Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

[Inkstainedwretch]

Billboards began to disappear with Ladybird Johnson's "Beautification of America" program. She got billboards banned from federal highways first. In fact, the situation was getting intolerable. There were long stretches on the Interstates where it was impossible to view the scenery because of the cheek-by-jowl placement of billboards, and they were thickest where the scenery should have been best. At least they were banned from the federal right-of-way. You still saw them sited on private property, but at least that opened up the view a bit.

 

[LizzieMaine]

As a little kid I enjoyed billboards, probably because of the fact that where I grew up you could see all the trees and scenery you wanted at any time, and I thought scenery was boring. Billboards broke up the green monotony of a road trip.

They also helped teach me to read. I learned to recognize words by associating them with trademarks and logos, and learned to sound out letters from there. We didn't have "Sesame Street" in those days, so billboards were the next best thing. Sad to say, much of my pre-school education I owe for better or worse to the Boys From Marketing.

 

[HudsonHawk]

I wish billboards would be banned here...they are EVERYWHERE. Everything from any sort of political posturing imaginable to rooting for the local sports team to advertisements from the Boys to the local government warning you not to hire a prostitute.

 

[LizzieMaine]

If only we could get back to the kinder, gentler, simpler Good Old Days.

The best anti-billboard song ever recorded, as performed by Billy Murray in 1921:

 

[Fading Fast]

Historical pictures of Times Square will disabuse anyone of the idea that advertising excess is something new. That said, like Lizzie, I enjoy billboards overall, but respect that there needs to be zoning restrictions - I'm not claiming to know the "right" balance - to address all the plusses and minuses.

In the right place (Times Square for one) they become part of the character of a place; in the wrong place, they are just Boys-From-Marketing excess. Having just come back from visiting the girlfriend's parents in Michigan, I can report that billboards are alive an well on the highways and commercial districts in that state, but the residual areas seems reasonably (not completely) free of them.

 

[Bigger Don]

My dad believed that if your envelope had the postmark date of the due date, you had met your obligation.

From a legal position, I think he was correct unless their is specific contract verbiage to the contrary. This prevents companies from holding onto checks in order to charge unearned late fees.

 

[Bigger Don]

Ban outdoor advertising? Light pollution!

 

[LizzieMaine]

Aside from their commercial considerations, the best billboards of the Era could stand as pop-art -- before they switched primarily to photographs in the 1950s, they were paintings, blown up to giant size, and freely partook of the design trends of the time. The Wrigley company, in particular, was known for making impressive use of art deco in their billboards, and despite the fact that they were selling an unattractive habit, the posters themselves were stunning. The husband-and-wife team of Otis and Dorothy Shepherd did most of the Wrigley signs, and their work was among the most distinctive of the Era.

Along with the stuff the Shepherds did for Wrigley, they're also well known for the gorgeous scorecard covers they did thruout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s for the Chicago Cubs.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Right, Wrigley's were progressive marketing boys, still in my childhood!:

Which kid would forget this jumbo-package??

 

[tonyb]

While hardly an expert, I am a fan of advertising artwork. Some of it, anyway. And, like our Ms. Maine, I owe it in some part to commercial outdoor advertising that I learned to read.

Among my earliest recollections are of being in the backseat of the family car and knowing that all those signs we drove past "said something," and that if I were to know much of what this world had to offer, I had to learn the code.

 

[Zombie_61]

Historical pictures of Times Square will disabuse anyone of the idea that advertising excess is something new. That said, like Lizzie, I enjoy billboards overall, but respect that there needs to be zoning restrictions - I'm not claiming to know the "right" balance - to address all the plusses and minuses.

In the right place (Times Square for one) they become part of the character of a place; in the wrong place, they are just Boys-From-Marketing excess. Having just come back from visiting the girlfriend's parents in Michigan, I can report that billboards are alive an well on the highways and commercial districts in that state, but the residual areas seems reasonably (not completely) free of them.

There are two or three communities here in southern California (probably more) that have such zoning restrictions in place for signs of any kind--even a megalomaniacal corporation like McDonald's must keep their signs below a certain size and height. These communities want passersby on the freeways and highways to be attracted to the "beauty" of their community, free from the blight of advertising. It can be a bit of a problem if you've been traveling for a while and just want to grab something to eat or need a rest room, but you'll usually find yourself bombarded with that type of promotional sensory overload just a few short miles down the road.

 

[tonyb]

Disregarding sign ordinances is as American as McDonald's apple pie.

I've had occasion to speak with code enforcement personnel who say they typically take enforcement action when they receive complaints, provided they have the resources to do anything about it at all. In one smaller municipality where I once resided, the code enforcement department was one guy. Illegal signage didn't seem quite so pressing a matter as large additions built onto houses without benefit of permit or dead tree branches hanging over school bus stops.

You know those blade-shaped banners --eight or so feet high by maybe three feet wide -- that you see stuck into planting strips in front of fast food joints and the like? Every local ordinance I've looked into bans the things. And I'm fairly confident the advertisers know they aren't legal. And they also know that in the unlikely event that enforcement action is taken, the consequences will be nothing worse than having to take down the banners.

My objection to them isn't so much aesthetic as to the safety hazard they sometimes present. They too often block both car drivers' and pedestrians' visibility.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Our local sign ordinance is the bunk -- it's based on a percentage of your total frontage, which is fine until you get something like the local art museum, which owns half a dozen buildings spread out all over downtown which count as a single unit for frontage purposes. So they can mass up their frontage and get away with putting a giant ridiculous billboard on the side of their main building, in addition to all their other signs, that I have to sit and look at all year, but we can only hang a tiny little vinyl banner on the side of ours. And here we've got a full length bare brick wall that's begging to have a gigantic painted sign on it saying MOTION PICTURES ARE YOUR BEST ENTERTAINMENT, but because we're only one building we're at our legal limit. Ought to be frontage-per-building instead of frontage-per-total-buildings owned, but money talks.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^
Sounds about as democratic as local improvement districts, where the additional taxation is "voluntary" in that it is self-imposed by the LID, but where the "votes" (and the assessments) are in proportion to the amount of property owned within the LID. So, large property owner throws weight behind, say, a street beautification project, and the guy who owns the shoe repair and the gal with a street-fronting bookkeeping business have to chip in as well, no matter their take on the matter.

 

[Zombie_61]

...And here we've got a full length bare brick wall that's begging to have a gigantic painted sign on it saying MOTION PICTURES ARE YOUR BEST ENTERTAINMENT, but because we're only one building we're at our legal limit...

If you painted it directly onto the brick wall, could you not argue the point that it's not a "sign", it's a "mural"?

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Art Museum pulled that one too. They don't miss a trick.

 

[Fading Fast]

While hardly an expert, I am a fan of advertising artwork. Some of it, anyway. And, like our Ms. Maine, I owe it in some part to commercial outdoor advertising that I learned to read.

Among my earliest recollections are of being in the backseat of the family car and knowing that all those signs we drove past "said something," and that if I were to know much of what this world had to offer, I had to learn the code.

Could not agree more. And the art world has caught on as I've gone to several museum exhibits of "advertising art." One I remember in particular was on pre-WWII "Underground" advertising in England. Those posters are gorgeous works of art.

 

[Harp]

Left early Christmas Eve Friday, found the Loop deserted and rainy. Passed the shuttered news stand fronting the Chicago Options Exchange
and thought of Sam, its former proprietor now deceased. Sam was a Runyonesque character of few words but whose sartorial style spoke volumes
with a woolen cap pulled down low to visor the glare off a single dangling bulb, and a coal red tipped soggy Dutch Masters cigar sticking out of a smile and three
or four days stubble. He offered all papers and magazines of substance, and I would stop for the Financial Times, Economist, and National Law Journal.
He'd shuffle the deck like a casino dealer and push the pack across the counter with a grunt and nod. His kind seemingly have disappeared from the local scene.

 

[Fading Fast]

In the town I grew up in, the button-hole-sized newsstand was owned and run by a woman named "Lou." Why Lou? That was the name of her father from whom she had inherited the stand, called "Lou's." So, she became "Lou." Lou was a perpetual presence in her newsstand smock with her black hair upswept in a never-changing '60s style and black cat-eye glasses. The stand was open seven days a week and Lou was there every one of them, from morning 'till night.

The stand was less than a block from the train station entrance and Lou - the daughter - the father had passed away by the time I was commuting into NYC knew her clientele well. If you were running late, you could grab a paper and holler over your shoulder "get you tomorrow," and all was good (and, I bet, almost all did honor the shout).

Also, as I was just starting in my career and had to get to the floor of the exchange extra early to "open up," I sometimes beat Lou to the stand in the morning where, after discussing it with her once, I was allowed to open the stack, take a paper and pay the next time I saw her as the town had deteriorated to the point that loose change on top would have been stollen (but, oddly, not the stacks of papers).

Lou also did a good business in tobacco and, in my echo hearing, seemed to be adept at getting a customer's particular brand in if her, to my eyes, incredibly comprehensive stock didn't include the brand in question. Also, the candy selection was insane and all crammed into a series of open glass cubes that pyramided back to her elevated platform behind a small beat-to-heck wood counter.

As both a kid and young adult, I discovered several one-off candies (like Valomilks) and "international" selections like Cadbury before it was common. Lastly, there was a glass front refrigerator for all kinds of sodas, odd offerings like cheap sunglasses and random over-the-counter medicines, a lottery machine and small signs going back fifty or more years (many for items no longer in existence).

That was a newsstand.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

Newsstands like that were my favorite hangouts in the little towns where I grew up in the '50s and early 60s. They were always jammed with magazines, comics and paperback books and they all had that pervasive scent of cigar and pipe tobacco. Thursday was my favorite day because that was when the new comics and magazines went on the stands. Now, if I ever step into one of those specialty tobacco shops the smell transports me back to my old newsstands.