July 8, 2004

• When I was very young, my father sold Chevrolet cars at a dealership. It was so long ago, I tend to think it was when we lived in Silver Lake, right when we moved to the L.A. area in around 1955 or so, and this makes sense, because the postcards I remember were of the cars of that era.  A while back I “stumbled” across a website that featured some of these postcards, and I’ve never found a space on my website to portray them. If I remembered the name of the website where I stole these postcards from, I would supply the link, but I don’t seem to have it. The images which you see here are typical of the types of postcards that the dealership would mail out at the beginning of the “sales year” to homes in the area of the dealership. I can’t remember seeing postcards like this past the decade of the sixties, but I still have in my postcard collection a large “introductory” postcard showing the 1964-/1/2 Ford Mustang when it first came out. Times were “slower” in the fifties and sixties, and the auto dealerships were part of the “community” so these postcards not only served as advertising, but “introduced” the dealer to the community, especially to new folks on the block. I was always “thrilled” when I looked at the postcards when Dad would bring them home. The cars were always featured with beautiful women dressed in the finest clothing styles of the day, and special “props” were placed around the cars so they looked like they existed in a “special life” that really existed only in the advertising of the time. The fifties and the sixties were the “golden age of advertising”. I feature some neat advertisements throughout history on my Cultrual Blender website in the “Advertising” section. This is one website for which I had great plans but never really embellished it after the intital “spurt” of creativity.   The cars here are all Chevrolets. The wagon at the top is from 1955. The two door  and the convertible are from 1957. The last image is a sedan from 1956. Note the strategically placed driftwood in the picture on the left and the “pilot” coming down from his “plane” in the photo below. One of my “memories” of a lithe woman swimmer on a diving board above a nonexistent pool.

  I’ve had these images on my puter for some time now, and this is a perfect place to present them, and also to add the links to two more sections of the massive website. The final image is a 56. Oh what a time it was back then, in between “wars” when everybody seemed to be doing good financially and culturally. (well, “almost” everybody, this was pre-feminist/pre-civil rights America, I’m not forgetting)  As I mentioned in one of my many blogs, commenting on the ”new” version of ”The Stepford Wives” (which got only 4 of 10 on the Mikometer, a lousy effort as a movie) my favorite part of the movie was the credit sequence which shows a bunch of advertising images of the fifties and sixties, with beautifully coiffed models displaying the latest stoves and refrigerators. Old ads almost achieve “art” status in their naivete and wholesomeness, showing us an America that never existed except in the minds of the Madison Avenue Moguls. Advertising was the Computer Industry of it’s day, and Mad Ave was the Silicon Valley. 

  

  • 9:42 pm
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