The DECCA Navigator

Inside that 1961 BEA "About Your Flight" Booklet.

Now I Know Why They're Called Go-Go Boots

Into The 60s With Air BP

Another ad from inside 1961 BEA "About Your Flight" Booklet.

Your Seat Is Not A Flotation Device

A page in the 1961 BEA "About Your Flight" booklet, illustrating how to use your life jacket -- stowed under your seat.

Remember When You Could Smoke On A Plane?

Me neither. But this page inside my 1961 BEA "About Your Flight" Booklet reminds us not only could you smoke on an airplane, but that airlines would actually supply the smokes.

Remember When From 1959

Because I've been digging through & scanning old issues of The Saturday Evening Post, be prepared for a number of scans from them. Up now, Remember When? Pictures With A Past.


Text reads:

Recognize the smiling lad at right? Frank Sinatra was just one of a New Jersey quartet, the Hoboken Four, when he got his start on the amateur hour of Major Bowes (center) in 1936. From radio Frank turned to singing for the Harry James and Tommy Dorsey bands, then to films. He proved he could act as well as sing. Now past his forty-first birthday, he's still going strong.

Calvert Gostle

Text reads:

Here is a grim idea aborning: That planes could attack as well as scout. These Army officers fired a Lewis machine gun from the air in 1912. I made this photo before the take-off. The tests, at 500 rounds a minute, succeeded. The plance did not shake apart. Even so, early World War I air battles were fought with revolvers.

C. J. Mac Cartee

Text reads:

This stirring scene points a moral, as did almost everything in 1921. It was: Women can master the motorcar. Left, how to caress a radiator cap and get shocked by the ignition. Right. a familiar scene of the day--how to inflate a pneumatic tiree and patch a punctured tube. This was habit-forming.

Ezra Quincy

Because All Men Still Look Up To See Planes

And because all men are about 8-12 mentally, the Louise Antoinette Adams Airplanes Chandelier (found via A Tad Too Tan For Taupe) works for boys of all ages.

Craft-Scan Friday: Get Yer Space-Age Santas Here

Remember the 60's and how they promised us a future of hover cars and jet-pack travel? Well, some of us do, anyway. The rest of you can put down your Tommee Tippee cups and see why the rest of us all believed so hard.

See, our moms were busy creating space-age Christmases. Just like Ethel Peterson who had covered the face of her clock (now at a thrift shop near you) with a half-circle of gold-flocked cardboard. "Stars, pasted onto the blue crepe paper, give 'sky' effect."



Pretty potent stuff, merging forever, the idea of travel, space, and free gifts.

Here Santa rides a rocket -- which they call a "jet" ("cut from linoleum rolls and covered with shelf paper, then painted"). Not only better than that, a reindeer rests on the rings of Saturn.



What the heck can be better than typing "a reindeer rests on the rings of Saturn"? Seeing it. I can't wait to make hundreds for next year's holiday craft fair.

Three Things We No Longer See Often

This photo of Sophia Loren disembarking from a plane shows us three things we no longer see often:

Women in furs.

Men in hats.

The TWA logo.

Oh, Back When The Airplane Was The Aeroplane & More Magical Than Sleigh Rides!

From the How Many Days Till Christmas, a calendar to make for kids, inside Today's Woman Christmas Ideas magazine (1962), comes this diddy, sung to the tune of Jingle Bells:

Flying through the air,
In a private aeroplane
O'er the world we go,
High above the rain!
Wings on airplane zoom
Making spirits bright
What fun it is to ride and sing
A flying song tonight!

Zoom and whirr! Zoom and whirr!
The sky's an open lane!
Oh, what fun it is to ride
In a zooming aeroplane!
Zoom and whirr! Zoom and whirr!
The sky's an open lane.
Oh, what fun it is to ride
In a zooming aeroplane!

Friday, Dec. 7
Eighteen Days To Christmas

Hey, in 1962, December 7th was also on a Friday!

Children of the Atomic Age

This week's Craft-Scan Friday is the bedroom of the kids of a 1950s rocket scientist -- no Beatles or football or Vietnam here. We're looking to the skies and the future!

The english-mangling caption reads:

In-orbit room for boy has atomic motifs on bedspread, rug with radiant northern lights, sleek tables. String circle, the pillows symbolize sun, moon, and earth. Plane, balloon, show the progress of flight. Setting is by Irma Bolley.

Irma Bolley, it appears, affected a generation with her string art, so it's no surprise she reproduced, as funky string art, something Dave Bowman saw in his descent into spaciness. While she did her best to interpret what a sky-obsessed kid would like, it's obviously what a kid would get if his grandma designed his bedroom using a handful of random space terms pulled from a hat. It even goes so far as to assume some important facts. For example, from the diorama, we can assume that kids who idolize astronauts drink Coca-Cola, eat uncut raw tomatoes, and snack on Shake-n-Bake pork chops. They enjoy the letter M, globes, chess, and Montgolfier. They will appreciate the opportunity to tell their friends that their afghan is decorated with an atomic diagram of beryllium. A truly geeky kid can understand the planetary symbolism depicted on the pillows, and will snort loudly while mocking less-nerdy kids who don't get it. Personally, I think the shag rug might actually be rather enjoyable, lying on my stomach with my nose an inch from that 12" black-and-white TV, even though the 'northern lights' symbolism is invisible even to my tolerant eye.

The amount of media in the room is a nice forward-looking touch, though. Not only is the space-faring child a TV watcher, they're a radio-listener and a record-player-player. Bolley also took the time to make rudimentally-accurate wooden model of the X-15, complete with external fuel tanks, to hang in the room. I admit, without a note on another page I probably wouldn't have recognized it as a real plane, but in comparison they did an adequate job of representing it. The abacus on the wall is nicely geeky, but it was probably as foreign to a kid of the 60s as a slide rule is to a kid today; although, I'd wager that once this kid reached his teenage years, having a counting/adding machine mounted above his couch-cum-bed would lead to knowing looks and innuendo. Having that, his friends might even overlook the creepy string art.

(source: McCall's Needlework & Crafts, Fall-Winter 1968-69)