especially of Irish origin) who have adopted the Calvinist-Puritan tradition of pre-twentieth century America. This tradition arose in the small towns of America, and its adherents still harbor considerable suspicion of the city and its people, but especially of the "action-seeking," adventurous working class and the urbane and cosmopolitan upper middle class. They try to lead sober and controlled lives, with little drinking or partying other than the ubiquitous card parties. Ostentation and gaudiness are shunned, as are excitement and sensuality, which may be enjoyed only vicariously in the mass media. The expansive group includes other Catholics, Jews, and those Protestants who share their European, non-Puritan origins, particularly those who have moved into the middle class from urban working class and ethnic origins. Members of the expansive subgroup buy more impulsively, enjoy an aggressively active social life, and are willing to drink, gamble, and enjoy openly the offerings of modern show business.

Lower middle class culture is often accused of being overly concerned with respectability and keeping up appearances. This is probably truer of the restrictive than of the expansive group, for the former is essentially attempting to maintain a past tradition. Even so, there is more of a conflict between the ideal and the real in the lower middle class than in the working class. The latter has few pretensions about the world and expresses its idealism as cynicism; working class people have suffered too much from reality to believe that things could be much different. Lower middle class people, however, still defend a preindustrial moral code which sometimes requires the hypocrisy that has been noted in contemporary lower middle class life.

Upper Middle Class

A small proportion of managers and professionals have found their way to Levittown, at least temporarily, and although many are not yet upper middle class in income or status, they will be in years to come. Theirs is already the culture of the college-educated, cosmopolitan population, trained to be interested in and to participate in the larger world. Home and family are somewhat less important to this than to the other classes. The upper middle class family has shed almost all sexual segregation, for college attendance has trained women for organizational and occupational skills which they can and want to pursue even while being mothers and housewives. The wife still does the housework-though she is likely to have domestic help to release her for other activities-but many of the child-rearing functions may be shared with the husband. Interests other than those of the home can also be shared by the spouses and, conversely, each can have interests that take them away from the home. One-but not the only one-of the shared interests is the children. The upper middle class is concerned with the development of the child as a unique individual, one who can perform autonomously in all spheres of life valued by the upper middle class, especially a rewarding professional career. In order to achieve these aims, parents provide direction for the lives of their children, so that while family life is child-centered, it is also adult-directed. The children are encouraged and even pressured to do well in school and parents are concerned that the school their children attend not only provide a good education but also demand a high level of performance.°

Since most upper middle class people (at least in Levittown) have achieved their present position by their own individual achievement, the relationship with the extended family is even more tenuous than in the lower middle class. Upper middle class people are good at making friends, and choose them on the basis of shared interests. There is a considerable amount of social life, although the parties and entertaining may be devoted as much to shop talk and civic affairs as to the gossip and small talk that constitute the staple of social conversation among other groups.

Upper middle class people participate not only in voluntary associations but in the entire community. As cosmopolitans, they want to shape the community by national values which may not respect local traditions."' For example, they are less interested in having the school system be superior to that of nearby communities than in making sure that foreign languages are taught in the elementary grades. For this population, community participation is almost a cultural duty. Although upper middle class people are as distrustful of politicians as others, they have both the skills and the status to become involved in government and to fight for what they think is desirable. Needing the community's public institutions to provide cosmopolitan educational and cultural services that cannot be made available at home, they favor a high level of public expenditure, to be parceled out by welleducated, nonpartisan political leaders of their own class.

Upper middle class culture can also be divided into two groups which might be called conservative-managerial and liberal-professional. The former is often thought of as "the business community," and its people are likely to be politically and culturally conservative. The latter are frequently Jewish, and politically and culturally liberal, and are employed in the community centered professions such as education and social work. In some ways, the distinction between the two groups is similar to the restrictive and expansive distinction in the lower middle class. The conservative-managerial upper middle class has also come from Protestant origins, although its behavior is less restrictive. The liberal-professional upper middle class is unusually active in the community. Aside from its personal interest in good schools-a characteristic it shares with the managerial group-it also fights for well-known liberal causes such as better race relations, community planning, mental health, and the United Nations. Indeed, it is much more cosmopolitan than the managerial group, more sensitive to "ideas" in the abstract and to national issues than the latter. The managerial group may often oppose the professional group here, for the former, being allied with business, favors low taxes and opposes the liberalism that is inherent in the cosmopolitan stance. Liberal-professionals are the main audience for high culture. They go to concerts, plays, and museums in the big cities; they organize lectures, art exhibitions, and visits from famous performers in the suburbs. The managerial group is more likely to put its energies into golf and the country club which the liberal-professionals shun.

Organization Men in the Suburbs

2007-09-07T14:33:00.000-07:00

Growing up in the developing suburbs of Dallas in the fifties, I was immersed in an extremely homogenous population—mostly young nuclear families, WASP, in homes and yards uniform in design and contents. Our parents, intentionally or not, protected us from the stresses of growing up in dense urban areas with volatile mixes of ethnicity, poverty, etc.

But to a growing child, even in my neighborhoods, I found confusing the fact that families around me were different from my own, and that these differences had to do with work status and educational background of the father, family income, religious and political affiliations, and other subtle social variations. An obvious difference was that some parents were much stricter than mine, seemingly tied to some principles of family life not like those of my parents. Some families seemed to be more popular, and others seemed to be shunned as deviant in some way.

William H. Whyte, in the 1956 book The Organization Man, provides seven chapters on an in-depth sociological study of early fifties suburbs.

Whyte’s chapter titles are telling: Part Seven, The New Suburbia: Organization Man at Home; 21 The Transients; 22 The New Roots; 23 Classlessness in Suburbia; 24 Inconspicuous Consumption; 25 The Web of Friendship; 26 The Outgoing Life; 27 The Church in Suburbia; and 28 The Organization Children.

Although Whyte rarely uses the term bureaucracy, his definition of the organization man generally is mid-level workers who not only work at but “belong to” bureaucracies, whether corporate or government. “They are the ones of our middle class who have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life, and it is they who are the mind and soul of our great self-perpetuating institutions"

The suburbs in the 1950s, according to Whyte, were the organization man’s dormitories, where the communal life was thought of as like the frontier, or the early colonial settlements, or “a womb with a view,” “a sorority house with kids,” a lay version of Army post life,” or a “Russia, only with money.” “The organization men make the suburbs in their own image. They tend to dominate the tone of the community by organizing the committees, running the schools, selecting the ministers, fighting the developments, making speeches and setting styles.”

Another aspect of the suburbs is the rootlessness of its members. Residents, though homogenous in backgrounds, come from everywhere (though in my neighborhoods, mostly from the South). The organization men in particular are rootless, as the organization requires them to be mobile and transient.

Just as the organization requires a certain classlessness of its workers, in the suburbs, there is a leveling of class. Young couples, away from family homes and family influences, can make their own new image of class affiliation. For example, a young couple, like my parents, might choose a church a step up from their parents—Presbyterian rather than Methodist. “So with personal tastes: wives are particularly quick to pick up the cues from the college-educated girls on the street, and their clothes, be they slacks or cardigans and pearls, begin to show it. Home furnishings are another symbol of emancipation.”

In my neighborhoods, on any street all houses were 90 percent the same, but with small differences, selected by the new home buyer, such as porch style, kitchen colors, den paneling, just like the choices you would have to select your new car or your 401k plan—to express your unique personality. Some neighborhoods (mostly those built in the forties), were all frame with wood siding. My home, built in about 1952 and with 975 sq. ft. was combination brick veneer and wood siding with one bath and a one-car garage. Steve, up on San Lorenzo, lived in a house entirely brick veneer, with larger sq. footage and likely with two baths, while Kenny’s family moved up to a two-story brick. Home designs had names such as ranch house, colonial, and cape cod.

When all the houses on a street looked alike, small discrepancies were easily noted: a garage conversion was frowned on, as was too dense vegetation. Men kept the yards mowed, but it was best to take the middle way with lawn care—not too lazy and sloppy but also not in a big show-off way. On occasion, we had real social deviants in our neighborhood, like the beatniks on Sylvia Dr. who painted their house bright orange and painted a dragon with flaming mouth on the front siding.

Inside, we were quick to note new additions outside the norm—a portable dishwasher, a first and second window air conditioner, at Kenny’s house, a console stereo player. According to Whyte:

"It is the group that determines when a luxury becomes a necessity. This takes place when there comes together a sort of critical mass. In the early stages, when only a few of the housewives in a block have, say, an automatic dryer, the word-of-mouth of its indispensability is restricted. But, then, as time goes on and the adjacent housewives follow suit, in a mounting ratio others are exposed to more and more talk about its benefits. Soon the nonpossession of the item becomes an almost antisocial act—an unspoken aspersion of the others’ judgment or taste. At this point only the most resolute individualists can hold out, for just as the group punishes its members for buying prematurely, so it punishes those for not buying."

Whyte’s most interesting observations have to do with his analysis of social patterns of friendship in the neighborhoods. For a year or so, his research team studied social interactions in a particular neighborhood, recording group events.

In our neighborhoods, for instance, what houses were sites for backyard parties, bridge games, scout meetings, baby showers, etc? What houses did we want to go to on Halloween and which did we stay away from?

More from Whyte in a future blog.

Memorization

2007-09-07T13:19:00.000-07:00

Janie Wilson's auditorium class included dramatic and choir presentations, which required memorization. One of the earliest experiences I can remember on the stage was a nighttime performance with parents, in which I and several other boys, dressed like beatnks, sang a popular song of the mid fifties--"Standing on the Corner." It was not a big memorization job, but an accomplishment for a child likely only in the third grade or so.

Memorization of square dance routines also was required, by Mrs. Keating, and included nightime performances with parents invited.

I was reminded of another memorization task in a recent e-mail:

From: Shari Stern Sent: Mon 9/3/2007 6:22 PM
To: Don HancockCc: Stephen Webb
Subject: Oh. My. G-d.
I can't believe this just flew out of my brain. How is it possible? I was somewhere online and a photo of Buzz Aldrin on the moon popped up. This is what I thought: In a 3rd or 4th grade, I think, assembly, we did some sort of musical or play. You sang, "I am the man in the moon, I mind my p's and q's,I don't like to be disturbedby anyone from the earth, I'll always call this home, I'll never from here roam, Cause I'm happy, just living on the moon!" You sang it in a monotone!!!!!!!!! It was hilarious. Do you remember?

Shari obviously is one of those who has an elephant memory. I can confirm this happened and she has the words right but have no other memories as to the time or place--other than it was on the Reinhardt stage.

In the 8th grade, my wonderful English teacher taskmaster Miss Suggs, who was single and lived in an apartment on swinging Gaston Avenue, required all students to memorize and recite to her this poem.

And in the 10th grade my English teacher taskmaster Mrs. Wilbanks required all students to memorize and recite to her this poem.

It was probably good for us children to be required to memorize things like these. And as I responded to Shari, it's probably good for us old folks to keep the brain cells firing with seredipitous stuff like this blog.

Hippie Boys Confuse Motivational Researchers

2007-09-06T07:55:00.000-07:00

In the late 60s, the U.S. economy had need for the “Peacock Generation” to become good consumers like their moms and dads. Hippie boys and girls were a problem for the motivational researchers. They did not buy clothes, deodorant, soap, hair cream, razors or new cars. Not only did my friend Vick not buy underwear, he didn’t even wear them under his Levis. Their general rejection of consumerism might be construed as a big “Fuck You” to advertising, the media, and the captains of industry.

From Twentieth-Century Fashion, by Linda Welters & Patricia Anne Cunningham
http://books.google.com/books?id=ydEB1Yd6JkgC&amp;amp;pg=RA1-PA795&lpg=RA1-PA795&dq=%22peacock+generation%22&source=web&ots=Cv598-ypg6&sig=X0Oy0lCRl2IN4vwgSDSbJvN5FuU#PRA1-PA745,M1

They expressed their discontent through their dress. These young people were at the forefront of the hippie movement, whose adoption of anti-fashion, non-traditional clothing was one phenomenon of many that led to the decline in the traditional menswear market.
. . .
In their discontent, hippies sought self-knowledge through drugs, sex and spiritual advice. Their new manner of dressing distinguished them from the mainstream culture. Hippie clothing is often described as anti-fashion, created from patched clothing mixed together with cast-offs, second-hand clothing, and flamboyant accessories. It might include a mixture of rumpled past styles and ethnic clothing. The movement generated many merchants selling clothing from Africa, India, Afghanistan and the like. Hippies disdained new clothing and anything made of synthetic fibers, such as polyester and nylon, or with wrinkle-free finishes. In fact, they liked wrinkles. And they especially liked worn denim that by the end of the decade became the uniform of all disillusioned youth. One aspect that was particularly appealing about the hippie clothing was that it offered a great deal of comfort.

Sex Sells Soap

2007-09-05T18:41:00.000-07:00

The psychoanalyst determined the soul of the thing and then the Madison Avenue men (on occasion) made art, after budget approval from the organization men.

Hidden Persuaders 1957
Procter and Gamble ‘s image builders have charted a living personification for each of their cakes of soap and cans of shortening. Ivory soap is personalized as mother and daughter on a sort of pedestal of purity. They exude simple wholesomeness. In contrast the image charted for Camay soap is of a glamorous, sophisticated woman.

From How Advertising Works: The Role of Research By John Philip Jones, 1998
http://books.google.com/books?id=VLh-LSg6GyAC&pg=PA136&dq=Perceptual+Map+of+Toilet+Soaps&sig=7DXNGXqW8HsUmhonXwx_y4uzqRk#PPA136,M1

My mother, nearly always a brand shopper, tended to prefer Zest and Dial for our family. Today, I incline toward the house brands, such as Equate, but recognize the importance of brands in a few selected areas--Levi's 501s , O'Reilly's over AutoZone for front end parts such as ball joints and electronics such as distributor caps and plug wires, high-priced Lipitor to prevent death from heart attack but unavailable in generic, and "true taste" products such as pizza, cigarettes and whiskey. In Texas, we can get bargain prices for some unpopular premium beers such as the Coors 24 oz., but in quantity, the second-tier brands are a better value. Regarding soaps and other packaged chemical products, I have accumulated over 30 years hundreds of cans, bottles, tubes, boxes which are partly used. I regret that they were bought, and I wish I knew how to get rid of them--most being toxic to my septic tank and to the environment.

Handbook of Consumer Motivations, by Ernest Dichter, 1964

Bubble baths and the glamour attached to them reflects the deep gratification provided by lather. The lightness and "unreal” character of lather “born out of foam” has much significance. Lather has a caressing effect on the skin, which explains why people soap themselves more than would be necessary if they merely wanted to get clean. The urge to caress ourselves is a deep-seated, complicated psychological tendency which we usually try to suppress. Soap and lather supply an accepted pretext to fulfill this natural desire to pat and smooth our skin.

From "Getting the Id to Go Shopping: Psychoanalysis, Advertising, Barbie Dolls, and the Invention of the Consumer Unconscious," David Bennett

http://publicculture.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/17/1/1.pdf

[In 1939], Dichter proceeded to make $200 by discovering the autoerotic associations of soap lather for the Compton Advertising Agency and its client, Ivory Soap. Observing that “one of the few occasions when the puritanical American was allowed to caress himself or herself was while applying soap,” he conducted “a hundred non-directive interviews where people were permitted to talk at great length about their most recent experiences” with soap—a technique that he would later dub “the depth interview,” modeled on the psychoanalytic session. The depth interview’s free-association technique could be supplemented with another technique from the psychoanalytic armory, called the “psychodrama,” which he described as “penetrat[ing] just a few pegs deeper than the depth interview” and “where we ask people to act out a roduct”: “You are a soap, let’s say. . . . How old are you? Are you feminine? Are you masculine?”

Was Ernest Dichter A Materialist?

2007-09-04T09:07:00.000-07:00

Ernest Dichter (b. 14 August 1907 in Vienna; d. 21 November 1991 in Peekskill, New York) was a psychologist and marketing expert who is widely considered to be the "father of motivational research." He received his doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1934 and emigrated with his wife Hedy (née Langfelder) to the United States in 1937. http://www.wikipedia.com/

Born an Austrian Jew, he was one of few with the foresight and wherewithal to emigrate in the late 30s, first to Paris and then to the U.S. Nearly all his family was killed during WWII, many in concentration camps.

From The Handbook of Consumer Motivations, “The Soul of Things” 1964 By Ernest Dichter

The bedraggled column of refugees struggle down a muddy road, their backs bent under their few possessions. A few pieces of clothing, sometimes a mattress, or even a sewing machine stick out weirdly. They mean life to people. Some of the things are important for survival; most of them, however, such as the child’s doll or the long since faded and useless wedding dress of the woman, are a tangible anchorage, as accent on life’s continuity. They are needed for the glow they give, however weak, in the bottomless darkness of human despair. Hollow hands clasp ludicrous possessions because they are truly lost.

During World War II literally tens of thousands of people refused to leave their homeland because they felt they could not leave their possessions behind. They were eventually caught and immediately killed or dragged off into concentration camps and punished because of their infantile attachment to tangible, hard, security-giving but deadly things and objects.

Cleaning Up the Debris Left Behind by 20th Century Crazes

2007-09-03T18:22:00.000-07:00

Current ebay listing
http://cgi.ebay.com/2-Fire-King-Esso-Exxon-Tiger-Cereal-Bowls-LOOK_W0QQitemZ180154644558QQihZ008QQcategoryZ1019QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem#ebayphotohosting
From my grandparent's estate...

You are bidding on a set of vintage Fire-King cereal bowls from an Esso or Exxon gas station. The bowls feature a tiger face on the inside bottom, from the "Put a Tiger in your Tank" ad campaigns. These bowls were made with Fire-King's mold number 20, which is marked on the bottom. The diameter at the top is approximately 4-7/8 inches; the bottom diameter is approximately 2-5/8 inches. They are about 2 inches deep.Bowl #1 (right): Clean white glass color; tiger colors deep and distinct; 'popped bubble' flaw in top rim that feels like a chip.Bowl #2 (left): Creamier colored glass with some discolored pits on interior surfaces (factory second?); tiger colors not as deep as other bowl; no chips or bubble.

When I was 15 years old, for two of my speeches required in Mrs. Braden’s speech class, I presented short satires on advertising. One of the speeches poked fun at the ethical problem of setting up an experiment in which some children developed more cavities than others [see earlier blog on Dental Hygiene] and one speech was a narrative of juvenile delinquent boys and their nighttime car burglary of an Esso tiger’s tail; the tiger tail promotion must have reached a height of interest in Dallas in summer, 1964.

From Hidden Persuaders, 1957
The McCann-Erickson advertising agency made a study for Esso gasoline to discover what motivates consumers, in order more effectively to win new friends for Esso. The agency found there is considerable magic in the word power. After many depth interviews with gasoline buyers the agency perfected an ad strategy that hammered at two words, with all letters capitalized: TOTAL POWER.

Ernest Dichter is usually given credit for the 1959-64 Esso/Exxon “tiger in your tank “ ad campaign. Esso had used the tiger in ads in the 1930s, but the slogan and expensive advertising assault in the 1960s were apparently masterminded by Dichter. According to one source, Dichter liked the tiger because it is such a universal symbol of power, and Esso needed a global advertising plan to aid in its expansion. And Dichter, whether selling tooth paste or gasoline, was master of the branding needed to differentiate commodities.

In 1959, as tiger ads waned in Europe, the tiger came to life in Chicago, Illinois, where an advertising copywriter sat at his typewriter thinking up symbols of power for a local Esso campaign. In two minutes, a famous advertising slogan was born: Put a Tiger in Your Tank. Unlike his fierce forebears, this tiger emerged as a cartoon character - friendly, whimsical but still powerful. From his original Chicago habitat, the fun-loving cat eventually roamed Esso ads and promotions throughout the world. The tiger tail emerged from thousands of gasoline tanks. Tiger faces and stripes appeared on T-shirts, towels and other trinkets. Within five years, the tiger was so well known, Time magazine dubbed 1964 "The Year of the Tiger Along Madison Avenue." An astonishing 2,500,000 tails were [sic] sold [i.e., distributed. ][www.esso/Exxon.com]

Dichter . . . claimed to have “laid the groundwork for the symbolism” of Esso’s “Tiger in the Tank” ad campaign by decoding a patient’s dreams of fighting with a powerful animal, which he recognized as “a symbolic way of fighting and loving his father”—an insight that could be translated into a gasoline ad’s appeal to the subliminal desire to incorporate the father, or the father’s power, cannibalistically. As Dichter explained: “The “Tiger in the Tank” [w]as another worldwide, successful translation of sex into sales. A gas tank is mysterious and dark like a womb. It can be fertile or sterile. The hose of the gas pump resembles you-know-what. Rational? Who cares? The symbol of power, of virility, of strength, goes through the oddly shaped nozzle into the receptive womb and gives it power and strength. It worked practically around the world. I want you to realize that I am as amazed as the infidels are. How can such a contrived mixture between sexual allegories, mysticism, and caveman symbolism result in millions of dollars of very unmysterious cash through increased sales?”

Getting the Id to Go Shopping: Psychoanalysis, Advertising, Barbie Dolls, and the Invention of the Consumer Unconscious, David Bennett
http://publicculture.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/17/1/1.pdf

The “Tiger in Your Tank” was a fad in which the primary product was gasoline and the sideline swag was for amusement. In the early fifties, Disney had a fad marketing bonanza with the Davy Crockett coonskin hat and related paraphernalia. {See previous blog “One Man’s Dream Was Our Reality.”]

And many of us Reinhardt kids also experienced the hula hoop craze, with other Wham-O follow-up products such as the Frisbee, Slip 'N Slide, Chubby Checker Limbo dance game, Water Wiggle and others.

Fads could be marketing bonanzas for a company like Wham-O, but could not be started by advertising alone. The Wham-O entrepreneurs picked their products with care (in tests with kids, they saw that the hula hoop had a remarkable average “playtime’ per child), used much word-of- mouth, and somehow were simply in the right place at the right time. Between 1957 and 1959, Wham-O sold more than 20 million hula hoops, most at $1.98. According to one source, if extended as one piece, the hula hoops would stretch around the earth. And where did all that Marlex plastic end up? Likely in U.S. landfills.

[Did I attend a Limbo party at her home in about 1961?]

In the mid-fifties, marketing researchers such as Dichter, observing the Davy Crockett craze, theorized that crazes could be scientifically produced, but a successful craze’s causes likely were complex and unpredictable.

From Hidden Persuaders, 1957
An evidence of how big the business can be is that the Davy Crockett craze of 1955, which gave birth to 300 Davy Crockett products, lured $300,000,000 from American pockets. Big persuasion indeed.
American merchandisers felt a need for a deeper understanding of these craze phenomena so that they could not only share in the profits, but know when to unload. Research was needed to help the manufacturers avoid overestimating the length of the craze. Many were caught with warehouses full of “raccoon” tails and buckskin fringe when. Almost without warning, the Crockett craze lost its lure. One manufacturer said: “When they die, they die a horrible death.”
The problem of comprehending the craze drew the attention of such motivation experts as Dr. Dichter and Alfred Politz. And Tide magazine, journal of merchandisers devoted a major analysis to the craze.
The experts studied the Crockett extravaganza as a case in point and concluded that its success was due to the fact that it had in good measure all of the three essential ingredients of a profitable fad: symbols, carry device, and fulfillment of a subconscious need. The carrying device, and the experts agreed it was a superb one, was the song “Ballad of Davy Crockett,” which was repeated in some form in every Disney show. Also, it was richer in symbols than many of the fads: coonskin cap, fringed buckskin, flintlock rifle. Tide explained: “All popular movements from Christianity’s cross to the Nazis’ swastika have had their distinctive symbols.”
As for filling a subconscious need, Dr. Dichter had this to say of Crockett: “Children are reaching for an opportunity to explain themselves in terms of the traditions of the country. Crockett gave them that opportunity. On a very imaginative level the kids really felt they were Davy Crockett. . . “
What causes the quick downfall of crazes: The experts said overexploitation was one cause. Another cause was sociological. Mr. Politz pointed out that crazes take a course from upper to lower. In the case of adult fads this means upper-income education groups to lower. In the case of children, Politz explained: “Those children who are leaders because of age adopt the fad first and then see it picked up by the younger children, an age class they no longer wish to be identified with. This causes the older children deliberately to drop the fad.”
Both Politz and Dichter felt not only that with careful planning the course of fads could be charted to ensure more profits for everybody, but also that profitable fads could actually be created. Tide called this possibility “fascinating.” Dr. Dichter felt that with appropriate motivational research techniques a fad even of the Crockett magnitude could be started, once the promoters had found, and geared the fad to, an unsatisfied need of youngsters.

A Fifties Family Makes an Impulse Buy

2007-08-29T09:43:00.000-07:00

The Madison Avenue men made some advertising that rises to art.

Apparently, in the late fifites, Chevrolet made some big-budget two-minute ads that attempted to tell a story. After all, what kind of story can you tell in 30 seconds or one minute?

I'm not sure what impact motivational researchers had on this commercial, but the production team did an masterful job with casting and direction. I wish I had had this woman for a mom. She is sexy and also practical, showing concern for the family budget. The dad is generous and sensitive, just like a fifties dad was supposed to be, and just like my dad.

Ernest Dichter did much to help fifties families overcome their puritanical restraints and jump on the bandwagon of the juggernaut of the U.S. economy of the fifties and sixties.

He can be forgiven for being part of that fifties-sixties delusion, idiosyncratic to American culture, that the new “social sciences” had methodology that would have real effectiveness--to accurately predict human behavior. Packard and Friedan apparently were under the same delusion (with a paranoid strain), with their neat stories of marketing problem, psychologist recommendation and success. It’s unfortunate that that early arrogance of the social “sciences” became institutionalized in our universities and their academic departments. Many of the advertising men understood all along that they were creating art and fantasy. The Dichters of the world found easy marks in the corporate “organization men” who controlled advertising budgets. Psychoanalysis is a tool amazingly versatile in its range for explanation, but it is hardly a science. More about "The Organization Men" in future posts.

Cigarettes, Whiskey, Beer and Fast-Food Hamburgers

2007-08-29T08:05:00.000-07:00

The Hidden Persuaders, by Vance Packard, 1957
Chapter 5
Self Images for Everybody

People have a terrific loyalty to their brand of cigarette and yet in tests cannot tell it from other brands. They are smoking on image completely.” Research director, New York advertising agency (name withheld upon request).

The subconscious salesmen, in groping for better hooks, deployed in several directions. One direction they began exploring in a really major way was the molding of images: the creation of distinctive, highly appealing ”personalities” for products that were essentially undistinctive. The aim was to build images that would arise before our “inner eye” at the mere mention of the product’s name, once we had been properly conditioned. Thus they would trigger our action in a competitive sales situation.

A compelling need for such images was felt by merchandisers, as I’ve indicated, because of the growing standardization of, and complexity of, ingredients in most products, with result in products that defied reasonable discrimination. Three hundred smokers loyal to one of three major brands of cigarette were given the three brands to smoke (with labels taped) and asked to identify their favorite brand. Result: 35 per cent were able to do so; and under the law of averages pure guesses would have accounted for a third of the correct identifications. In short, something less than 2 per cent would be credited with any real power of discrimination. Somewhat comparable results were obtained when merchandisers tried “blindfold” tests of beer and whiskey drinkers.
----------------------------------------
Reading The Hidden Persuaders in 2007, I don’t find Packard convincing when it comes to cigarettes and whiskey. I’ve been a steady purchaser of these two products for forty years or so. I also am a big purchaser of beer and fast food hamburgers. In all my thousands of purchases of cigarettes, whiskey, beer and fast food hamburgers, I can say confidently that advertising has never had an impact. I shop only on the basis of price and taste, and I can tell my hamburgers apart by taste. Some days I prefer a Whataburger. Some days when I’m in a more frugal mood, I’ll take two MacDonalds double cheeseburgers. On a splurge day, I might have a Wendys with fries. I usually try to avoid Burger King due to the burgers’ overdone charcoal taste, but sometimes stop for the two-for-one deals. If a depth psychologist were to peer deep into my subconscious, he would find little in the way of hamburger advertising or self image brand extensions. On a typical day, I eat a hamburger, drink a beer, smoke a cigarette, and have a bowel movement—all parts of my human condition concerning which I have no pride and would just as soon do without.

Fur, Hair, Sex and Virility

2007-08-27T20:02:00.000-07:00

Most of the information provided in recent blogs by journalists such as Vance Packard and Betty Friedan was actually developed by a psychologist named Ernest Dichter, who wrote many books through the 1940s-70s, and I find him to be a tough hombre, just like this guy from a Marlboro commercial he likely influenced. I occasionally smoke a Winston (Tastes Good Like a Cigarette Should) but in 2007 what's left but Marlboros? Does this guy have a tattoo on the back of his hand?

From Dichter’s 1960 The Strategy of Desire:

“The Soul of Things”

To want material things, then, is a natural human desire, engendered partly by biological forces, the wish for security and protection, and reinforced by our contemporary culture. . . . . There is no sharp dividing line between materialist and idealistic values. To make such a distinction is unscientific. It is cheap moralistic hypocrisy. Let’s look at the amoral facts of human behavior. Doing so does not mean we approve of it. But even to think that nature needed our approval for the way we are put together is blasphemous and arrogant in itself. How do we behave always comes before how should we behave.

I buy a book. Is this materialist or idealistic? A book offers opportunity for new adventure, education. Raising vegetables, taking a trip, the child’s thrill with a new pair of shoes, the new Broadway shows, what are they all? What values do they represent? We still want suds in detergents, not being able to forget the stereotypes of all soap; we judge tools by their strength, we can’t conceive of aluminum beings as strong as steel. In all these cases ideas contaminate material things.
. . .

In many of our studies, we could demonstrate that the old proverbs “Clothes make the man,” “Tell me what a man eats and I’ll tell you what he is” are not too impractical and are not empty statements. Modern psychology has overlooked to a very large extent the real expressive power that objects have. Objects have a soul. People on the one hand, and products, goods, and commodities on the other, entertain a dynamic relationship of constant interaction.

Individuals project themselves into products. In buying a car they actually buy an extension of their own personality. When they are “loyal” to a commercial brand, they are loyal to themselves.
. . .

Take fur, for example. In our study conducted for the fur industry, the problem was, in addition to the commercial one helping to sell more furs, to also understand what the “soul” of the fur is. Few people today buy fur coats in order to keep warm. There must be other deeper reasons. We found that expensive fur coats are often being bought by men for their wives or girl friends. Mink stands out in this respect. Mink and most other fur coats are non logical buys, they are based on emotions, on the “ideological” meaning of these furs. In order to understand the meaning fully, to find the answer to the why problem of human behavior, we investigated the cultural anthropological meaning of fur. Originally , it was the warrior of the tribe who brought the fair maiden a skin, the trophy of his hunts and the proof of his prowess. The rarer and the more dangerous the animal, the more it serves as proof of the skill and virility of the warrior. This is replaced in the modern world by price. The more expensive the fur, the more it proves the earning power of the male giver of the fur coat, his earning virility. Fur, hair, sex, are of course all interrelated. The famous painting by Durer, entitled “Furlet,” and the painting of Botticelli, “The Birth of Venus,” show that many hundreds of years ago the real artist intuitively felt this relationship.

From a practical viewpoint our findings were developed for the fur industry in the following way. We found that a fur hierarchy had developed wherein furs are seen on a descending social scale on which each fur is assigned a rigid place related to the age, type and status of the woman who wears it. At the same time mink had become a too obvious symbol. In general, a new trend is developing particularly in the United States, to be more subtle in one’s conspicuousness. We are becoming more interested in keeping up with the “inner Jones,” than with the too obvious outer one. We want the neighbor to guess at our wealth and status rather than to display it too openly. At the same time we have learned that an easier way to stand out and to buy status is to resort to individuality and to be different.

From this different and new viewpoint which we found to be operative in the psychology of fur buying, we found that mouton [or rabbit] was seen as a fur for typists, sales clerks, and college students; beaver for suburban housewives and professional women; Persian lamb for elderly spinsters; and mink for society women, chorus girls, and movie stars. Our advice thus was to develop specific personality profiles for non-mink furs. We suggested that furs be pulled down from their psychological pedestal and promoted as fashion items rather than status symbols. Wearing a fur coat would thus lose the blatant conspicuousness.

Learning About Dental Hygiene

2007-08-27T10:30:00.000-07:00

From Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders, 1957.

Our toothbrushing habits offer a prime example of behavior that is at least seemingly irrational. If you ask people why they brush their teeth, most of them will tell you that their main purpose is doing so is to get particles of food out of the crevices of their teeth and thus combat decay germs. Tooth-paste producers accepted this explanation for many years and based their sales campaigns on it. Advertising men who made a study of our toothbrushing habits, however, came upon a puzzle. They found that most people brushed their teeth once a day, and at the most pointless moment possible in the entire twenty-four-hour day, from a dental hygiene standpoint. That was in the morning just before breakfast, after decay germs had had a whole night to work on their teeth from particles left from supper—and just before the consumption of breakfast would bring a new host of bacteria.

One advertising agency puzzling over this seemingly irrational behavior made a more thorough study of the reasons why we brush our teeth. It concluded we are motivated by differing reasons, based on our personality. Some people, particularly hypochondriacs, are really concerned abut those germs and are swayed by a “decay" appeal. (The hammering in recent years on all the wondrous anti-decay pastes has swollen the size of this group.) Another group, mostly extroverts, brush their teeth in the hope they will be bright and shiny. The majority of people, however, brush their teeth primarily for a reason that has little to do with dental hygiene. Or even their teeth. They put the brush and paste into their mouth in order to give their mouth a thorough purging, to get rid of the bad taste that has accumulated overnight. In short, they are looking for a taste sensation, as a part of their ritual of starting the day afresh. At least two of the major paste merchandisers began hitting hard at the appeal in 1955 and 1956. One promised a clean mouth taste” and the other proclaimed that its paste “cleans your breath while it guards your teeth.” (More recently one of these products got itself a new ad agency, as often happens, and the new mentor began appealing to the extrovert in us through the slogan, “You’ll wonder where the yellow went. . . “Good results are reported, which simply proves there is always more than one way to catch a customer.”)

Click here to watch a commercial on the possibilities that come with fresh breath.
. . .

Tooth-paste makers doubled their sales in a few years, and one explanation is that they succeeded in large part by keeping a great number of people feeling uneasy about their teeth. They hammered at the wondrous new ways to kill bacteria and prevent decay. In the mid-fifties, Crest tooth paste containing a fluoride was unveiled with the typical modesty (for a tooth paste) as a “Milestone of Modern Medicine” comparable to the discovery of the means to control contagious diseases in the eighteenth century. The marketers themselves were less reverent in discussing among themselves. Advertising Age called the fluoride paste the latest gimmick of a series of big promises (ammoniated, chlorophyll, antienzyme) and added, “The feeling persists that public has responded appreciatively to every new therapeutic claim that has come done the pike in recent years. . . . The hope is that it will exhibit the usual alacrity at the sight of the fluorides.”

Click here to learn about harms to children in human testing of fluoride.

An interesting success story among the tooth pastes is that of Gleem, which on the surface had nothing spectacular to offer in the way of killing the dragons in our mouths. It had an ingredient called GL-70 that was apparently a competent bacteria killer, but as Fortune pointed out GL-70 seemed pretty puny as a peg for ad copy when compared to the more spectacular cleansers that had been ballyhooed. Gleem, however, had discovered a secret weapon. Investigators had uncovered the fact that many people—as a result of being subjected for years to the alarums of tooth-paste makers—felt vaguely guilty because they didn’t brush their teeth after every meal. Gleem began promising tooth salvation to these guilt-ridden people by saying it was designed for people who “can’t brush their teeth after every meal. “ (This, of course, includes most of the population.) Two years after it was introduced Gleem was outselling all but one rival dentifrice.

Click here for a solution to dangers from once-a-day morning brushing.

Sexual Liberation

2007-08-24T23:20:00.000-07:00

The moms and dads of 1950s nuclear suburban families were part of a sexual revolution that was in many ways just as significant as that of their children’s generation.

My parents were creating a new, independent life, away from their parents, hometowns, and depression-era mentalities. They were (lowbrow) readers, and their personal libraries included a cornucopia (which I also found and read) of fifties-sixties paperbacks and magazines exploring the new thinking about sex and imaginative renderings of such. For my dad, it included Playboy magazine. My parents seemed to share some genres, such as psychology/sociology/fiction popular texts like the Kinsey reports, Masters and Johnson and maybe the Ian Fleming series. And then there were my mom’s romance thrillers such as Peyton Place, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Valley of the Dolls, The Carpetbaggers, The Godfather and hundreds of more. For my dad, likely, Fanny Hill and Pornography and the Law. For me, the good parts, all.

From wikipedia:
Reviews
Murray Schumach's review in The New York Times on June 25, 1961 opens: "It was not quite proper to have printed The Carpetbaggers between covers of a book. It should have been inscribed on the walls of a public lavatory." He complains that the plot is merely "an excuse for a collection of monotonous episodes about normal and abnormal sex—and violence ranging from simple battery to gruesome varieties of murder." A recent anonymous Amazon reader review observed that the book "seemed to be the same thing over and over again—business deal, gratuitous sex scene, business deal, gratuitous sex scene."
On the day the review was published, The Carpetbaggers was already at number 9 on the Times bestseller list.
The most successful of Robbins's many successful books, it was eventually to sell, as of 2004, over eight million copies. The profile of Robbins in Gale's Contemporary Authors Online makes the startling claim that The Carpetbaggers is estimated to be the fourth most-read book in history."

Memories of others:

http://www.romantictimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1545&start=0&sid=55c66987b0f57761f67fd7f6e621557f

http://www.accessromance.com/blog/2007/02/27/forbidden-fruit/

From Betty Friedan, “The Sex Seekers’” The Feminine Mystique

The image of the aggressive sex-seeker also comes across in novels like Peyton Place and The Chapman Report—which consciously cater to the female hunger for sexual phantasy. Whether or not this fictional picture of the over-lusting female means that American women have come avid sex-seekers in real life, at least they have an insatiable need for books dealing with the sexual act—an appetite that, in fiction and in real life, does not always seem to be shared by the men. This discrepancy between the sexual preoccupation of American men and women—in fiction and in reality—may have a simple explanation. Suburban housewives, in particular, are more often sex-seekers, not only because of problems posed by children, coming home from school, cars parked overtime in driveways, and gossiping servants, but because, quite simply, men are not all that available. Men in general spend most of their hours in pursuits and passions that are not sexual, and have less need to make sex expand to fill the time available [See also Chapter 10, “Housewifery Expands to Fill the Time Available.”] So, from teen age to late middle age, American women are doomed to spend most of their lives in sexual phantasy. Even when the sexual affair—or the “extramarital petting” which Kinsey found on the increase—is real, it is never as real as the mystique has led the women to believe.

Cars, Homes, Sterling Silver and Mink Coats

2007-08-24T21:16:00.000-07:00

Suburban families in the late 50s and early 60s had many shopping choices.

My family began as a one-car family, then added a second car for mom’s family travel needs (it also gave her a sense of independence), and then a third and fourth car for teenaged boys.

Detroit built in obsolescence by aggressive changing of styles and features.

The 1956 Chevrolet was a great car.

But the 1957 was even better.

Ten years later, the car culture determined that the 1957 Chevrolet was the classic of the 50s, as consumers reflexively re-rated the cultural messages of American industry and Madison Avenue.

Homes are identity commodities not unlike cars, and many of our suburban families saw the need to upgrade housing. My suburban neighborhoods in Dallas were extremely homogenous in their WASP, middle class make-up, but each succeeding housing development made new distinctions in possibilities of class and taste identities for families. Some stayed in place like my family, but many moved up.

While homes and cars are today as important to consumers as they were fifty years ago, two consumer items sought by many suburban families (including my mom) then stand in sharp relief—sterling silver flatware and mink coats. As baby boomers inherit the belongings of their dying parents, eBay is filled with these quaint status symbols, available at bargain basement prices.

Manufacturers of flatware in the forties and fifties used all the motivational research available from depth psychologists to market their wares.

Betty Friedan, “The Sexual Sell,” The Feminine Mystique

The fact that the young bride now seeks in her marriage complete "fulfillment," that she now expects to "prove her own worth" and find all the "fundamental meanings" of life in her home, and to participate through her home in "the interesting ideas of the modern era, the future" has enormous "practical applications," advertisers were told. For all these meanings she seeks in her marriage, even her fear that she will be "left behind," can be channeled into the purchase of products. For example, a manufacturer of sterling silver, a product that is very difficult to sell, was told:
Reassure her that only with sterling can she be fully secure in her new role . . . it symbolizes her success as a modern woman. Above all, dramatize the fun and pride that derive from the job of cleaning silver. Stimulate the pride of achievement. "How much pride you get from the brief task that's so much fun . . ."
Concentrate on the very young teenage girls, this report further advised. The young ones will want what "the others" want, even if their mothers don't. ("As one of our teenagers said: `All the gang has started their own sets of sterling. We're real keen about it--compare patterns and go through the ads together. My own family never had any sterling and they think I'm showing off when I spend my money on it they think plated's just as good. But the kids think they're way off base.'") Get them in schools, churches, sororities, social clubs; get them through home-economics teachers, group leaders, teenage TV programs and teenage advertising. "This is the big market of the future and word-of-mouth advertising, along with group pressure, is not only the most potent influence but in the absence of tradition, a most necessary one."
As for the more independent older wife, that unfortunate tendency to use materials that require little care--stainless steel, plastic dishes, paper napkins--can be met by making her feel guilty about the effects on the children. ("As one young wife told us: `I'm out of the house all day long, so I can't prepare and serve meals the way I want to. I don't like it that way--my husband and the children deserve a better break. Sometimes I think it'd be better if we tried to get along on one salary and have a real home life but there are always so many things we need."') Such guilt, the report maintained, can be used to make her see the product, silver, as a means of holding the family together; it gives "added psychological value." What's more, the product can even fill the housewife's need for identity: "Suggest that it becomes truly part of you, reflecting you. Do not be afraid to suggest mystically that sterling will adapt itself to any house and any person."

Betty Friedan, “The Sexual Sell,” The Feminine Mystique

The fur industry is in trouble, another survey reported, because young high school and college girls equate fur coats with "uselessness" and "a kept woman." Again the advice was to get to the very young before these unfortunate connotations have formed. ("By introducing youngsters to positive fur experiences, the probabilities of easing their way into garment purchasing in their teens is enhanced.") Point out that "the wearing of a fur garment actually establishes femininity and sexuality for a woman." ("It's the kind of thing a girl looks forward to. It means something. It's feminine." "I'm bringing my daughter up right. She always wants to put on `mommy's coat.' She'll want them. She's a real girl.") But keep in mind that "mink has contributed a negative feminine symbolism to the whole fur market. "Unfortunately, two out of three women felt mink-wearers were "predatory . . . exploitative . . . dependent . . . socially nonproductive . . ."
Femininity today cannot be so explicitly predatory, exploitative, the report said; nor can it have the old high-fashion "connotations of stand-out-from-the-crowd, self-centeredness." And so fur's "ego-orientation" must be reduced and replaced with the new femininity of the housewife, for whom ego-orientation must be translated into togetherness, family-orientation.
Begin to create the feeling that fur is a necessity--a delightful necessity . . . thus providing the consumer with moral permission to purchase something she now feels is ego-oriented. . . . Give fur femininity a broader character, developing some of the following status and prestige symbols . . . an emotionally happy woman . . . wife and mother who wins the affection and respect of her husband and her children because of the kind of person she is, and the kind of role she performs. . . .
Place furs in a family setting; show the pleasure and admiration of a fur garment derived by family members, husband and children; their pride in their mother's appearance, in her ownership of a fur garment. Develop fur garments as "family" gifts--enable the whole family to enjoy that garment at Christmas, etc., thus reducing its ego orientation for the owner and eliminating her guilt over her alleged self-indulgence.

Learning the Ropes about American Commerce--Part 2

2007-08-10T08:20:00.000-07:00

As a child growing up in a Dallas suburb, I crossed the divide between shopping in an old central business district and the new suburban shopping centers. Downtown Dallas was a man’s world in the fifties and early sixties—congested with diversity of Dallas’s population, noisy, dirty, smelly, with shopping excitement I could not find elsewhere. It was the central district for entertainment, with its movie row, bars, tea rooms, Magicland, Planters Peanuts, and the best restaurants.

In contrast, nearby forties/fifties shopping centers were a feminine world, designed for suburban housewives and populated by them during the men’s workweek, when fathers left the suburbs.

My father was a businessman, dressing in a business suit (Hart Schaffner and Marx with Dobbs felt hat) who made the daily drive, sometimes in a carpool, to the manly caverns of downtown.

My mom was a stay-at-home housewife during most of those years. During the fifties, her shopping occasionally took her downtown, but she preferred the convenience of the shopping centers, where parking was accessible, fellow shoppers were just like her, and stores were designed to fit the tastes of fifties moms—they had everything she could find downtown and more.

Like other suburbs across America, Dallas exploded with new shopping opportunities—Lochwood, Big Town, Preston Center, Northpark, all with their anchors such as Titche’s, Sangers, Neiman Marcus, Sears, et al. It was not a coincidence that when my mother decided to go back to work—to make some supplementary income for her kids’ college--she chose to work as a part-time credit department clerk at Titche’s in Lochwood. She had been collecting credit cards from the major department stores (VISA and Mastercard were yet to be Discovered), which emancipated her from the scrutiny of weekly allowances and budgets and allowed my family to step forward into debt to take full advantages of Postwar America’s civic obligation to grow the American Pie through consumption.

At first, she had to work an occasional Thursday night and Saturday—those being the only times stores were open outside the Monday-Friday workweek. Blue laws (protecting Sunday rest and small retailers) shut down commerce for a time, but soon large retailers won out to the desires of the suburban populace and were open when suburbanites preferred to make their buying decisions, at night or on weekends. Housewives, working at minimum wage and without benefits, were an ideal manpower. My mom helped her employer by spending much of her check on purchases from Titche’s. She also was full of excitement as she sat with my father at the kitchen table in the evening, talking about her work successes (she was a smart, conscientious worker recognized as a winner by her Titche’s bosses) and able to experience for the first time the adult-like frustrations and challenges of dealing with bosses, coworkers and customers.

See The Consumer's Republic by Liz Cohen for more on this topic.

From The Feminine Mystique, Chapter 9 “The Sexual Sell”

In 1957, a survey told the department stores that their role in this new world was not only to "sell" the housewife but to satisfy her need for "education"--to satisfy the yearning she has, alone in her house, to feel herself a part of the changing world. The store will sell her more, the report said, if it will understand that the real need she is trying to fill by shopping is not anything she can buy there.
“Most women have not only a material need, but a psychological compulsion to visit department stores. They live in comparative isolation. Their vista and experiences are limited. They know that there is a vaster life beyond their horizon and they fear that life will pass them by.
“Department stores break down that isolation. The woman entering a department store suddenly has the feeling she knows what is going on in the world. Department stores, more than magazines, TV, or any other medium of mass communication, are most women's main source of information about the various aspects of life . . .
"There are many needs that the department store must fill,” this report continued. For one, the housewife's "need to learn and to advance in life.”
“We symbolize our social position by the objects with which we surround ourselves. A woman whose husband was making $6,000 a few years ago and is making $10,000 now needs to learn a whole new set of symbols. Department stores are her best teachers of this subject.”
For another, there is the need for achievement, which for the new modern housewife, is primarily filled by a "bargain. . . . Since buying is only the climax of a complicated relationship, based to a large extent on the woman's yearning to know how to be a more attractive woman, a better housewife, a superior mother, etc., use this motivation in all your promotion and advertising. Take every opportunity to explain how your store will help her fulfill her most cherished roles in life . . .”
“If the stores are women's school of life, ads are the textbooks. They have an inexhaustible avidity for these ads which give them the illusion that they are in contact with what is going on in the world of inanimate objects, objects through which they express so much of so many of their drives. . . .”

Learning the Ropes About American Commerce

2007-08-07T13:02:00.001-07:00

Reinhardt kids were surrounded by advertising appeals. Stepping across the great divide of the older reading culture and the new media of electronic images, we had many sources for our shopping. A child bookworm like me could spend hours reading every line of type within a comic book, a Mad magazine, or a Boy’s Life, including ads like these:

Several of my greatest sources of excitement and greatest disappointments were mail order transactions from these types of ads. For instance, I had the same experience as Louise in joining the Smokey Bear Club. Read her MySpace blog story by clicking the link below. Scroll down to her blog dated Saturday, July 28, 2007--The Story of My Life Day 8:

http://blog.myspace.com/198075569

[A Smokey Bear doll was released by Ideal Toys in 1952, which included a mail-in card for children to become junior forest rangers. Within three years, half a million kids had applied. In April 1964, Smokey was given his own ZIP code, 20252.]

I wasn’t stupid enough to get sucked into buying the x-ray glasses described in this piece:

http://freakcomics.com/2005/09/14/false-advertising-in-comics/

As a Mickey Mouse Club member and avowed straight shooter, I likely had my share of Mattel guns.

And I believe I spent 15 minutes or so of my life trying to figure out this idiotic toy:

The picture shows all (6) 1954 Kellogg's Corn Flakes Cereal U.S. Navy Frogmen Premiums in this lot. These Navy Diver figures dive with baking soda. All six have their metal caps on the bottom. A 1954 Kellogg's adverisement states: "6 COLORS - COLLECT THEM ALL!" well, there are six different colors here. Included here are:
(3) Torch Man figures
(2) Obstacles Scout figures
(1) Demolitions Expert figure.

And my skinny brother got clipped on this one:

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, downtown Dallas had a store where we could see what we were purchasing before we bought it--Magicland and pick up a snack on the way at Planters Peanuts. [more to follow]

http://www.dallashistory.org/cgi-bin/webbbs_config.pl?noframes;read=72767

One Man’s Dream Is Our Reality

2007-08-06T14:08:00.000-07:00

Mr. and Mrs. Hancock and Mr. and Mrs. Williams encouraged my participation in many structured activities such as Sunday school, Cub and Boy Scouts, baseball and basketball team sports and Demolay. But for me at age 6-8, the most exciting structured activity to belong to was The Mickey Mouse Club, a relationship carried out entirely between me and my television set. The Mickey Mouse Club had members, hierarchy, songs, creeds, moral lessons (a la Disney), boy-girl attractions and much other excitement—especially the Hardy Boys mystery serials which aired afternoons in 1956.

Though my parents had little knowledge or involvement in this club activity, they probably weren’t concerned. The great heyday of the Mickey Mouse Club was actually in the 1930s, when kids my parents’ age joined this bizarre animal cult at their local theatres. Toy companies were often sponsors of the Saturday club meetings. The 30s MMCs eventually had 150,000 - 200,000 kid members, equal to the U.S. memberships of the Boy and Girl Scouts at the time.

Mickey Mouse Club Creed
“I will be a square shooter in my home, in school, on the playground, wherever I may be. I will be truthful and honorable and strive always to make myself a better and more useful citizen. I will respect my elders and help the aged, the helpless and children smaller than myself. In short, I will be a good American.”

http://scoop.diamondgalleries.com/scoop_article.asp?ai=7477&si=121

During the thirties, some Soviet thinkers saw Mickey as in the vanguard of proletariet heroes, but Disney cleansed his studios of left-leaners in the late forties. Some modern critics liken the 30s MMC to Hitler's Youth of Nazi Germany, but by the fifties MMC was a tame capitalist's pipedream.

Mickey Mouse moved into his new home at the Disneyland Theme Park in Anaheim in 1955, and my family had been continuously apprised of this fun vacation opportunity while watching the Wonderful World of Disney and “Davy Crockett” in the early fifties. Through the sixties, seventies and eighties, various Hancock families spent tens of thousands of dollars on fun pilgrimages to the Disney parks. [From The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard: "An evidence of how big the business can be is that the Davy Crockett craze of 1955, which gave birth to 300 Davy Crockett products, lured $300,000,000 from American pockets."]

While the Wednesday night Disneyland shows had been a phenomenon never before seen—some shows attracted 90 million viewers, virtually every TV household in the country--the after-school bunch got in on another television growth extravaganza with the beginning of The Mickey Mouse Club in 1955.

At age 7, I could hardly contain my excitement to rush home after school to watch “The Mystery of the Applegate Treasure” series.

I’m sure that our family also bought many products advertised, such as the Mattell burp gun, for which Mattel paid $500,000 for a season’s advertising and struck the jackpot with 1 million orders between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Mattel, #536, "Burp gun" Automatic cap gun. Safe 1 to 50 shots at trigger touch, noisy fire bursts, smoking barrel. All metal working parts. Perforated roll caps....1957.

The Hardy Boys series was kicked off with a preview promo in October, 1955. Click here to watch the promo.

Here are some other links about MMC and the 1956 Hardy Boys series.

http://www.tvdays.com/mattelstory3.htm

http://www.micechat.com/forums/index.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_anthology_series

http://www.thrillingdetective.com/hardys.html

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/1999/10/07/hardy_boys/index.html

http://www3.sympatico.ca/farini/peacock/pages/Aexcerpts/FatherOfTheHardyBoys.html

http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0319288/

http://www.medialit.org/reading_room/article130.html

http://imagineerebirth.blogspot.com/2006/03/restoring-walt-disneys-disneyland.html

http://hardyboys.bobfinnan.com/hb0.htm

http://www.fiftiesweb.com/annette.htm

http://www.youthspecialties.com/articles/topics/culture/walt.php

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,874558,00.html

http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/9434_10529Chp1.pdf

Critique of the disneyization or disneyfication of the world is a burgeoning academic industry. The 1955-58 Mickey Mouse Club and Hardy Boys serials are a tiny and relatively uncontroversial part of the larger story. But it is a worthy subject to ponder: what unique effects did TV and Disney have on Reinhardt kids of that time period?

Toward a Natural History of Reinhardt Boys—Part 2

2007-08-01T13:30:00.000-07:00

When I was about 7 years old, my brother—five years older than me—had many anxieties about his small stature. His biggest fear was that, while walking to Gaston, he would be attacked by a roving gang of hoods intent to rip the leather patch from the waist of his new pair of Lee jeans (James Dean wore Lee's in "Rebel.") I should be concerned too walking to Reinhardt—sometimes the gangs would just rip off your pants and leave you on the street in your underwear.

Our new television culture of the mid-fifties provided my brother with some remedies for his anxiety—wrestling moves such as the half nelson, the full nelson, the scissor lock and, most terrible of all, the stomach (or tummy) claw.

Of course, what better object on which to practice your wrestling abilities than on your weakling younger brother?

Before he would practice on me, he would have me join him in watching the weekly televised matches. Our heroes were Pepper Gomez and Lou Thesz. The bad guys included Duke Keomuka and the guy we learned the stomach claw from—I believe Killer Kowalski.

Click here for a clip from an early Pepper Gomez fight

And more info about Pepper Gomez and fifties wrestling, click here.

Hoods

2007-07-19T20:22:00.000-07:00

When I was growing up in the fifties in East Dallas, we used the term "hood" to refer to adolescent boys that were on the edge, i.e., engaged in various juvenile delinquent activities such as Elvis hairdoes, drinking, smoking, having sex, riding motorcycles, carrying firearms, drag-racing, using marijuana, or vandalism/gangfights/crime.

The origin of this term distinguishes it from the later slang term associated with "neighborhood."

Check these links:

http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=20010327

http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=hoodlum

http://www.answers.com/topic/hoodlum

http://www.answers.com/hood

Nuclear Warheads Part 2

2007-07-17T18:12:00.000-07:00

During my years at Reinhardt, I remember two emergency situations that rattled my mother enough to let me know my life was in danger. The first was April 2, 1957, when at about 3 pm, the sky turned green and a tornado touched down in Oak Cliff. My mother and neighborhood friends had watched the sky and also probably through radio or television learned that the tornado was heading east toward east Dallas. So she and a friend rushed to Reinhardt, found us children, and rushed back home, where we prepared to sit through the storm in our bathtub. Fortunately, the tornado made it no further than near downtown. Many other children that afternoon stayed in the building in tornado drill formations. On the evening of October 22,1961, my mother again became very rattled, telling me when I got home that President Kennedy was getting us into a nuclear war. That night, Kennedy had delivered a televised address announcing the discovery of missile installations in Cuba. He proclaimed that the United States would "...regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response..." He also placed a naval quarantine blockade on Cuba to prevent further Soviet shipments of military weapons from arriving there.

The following is an educational video for children developed by Civil Defense in the early 1950s.

Nuclear Warheads Flying Toward Reinhardt

2007-07-16T20:31:00.000-07:00

Most of us children at Reinhardt lived in nuclear families and also live under the shadow of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union.

I believe that we practiced three types of emergency drills as children:

--Fire drills in which each class marched single-file from rooms to a designated area at a safe distance from the building.

--Tornado ( a real possibility) drills where we would line up against lockers with hands behind neck and away from transom windows.

This photo is from 1960-61 PTA Yearbook, from the
Reinhardt Library, likely of 6th grade students in
a tornado drill.

--Bomb (a remote risk but with high impact) drills in which we assumed a “duck and cover” position in halls.

To Be Continued