Thus, the other week, a huge tome, 900-plus pages, jumped out at me on a cart of books waiting to be shelved. All American Ads 60s” contained just about every print ad I can remember seeing in popular magazines of the decade when I was in junior high and high school in New Orleans. For American consumer culture, the 60s were a golden age, a stretch of time when the American dream really seemed attainable for the middle classes filling up the vast suburbs that were springing up around every large city in ever-expanding concentric waves. It was a decade of progress, social change, musical ferment, and possibility. Young people flocked to colleges and there was an almost palpable sense of growth and change, culturally, economically, and intellectually. This consumer culture hid for many the dark side of the decade: the Kennedy and King assassinations, racial unrest and violence, the war in Vietnam.
I feel the tumult of those times more now than I did when I was growing up in the suburbs of New Orleans those many long years ago. Life revolved around going to high school and studying hard and graduating and the going to college at the end of the decade. I had a lawn mowing business for a number of years as well as various part-time jobs. Frequently looking through the pages of that huge book that constitutes a veritable catalog of 60s popular culture, brings me back to the days of my youth, learning to drive, working at a movie theater, playing basketball inthe neighborhood with friends, taking the school bus to school every day – in general, just growing up and trying to do as well as I could in school.
As for popular culture, the ubiquitous television finally came into it’s own during the 60s. It was the heyday of situation comedies, westerns, and dramatic series. One of the TV manufacturers of that time, Motorola, commissioned a series of paintings to promote the “new lively art of electronics.” As you can see, 60s popular culture was infused with an element of futuristic modernity. To us now those domestic scenes appear practically quaint, but during a decade when the New York World's Fair of 1964 promoted visions of the future with its theme "Peace Through Understanding" and the Jetson cartoon characters zoomed around in their little spaceship vehicles, tomorrow seemed to be "here" now.
The book is full of hundreds of examples of automobile ads that showcased the sunny side of the American questfor freedom and adventure on the road. (“See the USA in a Chevrolet.”). The automobile was also singlehandedly responsible for the sprawling suburbs that depopulated inner cites and gaves us interstate highwaysand shopping malls, all inter-dependent and interlocking. I will never forget when my friend got his firstcar, a 1965 Ford Mustang. I thought that was the coolest car I had ever seen. I ended up driving the family Oldsmobile Delta 88 after learning to drive on our practically vintage 1956 Chevy Bel-Air. Little did I know back then that the lure of the open road would be irresistible to me 20 year later during my round-the-country backroads car trips.
The 60s were indeed about change and the future, and the advertisements we were surrounded by in that pre-Internet age painted a rosy scenario that was quite at odds with the reality, then as now, in many instances..
The 60s were indeed about change and the future, and the advertisements we were surrounded by in that pre-Internet age painted a rosy scenario that was quite at odds with the reality, then as now, in many instances..
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