A Colossal Mistake

Most days I avoid the evening rush at the Checker Mart like it’s Mrs. Green in 4F, who eats baked beans out of the can and always needs her toilet plunged.

Not today.

Today, I let the chimes jingle behind me. My sneakers stick to the linoleum, and I nod to the clerk as I squeak past. He doesn’t acknowledge me.

Today I broke my routine. I got my ass off the couch because I had to see her and I knew she stopped at the Checker Mart every day after class.

She’s in front of the refrigerator case with a shopping basket hanging from a muscular forearm. A vein on her massive bicep looks fit to burst as she chucks protein shakes and energy drinks into her basket.

As soon as my bony fingers touch damp spandex she jumps. Her head spins around, platinum-blond curls whip across my nose and the whole basket of proteins and carbs rains down on Aisle 3.

“Arnie Trundle,” she growls, “I have no time for this.” Her eyes pan down a few feet to meet mine. “Not here.” I kneel down and gather a few bottles — anything to avoid her stare.

“I need to tell you something,” I mumble to the linoleum tiles.

“I can’t hear you,” she grunts.

I rise and try to hand a can of Flex-o Energy to her. She doesn’t budge. “Sherry, we need to talk.” She grinds her molars and her jawline looks like it was carved from granite. “Just give me one minute.”

“One minute,” she says.

I can’t blame Sherry Shayne for wanting to roll me into the shape of a rugby ball and boot me as far as one of her ogre feet would allow. I’d brought her wrath upon me, and I did it for one reason: professional wrestling. My one true love. My addiction. I pride myself on my extensive collection of wrestling videos. I have everything from Gorgeous George and Jerry “the King” Lawler to Ric Flair and “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan. There’s even an old film reel of a match between Japanese legend Antonio Inoki and Muhammad Ali. Not too many people know about that one.

I watch them all the time — mostly because there’s not much to do when you’re a building super but wait for old ladies to complain about leaky faucets and occupied mousetraps. The only time I get out of that place is on my trips to the Checker Mart. That’s how I saw Sherry the first time.

Only I’d seen her before, under a different name: Queen Colossus — a towering, unhinged science experiment that tore opponents to shreds in a wide selection of my video library. She always wore a luchadores mask, but I could pick that body out of a lineup. The 250 pounds of human power. The canyon-like span from shoulder to shoulder. Arms like telephone poles. And those eyes: ice-blue and colder than a rocky mountaintop.

I didn’t say anything to her when I saw her in line that day. The words dried up when I realized I was standing in the shadow of my hero. So I inspected a few packs of gum beside the register and I followed her. Not literally. With my eyes. I watched her walk across the street and through the doors of The Muscle Zone, and then I knew. She was hiding her true identity behind the mask of a common fitness trainer. Brilliant.

The next day, I awoke at dawn and came out of an exercise retirement that started at birth. I threw on my sweatpants with the hyperextended waistband, and I squeezed into a wrinkled T-shirt I got when I opened a checking account. My objectives? Infiltrate Sherry Shayne’s fitness class, casually unmask her as the infamous Queen Colossus, and reap the benefits of a close relationship with wrestling royalty.

Sherry’s class met on a set of moldy mats in the recesses of the facility. All of her clients were square-jawed and pumped-up, like of a pack of mountain gorillas. I squeezed between a collection of flexing biceps and sweaty pit stains and found a sliver of mat where I could hide among the curl bars and the kettlebells. But, in a field planted heavily with beefcakes, the rotten tomato is easy to spot.

“We have a new member today,” my Queen said, beckoning me forward.

“Why does he get the front?” a disgruntled gorilla whispered as I staggered through the pack.

“Me?” I asked.

The tension lifted from her cheekbones. Something that resembled laughter bellowed up from within the gentle giant. “Anyone else look new here?” she asked. She gave me no chance to answer.

Instead, she screamed, “Squat thrusts!” Right in my face. My knees buckled. My ass hit the mat, and I had to force my bladder not to betray me. “On your feet, shrimp!” she shouted, and she grabbed my wrist and yanked me upright in a single motion. From there it was kettlebell, push-ups, jumping jacks, kettlebell again, a 20-second recess so I could pull up my sweatpants, and then more kettlebell. I didn’t complete a single repetition of a single exercise. Sherry would shout, “Up!” Then she’d watch my arms go noodley, grab me by the T-shirt, and hoist me up in one pump. She’d push me down, too. And she poked and prodded me through a battery of calisthenics I could never complete on my own.

When the whole ordeal was over, I vowed to re-retire to the world of the un-athletic and forget about my heroes. As I slithered off the mat in a sweaty glob of pity and sadness, Sherry Shayne — Queen Colossus herself — walked right over to me and said, “I like you.”

“Me?” I stammered. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You’re cute. Like an out-of-shape ferret.” Before I could defend myself she added, “How about we grab a drink sometime?”

“Yes … I mean, sure, okay.”

But now, as I stand here in the Checker Mart with the door chimes jingling and the steam puffing from Sherry’s nostrils, I’m not sure that had been the correct response.

“I … uhh … I —”

“Clock’s ticking,” she says. “You better spit it out, shrimp.” She takes another angry step that makes me wish I stayed home and snaked Mrs. Lumbeck’s drain instead. But I gather myself and stare certain death in the ice-blue eyes.

“I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else,” I say.

“You’re not making any sense and —”

“I thought you were Queen Colossus!” I blurt, and the register stops beeping and the door chimes stop jingling.

“Queen. Freaking. Colossus?” Sherry’s eyebrows point in like darts. “You thought I was a wrestler?! Who wore a mask?!”

I nod.

“The one with the bulging veins and the tree-trunk thighs?!”

I nod and take a step back. She has me cornered at the end of the aisle now. Pinned against a rack of sunflower seeds.

“That’s the one,” I say. Sherry leans forward and her burning eyes consume me. “And that’s why you did what you did?!” I’m frozen. Locked somewhere between life, death, and the pursuit of a hero. Whatever horrific form of mutilation Sherry inflicts on me, I deserve it. Because our little date? Yeah. It wasn’t the romantic masterpiece you may have expected.

Last Thursday, I’d met her at the gym during her break and we walked to the Detox Café. I’d never heard of the place even though it was close to my building. I found out why once we stepped inside. A juiced-up barista behind a stainless-steel counter churned bananas, strawberries, and exotic pea proteins through an industrial blender. Workout gorillas packed the place, and they all knew Sherry.

We ordered wheat grass smoothies, and I only hacked the first few sips on the table before tolerating the rest of the glass. I was proud of myself; I was able to navigate the various Chips and Clints that vultured around our table and wanted to know with alarming consistency, “Who’s the new guy and how can I help him maximize the mass of his delts?” And, after stumbling through a conversation that went somewhat thusly:

SHERRY: I dropped to five grams of glutamate and upped my caloric intake.

ME: I found a rogue corn chip in my couch this morning.

SHERRY: …

I decided to lean on a topic we held in common. “Are you into wrestling?” I asked, and I fought to hold back a grin that would reveal my knowledge of Queen Colossus.

“Who isn’t? Show me a wrestling hater and then call the coroner. Cause that dude’s dead.” I liked what I heard, and I liked that Sherry had an unhealthy infatuation with Jake “the Snake” Roberts, and that we had both battled severe bouts of Hulkamania in our youth. I liked that she could rattle off every contestant in an upcoming steel cage match. But I loved how we could sit there together — the hulking giant and the terrified shrimp — and let the chest-pounding fade away to nothingness. But moments like these don’t last. And this moment was no exception.

A perky couple in matching tracksuits appeared at our table. They jogged in place for fear their precious heart rates would drop below 9,000 beats per minute. The guy ended a Bluetooth conversation mid-sentence, “Sherry! Great to see you!” The lady plucked out her earbuds and asked, in the same high-pitched song, “Wow! Who’s the new man?” Big surprise. After a 10-minute dance routine that laid out every dietary adjustment they’d ever made since they began eating solid food, the guy pulled out his cell phone and started scrolling through the pictures.

“We were in the same workout class,” he said to me. “Sherry, too. I can’t believe how far she’s come in two years.” Then he showed me a picture of a gorgeous blonde with a 20-inch waist and piercing blue eyes. No rippling biceps. No rigid jawline. No boulders for shoulders. Just slender and smooth and fragile. Not wrestling material.

And suddenly I felt betrayed. I don’t know why. It wasn’t Sherry’s fault she wasn’t Queen Colossus. And I don’t know why I did it, or how I had the guts to do it in front of her beefy friends, but the words came anyway. “Sherry,” I said popping up from my chair, “You’re not who I thought you were.” And I walked out under a cloak of shock and silence.

So you can understand, as I clutch desperately at bags of Checker Mart sunflower seeds, why I deserve the slow death Sherry has in store for me. She’s so close I can feel her hot breath on my face, and it makes every molecule in my body quiver. And just when I think she’s about to end me, she says, “You really thought I was her? Colossus?”

My teeth chatter so hard all I can say is “Uh-huh.”

Then something peculiar happens. Sherry straightens up and stares past me. She flexes her pecs in an alternating pattern that reminds me of the lights at a railroad crossing. I look behind and see Sherry’s reflection in the store’s security mirror. When I turn back, her entire face is a smile.

“That’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said to me!” she squeals. “Come here, you little shrimp.”

My sneakers leave the linoleum, and I’m twisted and twirled and spun around in midair like a human basketball. Sherry flips me up like a loaf of bread and catches me in the crook of her massive arms. She rocks me back and forth. Then her icy, blue eyes lock on mine and our lips touch, and I know instantly that Queen Colossus had never, in fact, been my hero.

Today I broke my routine. Today, Sherry Shayne carried me over the Checker Mart threshold and we drifted off toward the setting sunlamps of the local gymnasium.

Vintage Ads: Coffee Talk

As the days grow shorter, we all need a little “oomph” to get the day going. These vintage coffee advertisements will put a little more pep in your step!

 

Coffee Ad
May 1, 1920

This ad from the Joint Coffee Trade Publicity Committee of the United States was a collaboration between the U.S. and Brazilian coffee growers. The campaign was run in 306 newspapers, 21 periodicals, 50 grocery-trade magazines, and nine medical journals, according to All About Coffee by William Harrison Ukers. The ads enumerated health benefits, provided directions on how to make it, encouraged groceries and restaurants to offer it, and offered recipes to expand its use as a flavoring agent.

 

Coffee Ad
Maxwell House Coffee
January 6, 1923

Maxwell House had already been selling coffee for 40 years when this ad appeared in 1923. The bestselling brand for decades, it was named after the Maxwell House Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, which burned down in 1961.

 

Coffee Ad
It’s Time to Swing to Iced Coffee!
June 24, 1939

In an attempt to keep coffee sales flowing through the hot summer months, the Pan American Coffee Bureau created this marketing campaign around “Iced Coffee Week.” Who could resist these delicious recipes and adorable polar bears? Those of you sipping your salted caramel mocha Frappuccino can thank them.

 

Coffee Ad
September 21, 1940

 

Ad
November 2, 1940

 

Ad
March 15, 1941

Not satisfied with expanding the coffee drinking into the summer months, the Pan American Coffee Bureau now encouraged folks to drink coffee all day long — at every meal, morning, noon, and night. Concerns over insomnia were poo-pooed, as the effects were guaranteed to last only two hours.

 

Ad
Nescafé
September 14, 1946

Developed in Switzerland in 1938 as a way to find a use for surplus coffee beans in Brazil, Nescafé started importing its instant coffee to the United States after the end of World War II. It had been a popular item in Army rations, so Nescafé had no trouble making the transition to American households. It was the perfect beverage for a nation craving convenience and modernity.

 

AD
Nothing Satisfies Like Coffee!
June 23, 1951

Once again, we hear from the Pan-American Coffee Bureau, touting a beverage so delicious it will lure maidens out of the lake. Ritz crackers made the perfect accompaniment.

 

Ad
A&P Coffee
September 17, 1955

The Great Atlantic & Pacific Coffee and Tea Company (A&P) created Eight O’Clock Coffee in 1859. A&P promoted its economical price and the grocer’s offer to custom grind the beans right in the store. A&P sold the Eight O’Clock brand in 2003 (and the grocery chain closed its doors in 2015), but you can still buy the coffee in other stores.

News of the Week: New Books, Trash Treasures, and the Real Recipe for Toll House Cookies

Fall Reading

In the current issue of The Saturday Evening Post, Amazon editor Chris Schluep gives his picks for fall fiction and nonfiction coming in the next month or two. I’d like to add five more titles to the list:

60 at 50

Speaking of the 50th season of 60 Minutes, here’s a video tribute from CBS Sunday Morning. My favorite part is what Harry Reasoner does at the 11-second mark:

The End of the World Has Been Rescheduled

This is the second time a story about the end of the world has appeared in this column in the past few weeks, but I’m really not trying to turn it into an ongoing commentary on the world’s mortality. In fact, I have good news: The world didn’t end last week.

If you didn’t hear, the world was supposed to end on September 23, according to Christian numerologist David Meade. It’s a long story, but apparently a mysterious planet named Nibiru was supposed to hit Earth on that day, and we’d all be gone. But if you’re reading this, it obviously didn’t happen (unless heaven has Wi-Fi).

If you’re disappointed, there’s more good news! He says the day has just been moved to October. He doesn’t give an exact date, but it’s sometime in the middle of the month, when something will happen that will start seven years of horrible events that will destroy the planet.

I wish he’d be a little more specific because I have a dentist appointment on October 18.

Gatorade Has Agreed Not to Make Disparaging Remarks about Water

That’s one of the oddest lines in a news story I’ve seen recently, but it’s actually part of a $300,000 settlement that the state of California reached with Gatorade. A video game that the company put out called Bolt! (starring runner Usain Bolt) downplayed the health benefits of water. The game said that athletes should avoid water and instead drink Gatorade. In fact, the game had a scoring system where a player’s power would go up when they drank Gatorade and down when they drank water.

In a plot twist, the first ingredient listed on Gatorade’s label is water.

One Man’s Trash Is This Trash Man’s Treasure

Nelson Molina was a sanitation worker in New York City for over 30 years, but he had a hobby, too. He was always on the lookout for cool stuff that people were throwing away. And I don’t mean a few knick-knacks here and there; I’m talking about thousands of items, from rare artwork and entertainment collectibles to manual typewriters, housewares, and furniture. There’s enough stuff to fill the entire second floor of the sanitation depot where he used to work. Here’s the story from (again!) CBS Sunday Morning.

The amount of stuff he has collected over the years is astonishing. It’s better than most collectible or antique stores I’ve been in, and I’m very jealous.

Frank Zappa Is Going on Tour Again

I saw Zappa in concert twice in the 1980s, but it was different than how fans will see him in an upcoming concert tour. For one thing, Zappa died in 1993.

That’s right, the brilliant musician is going on tour again even though he’s no longer with us. The Zappa Family Trust and Eyellusion announced last week that they’ve made a deal to create a hologram of Zappa and have him “perform” with musicians that he played with many years ago, including Steve Vai, Vinnie Colaiuta, and his children Dweezil and Moon Unit. The concerts will feature classic songs as well as music that has never been released.

RIP Hugh Hefner, Liliane Bettencourt, Bernie Casey, Basil Gogos, and Charles Bradley

Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy and the envy of men everywhere, died Wednesday night at the age of 91. He started the men’s magazine while he was still in college. The first issue, in December 1953, had Marilyn Monroe on the cover.

Playboy was always interesting because, while you could read it for the, well, pictures, it really wasn’t a joke to say “I read it for the articles” because the articles and stories and interviews were often excellent. The Post published two stories on the man behind the myth.

Liliane Bettencourt was the L’Oreal cosmetics heiress and the richest woman in the world, with an estimated worth of almost $40 billion. She died last Thursday at the age of 94.

Bernie Casey was an ex-football player who became an actor who was in everything, from the movies Boxcar BerthaBill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and Revenge of the Nerds, to TV shows like Bay City Blues and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. He died last week at the age of 78.

Basil Gogos was an artist who created fantastic portraits of classic movie monsters like Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Wolf Man, many for the magazine many of us read before going to bed: Famous Monsters of FilmlandHe died September 13 at the age of 88.

Charles Bradley became a star later in life, releasing his debut soul album Changes at the age of 62. He died last week at the age of 68.

This Week in History

F. Scott Fitzgerald Born (September 24, 1896)

Not only did the influential Fitzgerald write for The Saturday Evening Post, we had a hand in the creation of The Great Gatsby.

First Televised Presidential Debate: Kennedy vs. Nixon (September 26, 1960)

People who listened to the debate on the radio thought Nixon had won, while people who watched it on TV gave it to Kennedy. (Nixon perspired a lot and didn’t want makeup.) Here’s video of the debate:

This Week in Saturday Evening Post History: Model Home (September 28, 1957)

Model Home by George Hughes From September 28, 1957
Model Home by George Hughes From September 28, 1957

If you look closely at this cover by George Hughes, you can see that the house the people are touring is going for $29,995. The average 1950s home went for $18,000. Either way, that’s a lot less than what the houses go for on House Hunters, where people who spend $300,000 on a house get upset if one of the rooms has ugly wallpaper.

Everything You Know about Toll House Cookies Is Wrong

Since I’ve always been a pop culture food history geek, and Sunday is Homemade Cookie Day, this story intrigued me. The recipe for Toll House Cookies we’ve been using all these years? It’s wrong.

We’ve always been told that the recipe by Ruth Wakefield of the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, that’s on the back of Nestle’s Semi-Sweet Morsels is the original recipe for the cookies. But in this terrific interview by WCVB’s Maria Stephanos, Peg Brides, the daughter of Wakefield’s baker Sue Brides, reveals that the recipe that Wakefield and her mom came up with is actually different from the one that’s on the bag. Some of the ingredients are in different amounts (you should use less baking soda and more eggs), and some of the ingredients shouldn’t be used at all (Brides uses Crisco instead of butter)! The original recipe makes the cookies come out smaller and more crisp than the ones we’re used to.

I have a feeling cookie fans are going to talk about this. This could even rival the Great Dress Debate of 2015.

But here’s the thing: If the recipe that’s on the bag is the one we’ve all been using for generations, isn’t that the “real” recipe, even if it isn’t the REAL real recipe? I mean, if you’ve been making the cookies the way Nestle (who bought the recipe from Wakefield) says you should make them since you were a kid, isn’t that recipe legitimate? Sure, it’s interesting from a food history standpoint that the original recipe is different — and we can certainly make those cookies too! — but I think a lot of people will simply keep making them the same way they always have because they also have their own history and they really like them.

Also, walnuts don’t belong in chocolate chip cookies. That’s just wrong.

Next Week’s Holidays and Events

Sarcastic Awareness Month Begins (October 1)

Oh, I bet everyone just loves this month-long event. They must be soooooo happy that it even exists. I bet everyone is just going to be freaking out about how great the day is.

Supreme Court Term Starts (October 2)

The cases the court will ponder this term include government access to smartphone location data, religious exemptions to anti-discrimination laws, and individual state’s rights to allow sports betting.

The Invention of Camouflage 100 Years Ago

Soldier in camo
Mead Schaeffer, © SEPS.

Armies lost the ability to conceal themselves when the airplane appeared above the battlefields of World War I Europe, so soldiers came up with a defense against aerial snooping, and introduced a new word to the English language.

“Camouflage” by Will Irwin, September 29, 1917

100 years ago ribbonIt is pronounced, at present, French fashion, like this — “cam-oo-flazh.” In the theatrical business it signified makeup. The scene painters of the Parisian theaters carried it with them to the war and fixed it in army slang; for just about that time the armies of Europe began to introduce a new branch of tactics into warfare. By the end of the first year, most of the guns and motor transports used near the line were striped with greens, browns, dull yellows; sometimes with pinks and blues. But the stripes were not regular. All lines of union were wavy or broken. Nor did the colors meet each other sharply. For a little distance they were blended. It looked more, perhaps, as though someone had poured a few bucketfuls of paint, hit or miss, over guns and transports.

The first page for the 1917 article, "Camouflage".
Click to read the complete article from the September 29, 1917, issue of the Post.

This article is featured in the September/October 2017 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

 

Cartoons: Let’s Get in Shape!

September is National Self-Improvement Month, so it’s a great time to start an exercise routine. Our fitness cartoons will help keep you motivated!

 

Cartoon
“You should start weight lifting for your health. You can start by lifting your weight off the couch.”
Ken Benner

 

Cartoon
“You’re the only person I know who gets jet lag from an exercise bike.”
Bob Vojtko

 

Cartoon
Roy Delgado

 

Cartoon
“Mind if I stroll leisurely alongside while you jog dad?”
Smith

 

Cartoon
“My goal is to be able to fit my laptop on my lap.”
Roy Delgado

 

Cartoon
“He wants to see about trading in his keg for a six-pack!”
Rob Rucha

 

Cartoon
“This one comes with its own garage sale sign.”
Roy Delgado

Does the Washington Press Lie?

There’s a lot of talk of “fake news” and distrust of the media these days, but fifty years ago, at the height of the Vietnam war, the role of the press was also controversial as news from the front became increasingly grim and more at odds with the government’s account of the war. In a July 15, 1967, editorial in the Post, famed columnist Stewart Alsop—a supporter of the war—put things in perspective when he asked,  “Does the Washington Press Lie?” (see below).

Alsop writes that the media was too big and diverse for one viewpoint to permanently dominate. Moreover, the press worked within a self-correcting process. Reporters could always advance themselves by pointing out other reporters’ errors and disproving their lies. “The half-truths and lies get winnowed out, mainly because reporting is a fiercely competitive business,” he writes.

Following the war, America appeared to re-evaluate the press. Their trust of the media rose, aided by the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which proved that successive American governments had, in fact lied about Vietnam, and Watergate, where the press was instrumental in exposing the crimes of the Nixon Administration.  In 1976, Gallup reported the highest level of Americans’ trust in the media: 72 percent. But trust has eroded over the years. In 2007, polls showed public trust slipping under 50 percent. Today, it has fallen to 32 percent.

 

 

Page
Click to read “Does the Washington Press Lie?” by Stewart Alsop, an editorial from the July 15, 1967, issue of the Post.

Hugh Hefner: The Master of Illusion

Hugh Hefner, who died on September 28 at the age of 91, was profiled not once, but twice by The Saturday Evening Post. Both articles appeared in the 1960s, when Hefner had turned his upscale girlie magazine, Playboy, into a publishing empire.

In the 1940s, Hefner had worked for Esquire magazine, then considered the country’s most risqué publication. In 1953, he believed the country was ready for a far more sexually suggestive publication and started his Playboy magazine. The first issue sold unexpectedly well: over 50,000 copies, helped by the inclusion of pictures of a nude Marilyn Monroe.

By 1960, its circulation had topped one million, which is a quicker growth in circulation than even the Post achieved.

In the Post’s April 28, 1962, article, “Czar of the Bunny World,” author Bill Davidson presents Hefner as a man less obsessed with sex than with business. While Playboy portrayed him as a laid-back, sophisticated, jazz-loving epicure, Hefner was in reality a magazine geek and workaholic:

Hefner works at his legend 18 hours a day. He rises about one p.m., goes to his office to berate and guide his Playboy staff, and generally spends his evenings escorting celebrities around his Chicago Playboy Club. He never takes a vacation.

Davidson described him as looking “more like a small town grocery clerk than the epitome of sophisticated prurience.”

Hefner’s character was just one aspect of the Playboy impression. The magazine also liked to present itself as the champion of liberty and the American way during the Cold War. Hefner’s column, “The Playboy Philosophy,” featured “a seemingly endless crusade against censorship, obscenity laws, sexual repression and American puritanism in general.” But that message would have had less market appeal without the nudity customers expected.

Four years later, the Post reported on Hefner again. The Playboy empire had continued to grow: The clubs were grossing over $19 million a year, and annual magazine sales exceeded $28 million.

Calvin Tompkins’ article from April 23, 1966, “Mr. Playboy of the Western World,” focused more on Hefner’s rise from obscurity, his repressed childhood, and his crusade against censorship and repression. Tomkins’ impression of Hefner and his empire differed little from Davidson’s:

Hefner has lost interest in parties. He works around the clock, sometimes 30 or 40 hours at a stretch, eating when he remembers to, drinking bottle after bottle of soda pop, going to bed only when he is ready to drop from exhaustion, sleeping like a baby for eight or nine hours and then getting up and starting over again.

Tomkins saw the publisher as a man in arrested development who wanted the image of success more than its substance. “Success,” Hefner told him “has to do with how close you come to the ideas you had as a child.”

Hefner vociferously defended the use of nude or nearly nude women in his magazine and clubs. Tomkins wrote, “To the frequent accusations that this is a puerile and insulting attitude that reduces women to the status of a commodity, Hefner invariably replies that such criticism simply reveals the critic as having a ‘sexual hang-up’ of some sort, a pathological bias against healthy sex.” But Hefner’s statements about women differed from the daily reality at Playboy. A local newsman commented, “In the Playboy world, a female goes into the discard when she is not the show-girl type, when she has a bust of less than 38 inches, when she reaches the age of 25, and when she exhibits any intelligence.” And an executive in the corporation told Davidson, “I guess we do express an antifeminist point of view, and we might be somewhat in error in not giving the exceptional woman full credit. But we firmly believe that women are not equal to men.”

Despite the glitzy mansions, beautiful women, and glossy magazine that Hefner worked so hard to build, the true nature of the man was likely something far different. Said a friend, “I have a feeling that when he’s all alone, there in the stillness of the night, that’s when he’s the happiest.”

 

Page
Click to read “Czar of the Bunny” from the April 28, 1962, issue of the Post.

 

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Click to read “Mr. Playboy of the Western World” from the April 23, 1966, issue of the Post.

What Makes Me Laugh: An Interview with David Sedaris

David Sedaris
Photo by Ingrid Christie

What makes us laugh, and why? Philosophers and scientists have been trying to crack the code for millennia. Yet, who knows funny better than the writers who create it?

The Post invited David Sedaris to share his thoughts on what makes him laugh. (We also interviewed other prominent humorists. See “Humorists on Humor”).

A master of satire, David Sedaris has made a career out of transforming the facts of his own life and family quirks into laugh-out-loud essays and prose. A regular contributor to NPR’s This American Life, Sedaris has been compared to literary giants Mark Twain, James Thurber, and Dorothy Parker. The author of 10 bestsellers, including Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls and most recently Theft by Finding, shares a unique encounter with socialized medicine in his essay “Dentists Without Borders” and his take on contemporary humor.

Pat Perry: Where does humor come from in your own writing?
David Sedaris: I come from a big family, and all the kids in it are funny in a different way. My sister Amy and my brother Paul are incredibly fast on their feet. Their humor is in the moment. I, for some reason, prefer to chew on the past. My sister Lisa is the same. I love her stories. What makes Gretchen funny is her weird timing, and the shocking things that she says. My late sister, Tiffany, was funny as well. We’re not competitive; rather, we just appreciate each other. No one makes me laugh like my family. I use humor in my writing because I want the audience to make a noise, and laughter beats the sound of people vomiting or having babies in the dark.

PP: What are your thoughts about the, for lack of a better term, politically correct moment we’re in and the relationship between humor and public sensibilities? Is it stifling humor writing?
DS: After a London reading last year, a woman handed the theater manager a slip of paper. “Here’s my address,” she told him. “He’ll need it when sending me an apology letter.”

“Did she mention what I’d done to offend her?” I asked.

It’s so hard to tell what might set people off anymore. I’m gay, so am spared charges of being heteronormative.

A woman approached me at the book signing table a few years back and said, “Question: Do you think you could maybe write one single story in which an animal isn’t being tortured?”

(I hate it when people begin sentences with “Question:”.)

“After a London reading last year, a woman handed the theater manager a slip of paper. ‘Here’s my address. He’ll need it when sending me an apology letter.’”

—David Sedaris

“Did I mention a lot of animals being tortured tonight?” I asked a 70-year-old a few minutes later.

“Well,” she said, and she thought for a moment. “There was that one mouse.”

What really gets people going is race, which is almost impossible to talk about in America. If I have a black character in an essay who is any less virtuous than Morgan Freeman in every movie he’s ever been in, the audience — the whites in the audience — retreat into their own heads and stay there, thinking, If I laugh, does it make me a racist? What does it mean that I don’t like this particular character?

That said, I don’t feel particularly stifled. I just do my thing.

PP: Would you say the American sense of humor is different from that of other countries, other cultures?
DS: A few years back, a group of Italian horn players adapted a number of my stories for the stage. It was all very madcap and physical — at one point a tuba acted as a toilet. I can’t imagine that kind of broad, almost infantile theater working in, say, Greece or the U.S., but it killed in Turin. I see differences between the U.S. and the U.K. I think the British are better at wordplay than we are, more appreciative of it. I can’t speak for France. My books come out there, but nobody buys them. The reviews are like, “What is this? A person wrote a story about their dentist, but why?” I’ve never understood the stereotype of the humorless German. I love doing shows there.

PP: What trends do you see in current American humor? Any you like? Any you don’t?
DS: I like that our society has opened up. Cable TV and podcasting are giving more people a chance to be heard. As for trends, you’re talking to someone who just yesterday noticed that people are wearing skinny jeans. And it’s been, what, eight years now?

This article, along with David Sedaris’ essay, “Dentists without Borders,” was featured in the September/October 2017 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

 

Dentists Without Borders

One thing that puzzled me during the American healthcare debate was all the talk about socialized medicine and how ineffective it’s supposed to be. The Canadian plan was likened to genocide, but even worse were the ones in  Europe, where patients languished on filthy cots, waiting for aspirin to be invented. I don’t know where these people get their ideas, but my experiences in France, where I’ve lived off and on for the past 13 years, have all been good. A house call in Paris will run you around $50. I was tempted to arrange one the last time I had a kidney stone, but waiting even 10 minutes seemed out of the question, so instead I took the subway to the nearest hospital. In the center of town, where we’re lucky enough to have an apartment, most of my needs are within arm’s reach. There’s a pharmacy right around the corner, and two blocks farther is the office of my physician, Dr. Médioni.

Twice I’ve called on a Saturday morning, and, after ­answering the phone himself, he has told me to come on over. These visits, too, cost around $50. The last time I went, I had a red thunderbolt bisecting my left eyeball.

The doctor looked at it for a moment and then took a seat behind his desk. “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you,” he said. “A thing like that, it should be gone in a day or two.”

“Well, where did it come from?” I asked. “How did I get it?”

“How do we get most things?” he answered.

“We buy them?”

The time before that, I was lying in bed and found a lump on my right side, just below my rib cage. It was like a deviled egg tucked beneath my skin. Cancer, I thought. A phone call and 20 minutes later, I was stretched out on the examining table with my shirt raised.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” the doctor said. “A little fatty tumor. Dogs get them all the time.”

I thought of other things dogs have that I don’t want: dewclaws, for example. Hookworms. “Can I have it ­removed?”

“I guess you could, but why would you want to?”

He made me feel vain and frivolous for even thinking about it. “You’re right,” I told him. “I’ll just pull my bathing suit up a little higher.”

When I asked if the tumor would get any bigger, the doctor gave it a gentle squeeze. “Bigger? Sure, probably.”

“Will it get a lot bigger?”

“No.”

“Why not?” I asked.

And he said, sounding suddenly weary, “I don’t know. Why don’t trees touch the sky?”

Médioni works from an apartment on the third floor of a handsome 19th-century building, and, on leaving, I always think, Wait a minute. Did I see a diploma on his wall? Could Doctor possibly be the man’s first name? He’s not indifferent. It’s just that I expect a little something more than “It’ll go away.” The thunderbolt cleared up, just as he said it would, and I’ve since met dozens of people who have fatty tumors and get along just fine. Maybe, being American, I want bigger names for things. I also expect a bit more gravity. “I’ve run some tests,” I’d like to hear, “and discovered that what you have is called a bilateral ganglial abasement, or, in layman’s terms, a cartoidal rupture of the venal septrumus. Dogs get these things all the time, and most often they die. That’s why I’d like us to proceed with the utmost caution.”

With all the dental professionals in my life, you’d think I’d look less like a jack-o’-lantern.

For my $50, I want to leave the doctor’s office in tears, but instead I walk out feeling like a hypochondriac, which is one of the few things I’m actually not. If my French physician is a little disappointing, my French periodontist more than makes up for it. I have nothing but good things to say about Dr. Guig, who, gum-wise, has really brought me back from the abyss. Twice in the course of our decade-long relationship he’s performed surgical interventions. Then, last year, he removed four of my lower incisors, drilled down into my jawbone, and cemented in place two posts. First, though, he sat me down and explained the procedure, using lots of big words that allowed me to feel tragic and important. “I’m going to perform the surgery at nine o’clock on Tuesday morning, and it should take, at most, three hours,” he said — all of this, as usual, in French. “At six that evening, you’ll go to the dentist for your temporary implants, but still I’d like you to block out that entire day.”

When I got home, I asked my boyfriend, Hugh, “Where did he think I was going to go with four missing teeth?”

I see Dr. Guig for surgery and consultations, but the regular, twice-a-year deep cleanings are performed by his associate, a woman named Dr. Barras. What she does in my mouth is unspeakable, and, because it causes me to sweat, I’ve taken to bringing a second set of clothes and changing in the bathroom before I leave for home. “Oh, Monsieur Sedaris,” she chuckles. “You are such a child.”

A year ago, I arrived and announced that, since my previous visit, I’d been flossing every night. I thought this might elicit some praise — “How dedicated you are, how disciplined!” — but instead she said, “Oh, there’s no need.”

It was the same when I complained about all the gaps between my teeth. “I had braces when I was young, but maybe I need them again,” I told her. An American dentist would have referred me to an orthodontist, but, to Dr. Barras, I was being hysterical. “You have what we in France call ‘good-time teeth,’” she said. “Why on Earth would you want to change them?”

“Um, because I can floss with the sash to my ­bathrobe?”

“Hey,” she said. “Enough with the flossing. You have better ways to spend your evenings.”

I guess that’s where the good times come in.

Dr. Barras has a sick mother and a long-haired cat named Andy. As I lie there sweating with my trap wide open, she runs her electric hook under my gum line and catches me up on her life since my last visit. I always leave with a mouthful of blood, yet I always look forward to my next appointment. She and Dr. Guig are my people, completely independent of Hugh, and though it’s a stretch to label them friends, I think they’d miss me if I died of a fatty tumor.

Something similar is happening with my dentist, Dr. Granat. He didn’t fabricate my implants — that was the work of a prosthodontist — but he took the molds and made certain that the teeth fit. This was done during five visits in the winter of 2011. Once a week, I’d show up at the office and climb into his reclining chair. Then I’d sink back with my mouth open. “Ça va?” he’d ask every five minutes or so, meaning “All right?” And I’d release a little tone. Like a doorbell. “E-um.

Implants come in two stages. The first teeth that get screwed in, the temporaries, are blocky, and the color is off. The second ones are more refined, and are somehow dyed or painted to match their neighbors. My four false incisors are connected to form a single unit, and were secured in place with an actual screwdriver. Because the teeth affect one’s bite, the positioning has to be exact, so my dentist would put them in and then remove them to make minor adjustments. Put them in, take them out. Over and over. All the pain was behind me by this point, and so I just lay there, trying to be a good patient.

As I lie there sweating with my trap wide open, she catches me up on her life since my last visit.

Dr. Granat keeps a small, muted television mounted near the ceiling, and each time I come it is tuned to the French travel channel. Voyage, it’s called. Once, I watched a group of mountain people decorate a yak. They didn’t string lights on it, but everything else seemed fair game: ribbons, bells, silver sheaths for the tips of its horns.

Ça va?

E-um.

Another week, we were somewhere in Africa, where a family of five dug into the ground and unearthed what looked to be a burrow full of mice. Dr. Granat’s assistant came into the room to ask a question, and when I looked back at the screen, the mice had been skinned and placed, kebab-like, on sharp sticks. Then came another distraction, and when I looked up again, the family in Africa were grilling the mice over a campfire and eating them with their fingers.

“Ça va?” Dr. Granat asked, and I raised my hand, international dental sign language for “There is something vital I need to communicate.” He removed his screwdriver from my mouth, and I pointed to the screen. “Ils ont mangé des souris en brochette,” I told him, meaning “They have eaten some mice on skewers.”

He looked up at the little TV. “Ah, oui?

A regular viewer of the travel channel, Dr. Granat is surprised by nothing. He’s seen it all, and is quite the traveler himself. As is Dr. Guig. Dr. Barras hasn’t gone anywhere exciting lately, but, what with her mother, how can she? With all these dental professionals in my life, you’d think I’d look less like a jack-o’-lantern. You’d think I could bite into an ear of corn, or at least tear meat from a chicken bone, but that won’t happen for another few years, not until we tackle my two front teeth and the wobbly second incisors that flank them. “But after that’s done I’ll still need to come regularly, won’t I?” I said to Dr. Guig, almost panicked. “My gum disease isn’t cured, is it?”

I’ve gone from avoiding dentists and periodontists to practically stalking them, not in some quest for a Hollywood smile but because I enjoy their company. I’m happy in their waiting rooms, the coffee tables heaped with Gala and Madame Figaro. I like their mumbled French, spoken from behind Tyvek masks. None of them ever calls me David, no matter how often I invite them to. Rather, I’m Monsieur Sedaris, not my father but the smaller, Continental model. Monsieur Sedaris with the four lower implants. Monsieur Sedaris with the good-time teeth, sweating so fiercely he leaves the office two kilos lighter. That’s me, pointing to the bathroom and asking the receptionist if I may use the sandbox, me traipsing down the stairs in a fresh set of clothes, my smile bittersweet and drearied with blood, counting the days until I can come back, and return myself to this curious, socialized care.

For more about the author, visit davidsedarisbooks.com.

This story, along with our interview with David Sedaris, is featured in the September/October 2017 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

 

The Deafening Criticism of Silent Spring

Was she a communist? A new McCarthy? These were the strikingly antithetical allegations mounted against Rachel Carson after she published Silent Spring — an influential work of environmentalism released 55 years ago today.

The book was an indictment of the widespread use of petrochemical-based pesticides developed during World War II in the U.S. Silent Spring made a bold claim: “For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals from the moment of conception until death.” Carson examined studies of the effects of chemicals like DDT on the human body, citing the range of concoctions used on farmlands, roadsides, and, sometimes, sprayed liberally over vast areas. She tracked the pesticides’ and herbicides’ movement through waterways as well as the food chain and alerted the public to DDT’s murderous effects on bird populations across the country.

Carson’s shocking scientific account met instant backlash. One of her critics wrote an editorial in this magazine in 1963 called “The Myth of the ‘Pesticide Menace.’” Edwin Diamond was a senior editor — and former science editor — of Newsweek who had originally planned to coauthor Silent Spring with Carson. His critique of her work contains more thinly-veiled sexism than scientific refutation. Diamond writes that “her arguments were more emotional than accurate” and dismisses the success of the book as a result of good timing and “graceful prose,” calling it the work of an era of “shrill voices.”

After declaring the “pesticide menace” a myth, the author’s argument shrinks in scope to merely chip away at Carson’s credibility with rhetorical questions like why “an industrialist or a scientist…would poison our food and water — the same food and water he himself eats and drinks?”

Over and over in his criticism, Diamond points to the grand accusations of Silent Spring with incredulity and little else: “What, finally, is Silent Spring’s game? If we were to believe Miss Carson’s own description of our times — an era where the right to make an irresponsible dollar is seldom challenged — then the answer would be an easy one. But I believe this description, like so much else in Silent Spring, is an extravagant one.” Diamond wrote this before the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Love Canal, Three Mile Island, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the West Virginia chemical spill, and numerous other environmental disasters brought about by apparent corporate malfeasance.

Regardless of the criticism of The Saturday Evening Post — or Forbes, Time, or The National Review Silent Spring gained widespread acclaim and led to a Kennedy-appointed panel to research its findings. The formation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and the banning of DDT in 1972 followed. Al Gore placed it “among the rare books that have transformed our society.”

Attacks on Silent Spring and the ideas it put forth are still numerous. Their intentions, however, are sometimes more transparent, like the website www.rachelwaswrong.com, which alleges “her extreme rhetoric generated a culture of fear.” The site is run by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who is in turn sponsored by corporations from Monsanto to Murray Energy to the Charles Koch Foundation. An article titled “Rachel Carson’s Genocide” in Capitalism Magazine speaks to another side of sensationalism.

Carson’s book is neither a hysterical call for Stone Age living nor an emotionally spun tale of the apocalypse. Silent Spring is a plea for more time, research, and deliberation regarding decisions we make for our environment — and ourselves. As the last 55 years have unfolded, we’ve seen the negative human impact on biodiversity worldwide, plastic fibers turning up in over 80 percent of global water samples, and an annual “dead zone” the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico, where a regular influx of field runoff creates a spot where fish cannot survive. The irony — though certainly not comedic — is that our own harm stems from our tireless efforts of survival, short-sighted as they may be.

Click to read “The Myth of the Pesticide Menace” from the September 28, 1963, issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

The Myth of the Pesticide Menace

Vintage Auto Ads: More from Chevrolet

Chevrolet produced its first production model in 1913, debuting it at the New York auto show that year. By the late 1920s, Chevrolet was the leading car manufacturer, finally surpassing Ford in 1927. These full-page Chevrolet ads from 1929 to 1964 show how the automaker’s style evolved to meet the changing tastes of the American middle class.

See more vintage Chevrolet ads.

 

Chevrolet ad
August 3, 1929
(Click to Enlarge)

 

Chevy positioned itself as a tool for the working man with this ad for their 1 ½ ton truck, which advertised that it was for “economical transportation.” The devastating stock market crash of October 1929 was still a few months away, and markets were booming despite signs that the economy was shaky.

 

Chevy ad
March 26, 1932
(Click to Enlarge)

 

This March ad titillates with the promise of summer, 60 horsepower, and a “faster, quieter getaway” (perfect for a car that looks as though Bonnie and Clyde would have driven it).

 

Chevy ad
January 16, 1954
(Click to Enlarge)

 

This ad features the 1954 Chevy Bel Air 4-door Sedan. The ’53 and ’54 Bel Airs offered options previously available only in luxury cars, such as headlight dimmers, and power steering, brakes, seats and windows.

 

Ad
April 3, 1954
(Click to Enlarge)

 

Chevy’s advertising tactic for this 1954 spread was to pair their latest sedans against a backdrop of spring flowers. Given the ad’s focus on the cars’ available color combinations and floral flourishes, its likely target was women.

 

Chevy ad
March 19, 1955
(Click to Enlarge)

 

“What could turn a young man’s fancy to thoughts of love quicker than a new Chevrolet!” Chevy splits the difference here, appealing to both the “cold-minded” and the “fanciful” for their new Motoramic Chevrolet, which introduced the auto maker’s first V8 engine.

 

Ad
October 27, 1956
(Click to Enlarge)

 

Here we see an early ad for what would become an automotive icon: the ’57 Chevy. This ad features their top trim line, the Bel Air.

 

Car ad
June 1, 1963
(Click to Enlarge)

 

In this 1963 ad for the Impala, Chevy emphasizes affordable luxury: more than 700 shock and sound deadeners, a new Delcotron generator for a longer lasting battery, and new self-adjusting brakes.

 

Ad
September 28, 1963
(Click to Enlarge)

 

Reflecting the style of the era, the 1964 Impala Super Sport brags of ultra-soft vinyl upholstery and door-to-door deep-twist carpeting. “The whole idea with this new Chevrolet, really, was to see how much luxury and comfort we could add to the car—but still keep it reasonably priced.”

The Art of the Post: Was Artist McCauley Conner a “Mad” Man?

At age 103, Saturday Evening Post illustrator McCauley “Mac” Conner has witnessed a lot of history.

An exhibition of his work was recently on display at the Delaware Art Museum, the Museum of the City of New York and the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The exhibition, “Mac Conner: An Original Mad Man,” collects pictures from Conner’s long career.

The exhibition labels Conner a “Mad Man” to take advantage of the craze over the television series “Mad Men” about the creative marketing geniuses of Madison Avenue in the 1960s.

However, Conner was not really a Mad Man. A younger generation of artists and writers came along after Conner and were responsible for that revolution.

It’s unfortunate that the backers of the Conner exhibition felt they had to attach his name to a TV show to attract publicity. At the opening of the exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, the museum’s director gave a talk in which she gestured to Conner and said, “Here’s a Mad Man, sitting right here, the original one!” But as Conner himself confessed in an interview with the Guardian, “I didn’t know what she was talking about then!”

The museum successfully drummed up publicity for the show as far away as England by leading viewers to believe they were seeing “the real Don Draper from Mad Men.” But it would have been more accurate, and it would have done a greater service to the history of illustration, if the museum had exposed audiences to one of the other vibrant periods where Conner had played a larger role.

Conner’s career actually began in the 1930s before some of the genuine Mad Men were even born. He painted his first cover for the Post in 1937, depicting a very different era than the young, hip world of advertising depicted in the TV show.

Here we see how Conner worked with a traditional realistic style, using humor that was popular in the 1930s but would seem dated by the ’60s when advertisers were trying to appeal to newly “liberated” women.

 

Cover
An illustration by Mac Conner for the September 9, 1939, cover of the Post. (©SEPS)

 

Cover
An illustration by Mac Conner for the April 13, 1937, cover of the Post. (©SEPS)

 

Looking back over Conner’s long career, we can see that he lived and worked through many different periods of American illustration that were every bit as influential and creative as the “Mad Men” era. They just haven’t had the good fortune to be selected for a TV series yet, so modern audiences aren’t as interested in them.

Conner was born in 1913, the era of the “Gibson Girl,” when illustrator Charles Dana Gibson (and a flock of imitators) set a nationwide standard for the ideal modern woman.

 

Woman with long hair
Charles Dana Gibson’s iconic Gibson Girl. 

 

Gibson’s iconic woman had a huge influence on American popular attitudes. It gave a boost to the suffrage movement that resulted in the vote for women and shaped America’s taste for the first female movie stars at the beginning of the movie industry.

A few years later, when Conner was a boy, illustrators again set the tone, this time by creating the images for the Gatsby era and the Jazz Age with the hugely popular Arrow Collar Man invented by J.C. Leyendecker …

 

Couple dancing
Illustration for Arrow Collars by J.C. Leyendecker.

 

…and the “flapper,” invented by John Held Jr.

 

Couple Dancing
.Cover for Life Magazine, 1926. 

 

These icons had a tremendous influence on the clothing, hair styles, fashions, and popular culture of their day.

As Conner grew up in the 1920s, the streamlined look of Art Deco dominated American culture in magazines such as Vanity Fair.

Train advertisementIllustrators such as Leslie Ragan helped shape the image of the Art Deco era. Ragan illustrated a series of train posters, such as this one from 1939.

The Art Deco look influenced the style of cars, buildings, and furniture. You can see it in all those Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies of the 1930s.

Conner began working as a professional illustrator in the 1930s and continued to work in the 1940s and 50s as tastes evolved through the Great Depression and World War II. Many illustrators adopted a “noir” look, a hardboiled, dark, shadowy genre which became very popular in illustration, detective movies and fiction:

 

Woman in front of car
Illustration by Mead Schaeffer for “Blue Roadster” by Corey Ford in The American Magazine, May, 1941.

 

Conner sometimes worked in a version of this noir style, as seen in this example from 1954.

 

Gunman shooting a policeman
Illustration for “Killer in the Club Car” from This Week Magazine, November 14, 1954. © Mac Connerom This Week Magazine, November 14, 1954. © Mac Conner. 

 

Styles and fads came and went during the post-war years, always with America’s illustrators leading the way in fashioning the visual taste of the era in magazines, advertisements, calendars, and posters.

In the late 1950s, waves of new consumer products sparked by post-war prosperity and the new popularity of television transformed public taste again. Conner updated his style to follow these trends.

The late 1950s paved the way for the Mad Men that were featured in the TV series. Fresh talent surged to the field of illustration in the 1960s. Illustrators and innovators at the prominent Cooper Studios and Push-pin Studios, and artists such as Bob Peak, Jack Potter, Bernie Fuchs and Peter Max worked with Madison Avenue to develop distinctive styles that fueled the “Mad Men” legend. Life was fast, advertising budgets were huge, and our culture was reinventing itself. Conner’s old fashioned style was very different from the ultra-cool look of the Mad Men era, as seen in this illustration by Bob Peak:

 

Military men
Illustration by Bob Peak for an airline advertisement.

 

The true Mad Men deserve the credit for their accomplishment. While it is not accurate to advertise Conner as the original Mad Man, he did adjust his approach to work in the popular style of the 1960s.

 

Women looking at cowboy
Illustration by Conner for The Saturday Evening Post. ©SEPS

 

Man and woman
Illustration by Conner for The Saturday Evening Post. ©SEPS

 

Looking back over Conner’s career, we can see that American illustration has been a long, noisy, colorful circus train of styles, techniques, and inventions. The Mad Men era was just one brief period of American creativity among many that would be equally fascinating for study.

Let’s hope that the success of the Mad Men television show will serve as a catalyst for reaching back to some of the other phases of American illustration in Conner’s lifetime, now frequently forgotten but just as bold and exciting and rewarding, awaiting the same rediscovery.

North Country Girl: Chapter 19 — Duluth Dentists Gone Wild

For more about Gay Haubner’s life in the North Country, read the other chapters in her serialized memoir. The Post will publish a new segment each week. 

 

My dad would shake his head over the Cs on my report card from gym and home ec, ignoring the As in math, history, science, and English (Bs in Spanish); did he not know who I was? I had always excelled at anything that required brain power; ask my fingers or legs or arms to do something, and I was as helpless as an earthworm.

My grades were good enough that my parents had no compunctions about pulling me out of seventh grade for a week. A dental convention in Mexico City was the tax-deductible impetus for a tour through Acapulco, Taxco, and Cuernavaca. My dad thought the exposure to a foreign culture would be good for me. Heidi was not yet two, and Lani, as usual, was the middle child afterthought: they got left at home with the sitter. I, the smart one, the lucky one, the anointed, flew south with my parents and grandparents.

My father’s favorite thing was to travel without hotel reservations. I was not on the trip to the New York City where my parents had to spend the night in a second-floor walk-up hotel in Harlem, back when Harlem was Harlem. I was on the family skiing trip in Wisconsin over a holiday weekend, when we drove for hours in the dark, passing one neon NO VACANCY sign after another. In the middle of the night we finally stopped at a hunting lodge that had closed for the season, but whose owners had stayed on. By a miracle this lovely old couple were awake and felt sorry enough for the exhausted-looking family to let us spend the night in one of the unheated cabins. They even made us breakfast.

This, however, was an American Dental Association trip, which meant fancy hotels, bus tours, and meals at restaurants where the most Mexican item on the menu was a margarita. In Acapulco my parents and I were given a luxury two-bedroom suite at the El Presidente hotel, as evidently the roll away bed had not yet been introduced to Mexico. Floor to ceiling windows looked out over the famously beautiful Acapulco Bay, a vision I thrilled to again while watching the first season of I Spy, and then, eight years later, from the balcony of a high-rise condo, while making out with a playboy from Chicago who was twenty-two years older than me.

Acapulco Bay
Acapulco Bay. (Nammer @Flickr, Wikimedia Commons)

My first day in Acapulco I was pulled sputtering and floundering out of a fierce undertow by a sharp-eyed dentist while my own dad was getting drunk at the bar. Heavy drinking Minnesota dentists plus cheap Mexican booze equaled a non-stop party that started in the morning with Bloody Marias and ended when someone got hurt or sick. Dentists were jumping off roofs into pools, getting into fistfights, laughing so hard on burro rides they pissed themselves. I was the only kid in this group, and as I was small and quiet (even when drowning) I went as unnoticed as a salt shaker, even by my own family.

I finally piped up during a drunken dinner at a fancy restaurant when I saw a flaming baked Alaska cross the room and was struck that here was the height of sophistication. Cake, ice cream, meringue, and a fire! If only I had a baked Alaska of my own I could die happy. I was certain that my request would not be granted: the usual answer to “Can we have dessert?” at a restaurant alternated between concern for our teeth from my father and “We have ice cream at home” from my mother. But my dad was tipsy and in a benevolent mood and my mom was too busy worrying about what drunken dental hijinks were in store that night. I felt like a princess when the waiter set the blue-flamed baked Alaska in front of me. It was Neapolitan ice cream set on a slice of chocolate cake, surrounded by hot, sticky, marshmallow-y goo, and it was delicious.

Baked Alaska ice cream
Baked Alaska. (Ralph Daily, Wikimedia Commons)

The last day in Acapulco the dentists who were not too hungover and their wives gathered around a open space between the hotel and the beach to watch three men dressed as Aztec warriors fling themselves off a 40-foot pole, anchored by vines knotted around their ankles. While I watched agog as they twirled around the rotating pole, I overheard two dental wives discussing the night before. Little pitchers do have big ears. A taxi driver had offered to take some of the dentists and their wives to see a “show” at a whorehouse.

Performers
Totonacs of Papantla, Veracruz performing the “voladores” ritual. (Frank C. Müller, Wikimedia Commons)

During the show, one of the group, in a perfect storm of drunkenness, decided to participate. But it was a not a dentist, but Mrs….here the woman’s voice dropped to a whisper, so I’ll never know which of the wives, hiding behind the cat’s eye sunglasses and under ugly straw hats purchased for way too many pesos from the voracious beach vendors, women who were sun-burned or coping with Montezuma’s revenge or hungover or all three, which of these demur ladies had ripped off her clothes and jumped on to the stage at the whorehouse and into the arms of the leading man.

TV Dinner
Swanson Mexican Style Dinner. (http://tvdinners.wikia.com)

Once away from the Acapulco nightlife, the dentists dried out and recuperated in Taxco and Cuernavaca, pretty colonial towns with pastel houses covered in bougainvillea, that featured boring tours of silver and pottery stores. In Taxco my father stepped off the tour bus and, instead of heading for the air-conditioned hotel for lunch, took me into the most flyblown, dingy restaurant on the plaza. We sat by the greasy front window at a table as sticky as flypaper, even though miraculously the 500 flies buzzing around our heads seemed able to resist setting down there, preferring to wait till the food arrived. As my dad was ordering the enchiladas suizas (how did he even know what that was? The only Mexican food I had seen in Duluth was in a Swanson’s Mexican Style TV dinner, where every brown component in the foil tray tasted the same), my mom and grandmom appeared at the open doorway, afraid to step inside in case germs clung to the soles of their shoes. Both moms ordered us to get out of there and not touch anything. I dutifully obeyed, but my dad just grinned and tucked into a huge platter of green and white something, while the waiter stood behind, waving off flies with a menu. My grandmother turned bilious just looking at the enchiladas; my dad finished the whole thing, burped, gave the waiter the equivalent of 90 cents, and felt absolutely fine.

My mother was not so lucky. She not only got sick from almost everything she ate, she had a terrible reaction to the smallpox vaccine the Dental Association recommended she get before traveling south of the border. She spent the night of the big formal gala at the actual convention in Mexico City puking and watching her arm swell up to the size of an elephant’s trunk. I was sent off to find my dad at the party, which was held on the top floor of our fancy hotel. He refused to leave, being several margaritas in and, never having experienced any illness himself outside of killer hangovers, didn’t believe anyone could get sick from a shot. I grabbed some food off a tray and went back to our room, my book, and the scary sounds emanating from the bathroom.

I was now a sophisticated world traveler.  I had been out of the United States! I never missed an opportunity to mention my travels, until even my best friend Wendy finally asked me to shut up about Mexico. But summer camp provided a whole new audience. I embellished my travelogue for my bunkmates, giving myself a handsome 16-year old Mexican boyfriend, Andres. In this new version, it wasn’t a balding orthodontist from Edina who pulled me out of the undertow in front of the El Presidente hotel, it was Andres, who then fell instantly in love with me, a reverse Little Mermaid. I spun a tale of Andres sneaking into our suite when my parents were out; how we would make out passionately on the sofa overlooking the lights of the bay. I confessed that Andres tenderly tried to stick his hand under my shirt, but I held him in check, despite his protestations of undying love. I told and retold the story of my imaginary romance so often that I almost came to believe it myself. For the two weeks of camp, I was the most popular girl in our bunkhouse, and even the counselors looked at me as if I might be interesting.

I came back from camp that seventh grade summer, basking in my fraudulent role as resident boy expert and sadly aware that I didn’t want to go to camp anymore. What if all of those camp girls who boasted of boyfriends and their extensive knowledge of sex were just big fakers too?

Magazine Ad
An ad for Grit Magazine. 

I had just gotten home when Wendy called to tell me that she had overheard Rick Bryers (one of my heartthrobs) and Steve Puloski talking about me. Two boys who knew I was alive? I couldn’t imagine what they had to say. Could they possible think I was cute? Wendy in all her innocence or malice, told me “Rick told Steve he had seen you at the Northland pool” (my racing thoughts: I did look adorable in my first two-piece suit, a red and white Hawaiian floral, what was Rick Bryers doing at Northland Country Club and….HE NOTICED ME AND KNEW MY NAME) “and Steve” (who was universally despised by the entire seventh grade for many reasons, including putting Fizzies in the biology teacher’s fish tank and showing up at all of our houses trying to sell Grit magazine or packages of seeds or greeting cards) “Steve said to Rick…flat as a board, huh?” After that there was a roaring in my ears. I hung up the phone and vowed I would never go to school again.

But I did, and eighth grade followed seventh as if it were Ground Hog Day: I was the star pupil in English, math, science, and even boring Minnesota state history. I was still chosen last when sides were picked for volleyball (why couldn’t the gym teacher simply divide the class in two?) and still regularly forgot to bring my gym uniform to school. I endured a second year of being taught useless domestic skills in home ec. I forgave Wendy for squashing my dreams of true romance with Rick Bryers and spent as many weekends as I could at her weird dorm apartment. We’d flip through that month’s Seventeen magazine, debate the merits of Napoleon vs. Ilya, review every comment made to us by a boy during the past week for signs of infatuation (“When he asked me what the caf had for lunch, did he want to sit with me?”), and try to figure out what the popular girls had that we didn’t (which was, in the end, their popularity, which made everything else — their clothes, their hair styles, their manner of speaking — admirable and something to emulate). We were two glasses-wearing, violin-playing nerds, but we had each other.

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This article is featured in the September/October 2017 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

 

Broadway All-Stars: The Dream Team that Conceived West Side Story

Sixty years ago, the curtain at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway rose to reveal the Jets, a teenage gang, snapping, kicking, and rumbling with the Sharks, a rival Puerto Rican gang. It was the opening night of West Side Story, a musical remake of Romeo and Juliet that combined the talents of Broadway big-wigs Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, and Stephen Sondheim. Their show opened with Larry Kert, Carol Lawrence, and Chita Rivera in starring roles.

The next day, Pulitzer-winning critic Walter Kerr wrote, in the New Herald Tribune, “The radioactive fallout from West Side Story must still be descending on Broadway this morning.” The musical became famous for its electric choreography and timely story of gang violence in New York, running for 732 performances with six Tony nominations. In 1961, the film adaptation won 10 Oscars and was later preserved in the National Film Registry.

Carol Lawrence and Larry Kert sang their intimate number, “Tonight,” on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1958, spending most of the song in a tight embrace. Despite their ages, 25 and 27, respectively, the star-crossed pair was able to convince audiences they were two teens in the throes of youthful passion.

 

 

In 1964 the Post covered Lawrence and her workaholic approach to show business in “Lawrence of Illinois.” Normand Poirier wrote, “Few have ever butted with more ferocity. For West Side Story she auditioned 13 times in 11 months. For one TV show she rehearsed 17 hours straight while ill with mononucleosis.” Poirier noted that during the taping of the 1958 Ed Sullivan Show performance Lawrence used the short tech breaks to chat with the orchestra about their upcoming club show. Since she would be using the same guys, she wanted to make sure their timing would be perfect.

Lawrence wasn’t the only perfectionist in the original Broadway production either. According to Humphrey Burton’s biography of Leonard Bernstein, the composer was constantly at odds with Robbins and Laurents, fighting to keep his sweeping, dramatic music in the show that Robbins was intent on making a hallmark of dance theatre. Despite, or maybe because of, their struggle, both were successful in creating a musical that delivered on all fronts. Sondheim made modest contributions in the way of lyrics, but he would go on to become undisputed Broadway royalty.

Though it was thought to be, perhaps, too dark for Broadway audiences at the time (“Who wanted to see a show in which the first-act curtain comes down on two dead bodies lying on the stage?” Leonard Bernstein told The Rolling Stone), West Side Story is now a classic of musical theatre. Performances, from high school productions to Broadway revivals, are still staged prolifically. The tale of young love is supposed to star teenagers anyway, as long as they can nail the tricky note intervals in “Maria.”

 

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Read “Lawrence of Illinois” by Normand Poirer. Published on March 21, 1964 in the Post.

As American as Pizza Pie: How Pizza Has Changed Since 1870

There’s something about pizza that seems to fire the human imagination. Today, Americans have nearly unlimited choices of crusts and toppings.

If pizza lovers are willing to travel, they can get a pizza that’s deep fried in New York, or one that has a sweet potato crust in Los Angeles. Around the country, imaginative pizza artisans (pizzologists? pizzeristas?) are adding caviar, sushi, tandoori chicken, eggplant, pancetta, and smoked reindeer to their creations. And they’re offering unusual combinations, too, like strawberries and chicken, shrimp and guacamole, peaches and prosciutto, and caramelized onions, apples, and goat cheese.

Even pizza delivery has been upgraded. Impatient customers now can track the progress of their delivery by GPS, and Domino’s is testing delivery via driverless car.

All this creative thinking was inspired by a food that, for centuries, was just a flour crust with tomato slices and seasonings. The Saturday Evening Post has been tracing the evolution of the humble pizza for nearly 150 years.

The lowly tomato pie is first mentioned in our November 21, 1835, issue in a column from The Rural Economist trying to convince readers of the tomato’s merits: “There are few who relish it at first sight.” Despite Americans’ apparently chilly reception to the tomato, the author soldiers on: “Some will give a decided preference to a dish of tomato sauce or a tomato pie, when properly prepared, to any thing of the kind in the vegetable kingdom.”

Thirty-five years later, in 1870, the tomato-in-crust makes another appearance, although this recipe for tomato pie is most definitely more “pie” than “pizza.”

TOMATO PIE-Take two large ripe Feejee or other tomatoes of the same size, drop them into boiling water to remove the skin, then, with a sharp knife, cut them into thin slices, put the crust in an ordinary pie-pan, as for berry pie; cover the bottom with a layer of the tomatoes, then a layer of sugar and butter, then of tomatoes, then of sugar and butter as before; flavor with either lemon, orange peel, or nutmeg, to the taste. Cover with the top crust, bake, and bring to the table hot — (cold tomato pie is not good).

—October 8, 1870

This recipe was offered among several others, including cold partridge pie and chow chow. The author’s judgment is not to be trusted, however, based on his or her condemnation of cold pizza.

One of the earliest toppings of modern pizza was anchovies. Here is one recipe described in 1927:

A typical Tuscan menu was prepared and served by Giovanni Pisani, capo cuoco, or top chef, of one of Florence’s leading hotels. He started off with Pizza alla Paesana:

Prepare a large, flat brioche, unsweetened, about ten inches in diameter and an inch thick. Place the brioche in a shallow baking pan. On top of brioche place a layer of sliced tomatoes. Scatter on top of the tomatoes about ten or fifteen filets of anchovy. Over all place thin slices of cheese similar to Mozzarella. Spray a little olive oil over it, season with salt and pepper and cook in oven for about twenty minutes.”

—“A Cook’s Tour,” by restaurateur George Rector, December 3, 1927

The author notes that mozzarella was a cheese native to Italy and unlikely to be found in America.

Pizza might have remained an obscure Italian dish if American soldiers hadn’t discovered it during World War II. By 1948, it was even appearing in Post fiction. It now had a thinner crust, but it still had those anchovies:

The little old man stood behind a counter, kneading a ball of dough. Presently he began to stretch it with light, deft fingers until it was large and round and paper-thin. He brushed it with olive oil, sliced bits of hard white cheese over the surface and poured on a thick tomato sauce. Then he arranged anchovy fillets across the top and sprinkled freshly ground pepper and oregano over everything. With a long-handled, flat wooden shovel he lifted it up and slid it into the huge oven behind him. …

Tony fed the juke box another nickel, and they danced some more, until the pizza was baked to a delicate melting brown. Then Papa Joe slipped it onto a big tin plate and cut it quickly into large sections, and Tony showed her how to eat it, flipping the tip of the triangle back over the filling and holding it over a paper napkin.

—“The Low-Brow and the Lady,” by Gertrude Schweitzer, October 2, 1948

That same year, the Post’s sister publication, Country Gentleman, ran an article on backyard barbecuing and offered a recipe for “Campfire Pizza.”

Add ⅔ cup of milk or water to 1 cup of prepared biscuit mix, and beat 1 minute. Spread in a well-greased 10-inch skillet.

Cover with 1 cup of cooked tomatoes, and sprinkle with ½ cup of cubed American cheese, cup of grated Parmesan cheese and 4 cups of salad oil. Season with salt and pepper.

Cover and cook over a rather slow fire 20 to 25 minutes, or until lightly browned on the underside, and the cheese is melted. Cut into pie-shaped pieces for serving. Serve while still hot to 6 hungry campers.

—“Cook It Outdoors,” by Sara Hervey, September 1948

Ten years later, America had finally figured pizza out. A Post article by Richard Gehman in November 30, 1957, rhapsodizes over pizza,

…that wondrously flavorful, smoky-crusted, crisp or chewy pie of Neapolitan origin, bubbling with hot melted cheese and rich sauce from Italian plum tomatoes, dotted with bits of sizzling, succulent sausage or laced with soft, salty anchovies, sprinkled with parsley or oregano and dusted with musty Parmesan cheese.

Pizza had swept the nation, particularly Los Angeles, where restaurateur Patsy D’Amore prospered: “His restaurant, where Joe DiMaggio wooed Marilyn Monroe with pizza, is highly esteemed by movie stars. Frank Sinatra, whose fondness for pizza is almost legendary, goes there several nights a week.”

From such primitive beginnings, pizza has continued to evolve. The cooks of 150 years ago likely wouldn’t recognize the modern pizza, with toppings like rhubarb and barbecue sauce. And who knows what tomorrow’s adventurous chefs have planned? What we can predict is that if you have the perfect, crisp crust and some juicy, vine-ripe tomatoes, you can’t go too far wrong.

Featured image: Pizzeria in Napoli, circa 1910 (Wikimedia Commons)