Fortune was founded in 1929 by that old rascal Henry Luce, and somehow through the power of really really good articles, top visual production, and very high print quality, the magazine managed to not only thrive and survive the Great Depression but continues to be published, in print, 90 years later. Starting in 1955, Fortune began ranking top-grossing businesses and business leaders on a list called the Fortune 500, a feature that has grown to be an industrial and cultural milestone with prestige largely beyond the magazine itself. You can read more about the history of Fortune here.

This painting by Arthur Lidov is credited to the Mariner’s Museum of Newport News, Virginia, which houses a collection of hundreds of ships’ figureheads. I wondered if this particular figurehead had any significance, so upon hitting up the Director of Collections for the Mariner’s Museum and asking for more info, she sent me back the catalog page for that exact figurehead. It is said to have come from a whaling ship called Martha, but the info taken from previous notes from older sources on the catalog page seems at odds with recent historical insights. Says the Mariner’s Museum, per email:

…The attribution to a ship called ‘Martha’ began with the man the figurehead was originally purchased from. Unfortunately, the ship they are trying to peg it to doesn’t date to the stylistic aspects of the figurehead (they aimed at a vessel built around 1810 but the figurehead historian feels its closer to the 1870s). Unfortunately, between 1858 and 1894 there are about fifty various types of vessel built with the same name. This means that unless a photograph of a vessel can be found showing the figurehead we’ll never know exactly which vessel the piece came from.

Sadly, this is the story of our lives at a maritime museum.

So, mucho thanks to Jeanne and historians for the help! While it is really a lovely painting by Lidov, I can’t say that much of the magazine’s content has anything to do with it. I’m assuming it’s more of a spiritual Onward we sail, American industry! evocation.

Things I look for in a new car: Futuramicana, Hydra-Matic Drive, and Whirlaway, to give me thrills such as I have never known!

Notice that the content doesn’t really start until page 38? That’s because the first 37 or so pages are just ads. The contents have a nice spare layout because there aren’t all that many features, but those features are long.

Sorry Dewey…

STOP TRYING TO MAKE ME PRESIDENT, DAMMIT! — Eisenhower, basically his whole life, probably including the years when he was president.

“How are we handling things with Russia?”
rich people: badly
“Should we do something about it?”
rich people: “eh, probably?”

“Should we separate Palestine into two separate parts in order to appease both sides?”
rich people: *noncommittal shrug*
“What if it might involve the military?”
rich people: “wait what”

I have processed 70+ year old correspondence written on Gilbert cotton bond paper, and it holds up beautifully over time!

I like that they have to differentiate between “clammy” unpleasant cold air and “mountain fresh” air. Can you imagine working in an office all day when air conditioning was an expensive luxury – AND everyone smoked nonstop?

Honestly, I love the design of this toaster. Good job, Udylite.

Currently a news and talk radio station, still chugging along!

There are a lot of paper ads in this one, which makes sense when you consider that the reading audience for this magazine was businessmen and office middlemen who were in charge of things like deciding on what paper their company purchased for work. I’m not entirely sure what the basis was for the short supply of paper alluded to here – paper was rationed in England during the war, but not America. I guess it’s more a matter of booming demand, or at least that’s what Moore & White would like you to think.

Note that the approving spirits of Mssrs. Moore and White share “Cloud 16”. Trying to figure out the origins of “cloud [ ]” has been surprisingly murky, but the lexicon seems to have settled on “cloud nine” by the late 50s.

Some women are smart enough to fix things around the house with the limited range of tools that they ingeniously employ as a solution to many household frustration. But it takes A MAN [with education, access to materials, and the encouragement of society to be the universal problem solver] to get this window open!

Early business computing!

They were still using WAX CYLINDERS for recording at this point, which, if you’re familiar with wax recordings, produces recordings that sound like someone standing next to a popcorn machine in the pouring rain and shouting into a microphone from 20 feet away.

Happy birthday, son! Try not to run anyone over and you’re out of the will if you do!

Shout out to Hedley and Betty, journalism team! And whaddya know, Hedley Donovan became editor in chief of Time magazine twenty years later, apparently hand picked by Luce himself. As far from what I can tell, Betty Fullen remained a researcher until at least the 1960s, when she may have retired or just said “wow, that guy I used to work with is now editor of Time and I haven’t had a raise in five years at the same job I’ve been working at since the forties”, and then she walked into Henry Luce’s office and kneed him in the balls and then left and never came back. HEY, IT COULD HAVE HAPPENED.

How much do you think that sucker weighs? It probably has more cast iron than a Griswold skillet.

This ad is really a treasure trove, but my favorite part is the “our speech was enriched by expressions first used by Barney Google”, because they have no idea how significant that will be in the future.

If you ever wonder what the deal was with the elite society suddenly making Mexico and Cuba and Latin America must-see vacation destinations in the 1940s and 50s, the answer is because no one wanted to go to Europe, because all the previous rich people playgrounds like England and France and Austria and Germany were all smoking bloody post-war craters. Hence, luxury tourism to exotic locations (where white people were comfortably in power as the ruling class) made places like Rio and Buenos Aires the hot new vacation destinations.

Pardon me, but I didn’t come back from the dead to be lectured about what my own poetry meant, SIR. I was talking about death when I was talking  about taking the “high road”, so maybe you shouldn’t be bragging about your plane that’s a one-way ticket to the afterlife.

The “running off to Palm Springs with your secretary” weekend starter kit.

And, no, I have no idea what “man-to-man woolen” means.

That is the face of a man who keeps his undies in the ice box.

The equivalent of $15k for a very classy jukebox. Woe betide whoever wants to play album #200, because even with the Select-O-Matic switch you’re going to have to push that thing 199 times to find the record you want. The $1,520.00 does not include a smartly dressed assistant to push the button for you.

Again, with the paper company ads. I love the warm colors of this art so much.

These images are all of women asking if there are job openings and then being rejected coldly but politely by the elegant secretaries who inform them that their jobs have been replaced by advances in accounting technology.

Gaylord! Oh, my archivist heart. This company is still the go-to for archival and museum supplies.

Advances in machine technology had made it possible to produce more textiles with less hardware, which led to a bountiful post-war surplus of fabric – and likely had a huge influence on the generous yardage of 1950s women’s fashion.

From a really, REALLY long article on Nabisco. Pictured: the big wheel at the cracker factory.

I do not have the strength to even approach the semantics of what differentiates a cracker from a biscuit according to this, so go ahead and tear each other apart over the differences on your own.

I could not find a thing on Philip Warren, Director of Product Development for Nabisco, so one must logically assume that he was accused by McCarthy of being a communist shortly after this article was published and immediately blacklisted and ruined, or he dropped dead from a heart attack and his tenure as a Nabisco executive was tragically cut short (yes, those are the only two plausible explanations for why my five minutes of Google research failed to turn up anything). Anyway, I thought he was pretty cute munching on his cookie here, and I hope he finally did come up with a hit product because I would never in a million years buy a box of something called “Choco Chubbies”.

There was also this article on salmon sport fishing that went about five pages too long, but which of course would be interesting to rich businessmen who would rather being doing anything but business.

So this story has nothing to do with anything at all, but clearly they could not come up with a way to make adding machines compelling and they knew it. Guys, we’re toast if we lose this Comptometer account. Let me ask my twelve year old if he’s heard any good stories at Boy Scout camp, he’s a swell kid who never shuts up. And get the graphics guy ready to go, yeah, the guy who draws the Indians real good. I don’t feel that this story is racist, although the illustrations aren’t helping.

I don’t know what happened to the Salterini company, but man did they make some beautiful stuff.

What is happening here? I have no idea! But it’s beautiful!

While I wish I could find that Stokely Van Camp grocery store cartoon, I do have this gem from Prudential Life Insurance company from around the same time. It gets real around the two-minute mark.

What else does the little insurance salesman in your coffee tell you? Take it easy…

Five of these children grew up to be arrested at civil rights demonstrations during college. The little one in front with the barette in her hair now goes by Rainbow Fudge and runs a nudist resort in Sedona. The bright eyed kiddo in the top middle doesn’t remember anything that happened between 1968 and 1972, but he does remember vaguely spending it in a VW van somewhere in Florida. And the one on the bottom far left? Last seen selling flowers for Krishna at an airport in 1976.

That’s a really weird pickup line, dude.

Johnny Reed was dubbed the Textilene Killer, because he wrapped the bodies of his victims in stain-resistant man made fibre that could easily be coated with other Vinylite brand plastics for extra wear and brightness. The Textilene Killer was most chillingly known for the message that he sent to his local police department, in which he whispered repeatedly the fabric that laughs at the sun…the fabric that laughs at the sun… before bursting into sobs and giggles and then hanging up.

BEEBE! Have we talked about Lucius Beebe before? I love him. Beebe was a journalist, historian, traveler, fashionista and general bon vivant. If anyone needs a life goal, “move from glitzy city to depressed tiny Nevada mining town with life partner and make it fabulous” is a good one. Think mid-century Carson Kressley, only a little more of a history nerd.

The site of the San Jose FMC plant is about a ten minute drive from my current location. Spoilers: it is now a parking lot at the San Jose Airport.

I encourage everyone to take the next five minutes and just close your eyes and visualize how amazing it would be to have this fictional woman’s career. Department store women’s fashion buyer? In 1948? Yes please!

I’m also into that subtle dig at men with “the businessman’s airline” because men are giant babies and they need a comfortable airline, so their recommendations for airlines is something she’ll actually bother to pay attention to.

Do you find this as ominous as I do? You should!

Will the circle be unbroken…

Hearst had nothing to do with Fortune, so it seems a little strange that this is showing up in a non-Hearst owned publication, but I do know that Hearst barely survived the Great Depression and was not a fan of Roosevelt. I also know that whatever this ad is actually about, it’s certainly not written in a moment of overwhelming emotion and compassion for the plight of the poor. Hearst liked to think that he was on the side of the working class in the early days, but by the late 1940s he was definitely appealing to the “stop trying to drain my money bin with your so-called ‘income taxes’, because why should I be punished for being disgustingly and unfathomably rich?” crowd. It doesn’t seem that Hearst and Luce were buddies. They were certainly rivals and likely frenemies at their warmest, but I’m sure Luce was overwhelmingly in favor of complaining about income taxes as well, so he had no problem with this being published in his magazine.

I kid you not, this was the next ad right after the Hearst “parasites” editorial ad. Excellent placement, I say.

I need to find this 1948 Shell Oil Company brochure with a cartoon oil drop named Pete that shills for capitalism, and I need it NOW.

This ad is so weird and I love it.

Oh, Monsanto, ruling the world in the age where a chemical company could sell the public on their business by extolling the virtues of chemicals with names eight syllables long. More syllables means more credibility, don’t you know? Science!

 

So if you’ve gotten this far, you’re either very patient or more likely you’ve probably scrolled past everything wondering what the hell is that other thing you were talking about, lady? And the answer is that after this post today, Let’s Read Old Magazines will be a biweekly feature instead of a weekly feature. Chalk it up to a combination of my job(s) getting more demanding and an urge to pursue some other Avocado-hosted writing projects that Old Magazines would otherwise eat up all my time for. Oh now, hey, it’s ok! Don’t cry! This will result in better written and researched articles, not to mention a wider variety of magazines that I’ll have more time to plan out in advance! …probably! But I want you to know that I still love doing this feature and it means the world to me that you love it too. Or at least you like it enough to come back and keep reading it. Or at least you hate-read it and you are nice enough not to tell me? Still thankful. I don’t ask much.

Besides, I am just SO FREAKING EXCITED to share the next magazine:

The Advocate, August 1995! Featuring interviews with not only one but TWO Star Trek captains! And also some other people! See you there!