Hoidy Toidy

My, how toilet seat technology has improved: today, you can get barbed wire embedded in them, or get ones that add unimaginable degrees of functionality of your regular toilet, but in the sixties you just had appliques:

Realize: this ad is a full-page in the Home Modernizing Guide, full-color, towards the beginning...it cost a lot of scratch to get your fractal fleur-de-lis in front of someone just dying to replace their already uncomfortable hard toilet seat with something exactly the same -- except for a little image on the cover. This, in 1965, was "a step up to a new high in bathroom elegance" -- which leads me to believe that American Standard thought the previous level of bathroom elegance was simply having a toilet seat to cover the hole.



Yup, that's all of them -- "delicate sea horses...gay bouquets...golden fleur-de-lis...handsome arabesque arrangements" -- molded into the cover with raised detail, so that as you're scrubbing the seat down you won't rub off the sea horses. I don't think I've ever lived used a potty with pictures on the seats; any sort of brownish, greenish details are off-putting to me, but those seem to be the key colors here. In the sixties and seventies, harvest gold and olive green were de rigeur home interior colors, but I can't imagine why anyone thought they'd be good toilet colors. I guess I shouldn't talk; our toilet seat is a plain-old white model...if only I could rub my bare butt on one of these fine examples of bathroom elegance, I'd change my tune.