“Hasn’t her teacher got her playing a little out of character?”

December 1948

“I put all your perfume into one bottle so you’ll have more room on your dresser.”

December 1960

“Just read the poem, Mercedes…don’t ham it up.”

1957

“I won again!”

March/April 1998

“The way you pestered that nice lady—I’ll bet she’ll be glad to see you gone!”

May/June 1999

“I sure hope I grow up to be beautiful—’cause if I can’t get by on my looks, I’m doomed.”

September/October 2006

Cartoons: Little Girls The Saturday Evening Post

“Well, sonny, what sort of mischief
have you been up to today?”

May 1959

“A baby sister’s all right—but there’s a lot of things
we needed more.”

November 1950

“Well, now what do you feel like doing?”

December 1988

“Have you seen a little boy
dressed like an Indian go by here?”

May 1959

“—you’ll find a hole in the fence, then turn right down th’ alley, cut catty-cornered across Husting’s backyard and over a brick wall at the grocery…”

November 1948

“I made the school band!”

September 1953

Cartoons: Boys Will Be Boys The Saturday Evening Post

The Fat Lady Sings by Dick Sargent

The Fat Lady Sings
Dick Sargent
December 16, 1961

American Idol wannabes, take note: When everyone is wincing, get a clue. Everybody but the pretty blond at the piano, that is, who still has fun even if the lady in blue is drowning everyone out. The male quartet is not happy. Make that a quintet – Beethoven is apparently in pain.

The Trumpeter by Norman Rockwell

The Trumpeter
Norman Rockwell
November 18, 1950

This is not the musician’s posture a teacher would demand. The idea for the painting came when Post editor Ben Hibbs talked to Norman Rockwell about the contortionistic body positions of his son playing the instrument. The dog’s expression is either terror at the strange sounds emitting from that thing or concern that the instrument is somehow hurting the kid (or vice versa).

Rockwell’s incredible eye for detail certainly shows in the chair’s slipcover. Does the charming pattern look familiar? Rockwell fashioned the fabric from a painting done by Grandma Moses, a good friend of his. Oh, and love the socks!

Making Music by Alfred E. Orr

Making Music
Alfred E. Orr
June 25, 1921

Everyone’s a critic! This dog has a definite opinion about the clarinet. Artist Alfred E. Orr did six Saturday Evening Post covers, including this delight from 1921.

Offkey Harpist by E.M. Jackson

Offkey Harpist
E.M. Jackson
April 4, 1925

It’s bad enough when the bust of Beethoven winces, but when the instrument itself covers its ears, you are really off-key. Artist E.M. Jackson did 58 covers for the Post and her sister publication, Country Gentleman with subjects from sad to glamorous to downright whimsical, like this one.

Jamming with Dad by John Falter

Jamming with Dad
John Falter
December 1, 1956

Jazz greats like Louie Armstrong adorn the walls and pops is sure getting into it, but the tunes just don’t click with the teens. This 1956 generation gap cover was by one of our most beloved artists, John Falter.

Thank you for your comments and suggestions on cover features, like “could you show us some covers people often mistake for Rockwells?” We’ll be glad to do it in the next installment.

Classic Covers: Music Critics The Saturday Evening Post

There’s a disastrous dearth.

Grown kids move home to stay.

You’re back to giving berth.

Lois Muehl

Iowa City, Iowa

Circumstances The Saturday Evening Post

The human animal is a perverse creature. Dr. Louis Berg, a psychiatrist who has studied this aspect of personality, points out that we seek not only security but also insecurity.

“From childhood on,” Doctor Berg says, “the human being likes to flirt with danger. Every child likes to be thrown into the air. It will scream in terror, and yet ask you to throw it up again. The child likes to skirt the edge of danger. It is a kind of secure insecurity. And an amusement park ride must always be dangerous and yet safe. This tendency goes so deep that I would call it a “prepotent reflex,” an instinct to seek mild suffering. More people are masochistic than sadistic, really.

“For the adult to go on a roller coaster is for him to experience a pattern of emotions which brings him back to the ‘secure insecurity’ of childhood, and this is one of the sources of the perverse pleasure attached to riding on a roller coaster.”

The greater the perceived risk, then, the greater the pleasure (if you enjoy that sort of thing).

This question of the danger of rides baffles most of the men in the industry. Some of them say that an accident actually booms business. Now and then, a drunk or a youthful bravo stands up in the car as the coaster takes the dip, and is flung out to his death. In some parks, there will be a long line of customers at the ticket office the next day. In other places, business will drop off for weeks afterward until the accident is forgotten.

Amusement parks knew how extremely safe their rides were, but they could never reveal this to customers. Rather, they engineered the ride to increase the perception of danger.

What seems to make the roller coaster the most zestfully dangerous of all rides is that it involves a speedy rising and falling motion, and also that the car is, so to speak, not under any control, but is proceeding by gravitational pull.

The nauseating experience of pleasant agony is the combination of drops and turns, of banks and dips, the contrasts between slow and fast, and the general illusion of danger which the designer creates.

“I been building these twisters about forty, forty-one years, I guess,” [Jim] McKee said. McKee, now the chief engineer in charge of torment, mayhem and hysteria at Palisades Amusement Park, in New Jersey, studied engineering at Carnegie Tech.

“The main idea of the thing,” he explained, his blue eyes twinkling genially, “is you got to scare the people mentally because actually there is nothing to be afraid of in the ride. The whole thing is in the mind. You take the roller coaster. The average twister don’t do no more than thirty, forty miles an hour. Our Bobsled ride, here at Palisades, she’s fast — she does about sixty an hour, just about the fastest coaster in the business. Our Skyrocket does about fifty. Well, sir, you know the average person will think nothing of doing seventy, eighty in a car.

“Or take, on the other hand, a pilot on a pursuit plane that does three hundred miles an hour. He will take a ride on the Skyrocket and she’ll scare the pants off him. It’s all in the illusion. It’s in the mind of the rider. A feller in a plane; he’s up in the sky all by himself, riding with the clouds, and it don’t seem so terrible fast. But we put him in a roller coaster, and we get the cars jangling and screeching, and those wooden posts go by like crazy, and of course the wind is slapping him in the face, and, by gosh, he thinks he is going like a bat out of hell. It’s all in the mind, mister,” concluded McKee.

Engineering has improved greatly since 1945, though. Today, there’s less need for illusion because passengers are moving faster, going farther, riding higher and falling quicker than ever before. The fastest roller coaster moves at more than 125 miles per hour; you don’t need to appeal to riders’ imagined fears when you move that fast. You can find roller coasters that rise 456 feet in the air, or travel over 8,000 feet. And the most challenging rides don’t simply descend at forty-five or sixty degrees, but at 90 degrees. Straight down.

I just understand the appeal. I think there’s something wrong with my “prepotent reflex.”

Read “Ride ‘Em And Weep,” [PDF].

When Science Takes You for a Ride The Saturday Evening Post

Our cover artists, quite inventive in their own right, have been chronicling America’s quirky new devices for decades. In observing our reactions to them, they have shown we are all pretty much like kids with new toys (with the exception of Rutherford B. Hayes, that is). It’s the kids, however, who take to the “new” at lightning speed, be it telephones, computers, or e-books. They garner new technologies for their own use, leaving their clueless elders far behind. And kids are inventive, too. But look out when they start thinking they are Henry Ford, the Wright brothers, or Alfred Nobel (inventor of dynamite). Kids in inventor mode, our artists suggest, can sometimes be unsettling.

Contributing writer: Joan SerVaas.

Classic Covers: Children of Invention The Saturday Evening Post

Name the Candy Bar – Candy bars melted in baby diapers are passed around the room as guests stick their noses in the diaper attempting to guess what kind of candy bar it is. (This game provides “Kodak moments” a plenty!)

Wrap the Mommy – Guests tear off the number of squares of toilet paper they estimate it will take to wrap around the new mommy’s tummy.

Baby Food Sampling – Guests pass around jars of baby food (labels removed) as they smell or taste the contents and write down their guess of baby food.

Baby Price Is Right – guests are shown different baby items such as wipes, diapers, rattles, bibs, and such. The goal is to correctly guess the price of the items. The guest who comes the closest wins.

Baby Bingo – Each guest is given a bingo card with baby gifts in each square. As the guest of honor unwraps presents, the guests mark off those that appear on their bingo card.

Sticker Swap – Each guest is provided a sticker with instructions that they may not speak words such as baby, cute, or girl, and if they are heard uttering one of those words by another guest, that guest takes their sticker. The person with the most stickers at the end of the shower wins.

Name The Parents – Photos of celebrity children clipped from pop-culture magazines are passed around as guests determine which celebrity parents belong to each child.

April Brings Baby Showers The Saturday Evening Post