Bygones: The Bed-In-A-Car

Nash Motors Company was a spunky little contender in the automaking field from 1916 until it merged with Hudson to form American Motors in 1954.  In 1936, Nash introduced the "bed car," a convenience for tourists and campers, which was a thing for a while.

Cover of 1937 Nash brochure

Nash's top-of-the-line Ambassador Eight, 1937

Specs for all Nash models, 1937

Popular Science article, May 1936

It's that new Nash, 1939

Newspaper ad, March 1941

Worldwide map of Nash dealerships, 1937

Wait, what did you say?  "Big enough to sleep two six-footers."  Hmm.

Carl Hardee Sr. Returns

Your Head Trucker has never heard of Carls Jr. - I don't think they have those joints in this part of the world - okay, I stand corrected by M. P., who says there's one right down the road here - but Daddy is my kind of guy. I tell you what.

Pool Boy

New ad from Coca-Cola:

I Am Your Father

New ad from Campbell's Soup featuring gay dads:

Which Way Do You Sway?

Via Joe.My.God., handed out at Philly Pride:

A Touch of Magic

This is the gayest ad for GM cars and Frigidaire appliances ever. Enjoy.

My Buick, My Love, and I

Click to enlarge.

The 1955-56 Buicks were beautiful, and so are the many gorgeous ads produced for the company in those years by the renowned illustration team of Art Fitzpatrick and Van Kaufman - a sampling of which you see above.

When I was a kid, my mom had a blue '55 Buick - it was a good car.  Here's a video compilation of more Buicks from the late 1940;s down to 1958.  Love those portholes (which actually delivered air to the operable side vents under the dashboard) and the elegant side swoop, which was a Buick feature on some models down to the early 1970's.




And just for fun, let's go back to the future in this 1956 General Motors promotional film, and find out what kind of automated highways we'll be able to travel in the scintillating, high-tech year of 1976!

Honey Maid: Love

Sweet.




The original ad:




The gay family:

Love and Pasta for All!

I reckon you fellas have heard that the head of Barilla pasta really stepped into it this week.  Here's a legit ad response from a competitor in Germany:

click to enlarge

Gotta love it. But - who knew there was more than one company that made pasta? We're just not that into it down here in the provinces.  When I need noodles, I just buy the cheap store brand.

Bertolli also made a (somewhat strange) gay-themed video ad in 2009:





In other news: ExxonMobil to provide same-sex marriage benefits.  About damn time, it's been overruled at stockholders' meetings each year for the last sixteen years.

Waitin' for the Weekend

The magnificent David Anthony from Titan Men

Note: This last is apparently a genuine Kraft ad, published recently in People magazine, of all places. Jeezus. I mean, seriously?

Guest Post: Gay Imagery

Another thought-provoking essay by my truckbuddy Tim in Spain:

GAY IMAGERY – Eye candy or bad for our health?

Well, it’s nice to be back after a long vacation. Russ was hoping I would have some more Universal Truths for you when I returned, but in 4 weeks I didn’t think about them once! What I did do when I got home was to check out my favourite blogs and cruise the imagery, and you know what? I was disappointed, and actually somewhat irritated with the pictures I found, like those below, for example. I'll explain what I mean as we go along.

The Salacious Look. This sort of ‘knowing’ look from the model is becoming very popular at the moment, but at who’s expense? The guy, like most models, well at least 9 out of 10, is probably straight, but he knows who his audience is. Look at his eyes–he’s saying, “Look at me, I’m your fantasy, but you can’t have me. If I lick my pit like this it will turn you on, but you still can’t have me.” It’s us, the viewers, who are being manipulated here: the image is a manufactured tease, and there are plenty more like it.

The Chocolate Box Fantasy. Another popular style, the fantasy couple, photo shopped and air-brushed to the point of making a sterile image that is devoid of any real feeling or affection–“Chocolate Box” looks that are not even chocolate, just 100% sugar. I’m not sure what this picture is meant to portray, the bonds of love perhaps? But that’s not reflected in their expressions. Images like this rot your mind, just like sugar rots your teeth–it’s just pap!

Artsy Fartsy. The classical look, like black & white, has long been used to justify images of naked men as “art.” But his image just doesn’t cut the mustard. The guy is far too stocky and muscular to be considered “classically” proportioned. He’s cute, but our brawny friend is built more like a brick outhouse than Michelangelo’s’ David or a classical Greek youth. He’s got a great body, but the context is all wrong. In real life you just know he wouldn’t be seen dead in 10 yards of red voile! This isn’t art, although it pretends to be. He is prostituting himself for the sake of gay imagery, and we, as the intended market, have to accept some responsibility for that.

And it’s not just the fantasy image that can be bad for us. Let’s consider something to do with real life, images of the Gay Family. Here’s Ricky Martin, Carlos, and the kids:

This is a great image; the love and affection shine out. But images of gay families can be fraught with problems; it works here because they are all almost unbelievably cute. Put out an image of a less attractive or older couple with children, and it could look like something sinister. I know we can’t all look like Ricky, but you know what I mean; people who are not sympathetic to gay imagery will readily jump to the wrong conclusion. We don’t want to look like someone out grooming! So well done to Amtrak, whose image of a gay family in a recent ad campaign got it just about right in my view. A sensible spread of ages, and not too cute to be unbelievable.

And talking of adverts, just look at this one. I should say it’s French, so it’s quirky, but not hilariously so!



I really don’t know what to make of this ad. Superficially it’s amusing, but the human partner is a stereotypical advertising gay hunk (we all wish), and a cat with chiselled pecs and a six-pack! What are we meant to think of that (and if anyone says “turned on” that’s the WRONG answer!) Even for the quirky French this ad was deemed too much, and it was pulled shortly after release, as being “too polemic” which after I looked it up, seemed very apposite. Remember guys, these ads are being aimed at us. This is what the ad men think we gay men like!

Now let’s get on to the thorny problem of how we portray ourselves in public, specifically our image at Gay Pride marches:

This image is about as far as I suspect Russ will allow me to go, although last week’s “Waitin’ for the Weekend” was pretty racy! There are plenty more Pride images out there, more explicit, and not “blurred”! OK, the guys are happy, they are expressing their sexuality to the utmost, so far so good, but naked? NO, not in public!

Pride marches demonstrate lots of positive things about our community, and have served us well as a wake-up call to those who are too passive, or uninformed. They also provide a point of contact with the straight community, whose help and support we also continue to need. The downside is that it also provides those who do not share our views, or who may be ambivalent to our cause, with ammunition with which to demonstrate how depraved, debauched, etc., etc., gays are. Why provide the ammunition ourselves? Why let our team down with such ill considered imagery? Come on guys: march with some pride, present an image that will win support, not lose it. Have fun, dress up, dress down, but at the end of the day if you’re marching in public, keep it in your pants. It’s not big, and it’s not clever!

Finally let’s have a look at self-image. How do you want to look, and how can that be affected by gay imagery? So this bit’s about me, sorry!

This photo was taken on my 60th, it’s a raw image, not doctored (my partner is many things, but “professional photographer” is not one of them). That’s me on the left, no, the other left, concentrate! You know how you have a mental image of your self, how, in your mind you are a certain age? Well, in my mind I have been aged somewhere between 40 and 50 for many years. Many of my friends are younger than me, and you can delude yourself into thinking you are just like them, so my own self-image has not lagged far behind. Looking at all the young, virile, gay imagery in the blogosphere only served to reinforce my mind’s eye view, that I too, was similarly young and relatively handsome. The images from my birthday therefore came as a rude awakening. There I was, with crow’s feet, big nose, bags under the eyes, suddenly confronted with the reality of my age. Although I’m laughing, hale and hearty, if you look closer it’s easy to trace the tracks of my tears. Russ will confirm from our correspondence at the time that I had a period of melancholy shortly after my birthday, and these photos (there are more, worse!) were a contributory factor to my blues. Well, post-vacation I was laid up sick, flat on my back for a week, during which time I didn’t shave and so grew a beard. Here we are with a self-portrait.

And you know what? I think it’s great! My self-image has readjusted and I’m learning to accept I’m as old as I am. Plus I’m beginning to understand the whole gay “bear” thing at last. It gives my round “Charlie Brown” face more length, and so makes my ears and nose proportionally smaller. It also helps hide some of the additional chins, and IMHO gives me a more mature look that can cope with crow’s feet and bags! Even better, this version is almost completely white, previous beards having ranged from ginger to salt and pepper, so now it matches my chest hair, win-win! Image and self-esteem restored. So you see, your own image can say a lot more about you than just what you see in the photo, it can help your mind’s eye view as well, and that’s good for your health. BTW, does anyone want to hook up with a “Polar” “bear”?

That just about completes this ramble. I’m not advocating censorship or codes of practice, God forbid, and I appreciate that fantasy images can be source of relaxation and exercise for the imagination, but as we speak the Gay movement in the USA and Europe is maturing from adolescence to manhood. I believe that now is the time when we need to take more ownership of our communities’ imagery and to show more responsibility in our use of gay imagery, particularly when dealing with the straight community. And if you’re anti-assimilation sorry, you’re WRONG. We have campaigned to be accepted as normal, not to be treated as a special case! Remember, with gay imagery, just like candy, too much of a good thing can be bad for you. Hey whad’ya know, there was a Universal Truth in there after all!

Make It with a Fireman

Um, okay.

All Aboard the Gay Train

This is pretty fucking amazing, as Metroweekly reports:

J.C. Penney did it and now so has Amtrak. It has launched a promotional campaign that includes gay families.

As part of an effort to market its standard discounted family travel program, for the first time, the national passenger rail company included gay families in its materials. In an online ad sent by Instinct magazine to its email subscribers, a photo of same-sex parents with their child is featured.

Two version of the ad, one with a picture of a male couple and another with a female couple, were distributed. Both versions include the headline: Priceless Family Moments Are Now Affordable. The ad goes on to promote Amtrak's 50% off campaign for children age 2 to 15 who are traveling with an adult, and directs readers to its gay travel website, www.AmtrakRideWithPride.com.

Note: the Ride with Pride website is totally lame and mostly blank. Some of you travel queens out there need to complain about that.

I remember when my first husband and I rode Amtrak from the Deep South up to, first, D. C., where the Quilt was being displayed, then on to Boston and back, in 1992. I love train travel - it's the only way to go - and that was quite a trip.

Since the trip to D. C. took all day, from about 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., we took some naps in our seats, pulling a bomber jacket over us so we could hold hands underneath it while we dozed - and often one head rested on the other's one's shoulder. The old hard-bitten conductor gave us the evil eye every time he came down the aisle, but we didn't give a fuck. There were, understandably, a number of other gays making the trip on that same train - and it was a happy surprise to find that most of the passenger service attendants were gay, too.

Amtrak is not what it could be, should be - mainly because it is forever starved of cash by Congress, which won't let it die but won't let it flourish, either. Sometimes there are delays, and some of the non-gay attendants can be surly. Still, if the trains are going where you want to go at the right times, I highly recommend it - doubly so now.

Amtrak routes; click to enlarge.
Note:  Service between New Orleans and Jacksonville
has been suspended since Hurricane Katrina in 2005

That's So Gay: Advertising

Some magazine ads from the pre-Stonewall era that were, um, a bit ahead of their time, shall we say?  Click to enlarge:

Temps Perdu: 1948

.

The New Yorker, October 9, 1948
Click to enlarge.


This might become a new feature here on the Blue Truck:  a picture or two, perhaps with an audio/visual clip, from a bygone era.

The truth is, guys, your Head Trucker just doesn't want to write about the modern world much these days.  I'm aware of the major news stories, and I more or less keep up with the coverage of politics and especially LGBT issues highlighted by the blogs I list in the righthand sidebar for your convenience.

Yet even though the progress towards full equality continues apace, by halting steps - and here I might add, the general progress of the world, too - still, in this day and time, there is a certain nauseating sourness mixed into the stream of life, a hatefulness and nastiness that I'm sick of reading about and thinking about.

And it is wreaked not merely by the well-known bad guys who may be leaping immediately to your mind:  it's endemic in the modern world, a coarseness and harshness that pervades all levels of society; something none of us can help being tainted with, to some degree or other, just by being alive at this period. 

Of course, there has never been a Golden Age upon the earth, exempt from ignorance, folly, selfishness, self-righteousness, cruelty, and outright brutality.  But perhaps we are more aware of it all now, if we are paying attention, than ever before because of the widespread ease of communication - perhaps too easy in some ways - of this much-vaunted Information Age.

Then too, when you reach a certain age, as your Head Trucker has, long observation as well as painful disappointment have opened your eyes to what human nature is, and how the world really operates.  Even the nice people - beloved by friends and family alike, pillars of the community or just good neighbors - even the nicest people are, at bottom, and more often than not, actuated by self-interest rather than genuine love:  and thus even the very nicest people are capable of quiet cruelties and callous ruthlessness.

I could say more on this topic - a lot more - but to dwell upon a fact of life so large and so irremediable is deeply distressing, more than I can tell you.  And my voice is so small and weak, that of a lone sparrow in an immense forest, that it would serve no purpose to explain further.  Never complain, never explain, is a very good rule; when I was young, it made no sense to me, but now I understand completely.

Instead, I propose to blog more on pleasant things, and less on hateful ones.  Of course, sometimes one can hardly help speaking out on a subject one feels strongly about; but even if the dike is crumbling and the waters will drown us all one day, one might as well spend the meantime cheerfully.  I'm an old man, or nearly so, and I'm just tired, very tired, of raging against the storm.  Which does no good as far as I can see.

But here, just for the sake of beauty and good cheer - and what can we offer one another, if not that? - are a few random things of interest I came across today, from the year when Harry Truman was making his whistlestop campaign tour, the Berlin Airlift was in full swing, and television was still a novelty, unseen by 9 out of 10 Americans.  Perhaps one or more of the following will raise a smile on your face.

Programming schedule from TV station KTLA, Los Angeles, 1948.
Notice that it operated only a few hours a day.




Motorola advertises the 1948 version of home theater in this ad.
But those early TV screens ranged from only about 5 to 10 inches diagonally.

India was only a couple of days away via a beautiful Constellation,
and Ireland just 13 hours from New York - imagine!

A good hat always adds to a man's studliness, a fact that our
hatless modern age has forgotten.  Pity.

That year, running boards were out, and automatic transmissions were in:




And believe it or not, here's Ronald Reagan lambasting outrageous corporate profits and lying Republicans - before he went over to the dark side, obviously.




And I saved the best for last, if you're still with me this far. From Canada, the CBC radio women's editor Kate Aitken gives a short chat on homely things like a scrumptious-sounding sour cream chicken recipe. Nothing earthshaking here, and I can't embed it; but do go listen to this lovely voice from home in a more civilized time:

Sunday Dinner with Kate Aitken, November 19, 1948.

Designing the Future, 1958

Click to enlarge these:


Um, so how much do these people spend on Windex, huh?


If the house is rockin', don't come knockin'.


Who needs interior doors when you've got plastic curtains, right?


Title of this pic is "Limitless Electricity." Got your home fusion pile set up yet?


Imagine how many sales clerks it would take to show all those home-shopping customers the goods, one by one.

Here's a well-made short film by Chevrolet from 1958, which focuses on more than just car styling:  the "American Look," as they call it, was being applied to everything in sight at that time.   It's not your Head Trucker's favorite style, by any means - my taste was old-fashioned even way back then - but those of you who get off on the Jetson-y "populuxe" will no doubt cream in your jeans over this thirty-minute look at the subject, which goes by surprisingly quickly.  Lots more I could say on the topic, but I'll just let you fellas make up your own minds about it.  This is an interesting reminder of styles and tastes and concepts from a half-century ago - as well as how things got designed before we had computers to make it easy.  Enjoy.




Bonus: After the jump, here's a real heartbreaker for you from the same period.  Sigh. 

Pre-emptive Paranoia

An excerpt of what Adam Gopnik writes today at the New Yorker News Desk:

Obviously, this was a big storm with a lot of water and wind in it; if things broke the wrong way, it could do a great deal of harm to a lot of people—and, just as obviously, the politicians had made an intelligent decision not to get caught with their raincoats down this time. (See Katrina.) But the relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios—the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about—was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. “It hasn’t even started, and the city is already Atlantis,” one of the back seat riders announced.

That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia. The real purpose not to get you to do anything, but to get you so scared that all you can do is keep the television, or radio, on. This is obvious, and yet there is something truly helpful, really instructive, about experiencing it again after a month of absence and silence. Two things that ought to be apparent all the time become briefly clear to you again. First, that the media, television particularly, are amplifying devices in which tiny kernels of information become vast, terrifying structures of speculation. The news business is one in which a minimum of news is really given the business.

And second, that the reasons for this are essentially non-ideological; frightened people need news for reassurance, and want to get a more heightened experience by being frightened still more, and the business the people supplying the fright are in (which we’re in too, of course) is not really that of dispensing information but of assembling enough listeners or readers, preferably still caught in that same spirit of credulous attentiveness, to offer to advertisers or keep subscribing. Sirius radio makes this clear in a backward way because it “blacks out” the commercials on the TV stuff they broadcast, not having been paid for them. Right in the middle of being terrified, everything stops and you’re bored stiff for a few minutes—and it occurs to you, as if for the first time, that those few minutes, when a commercial is being shown on CNN or MSNBC, are actually the whole point of the exercise. . . .

Farewell to All That

It's been all over the news lately, but in case you haven't heard that Kodachrome film is no more:



Now, a note for posterity: Kodak made a number of varieties of film in addition to Kodachrome, which was used by people who could afford expensive cameras - the kind you can adjust the speed and aperture of - to take slides or movies or professional photos. Certainly a lot of middle-class people did, but some families, including mine, never had such fancy cameras. The Kodak film I always used to take snapshots with had a different name - and come to think of it, what was that? - Kodacolor, maybe. Not the same thing as the much-lamented Kodachrome, which was much more expensive.

In fact, my family never even used color film until the very late 60's - black and white film was cheaper, say $1.50 a roll compared to $2.50 a roll for color - so my parents stayed with that, and the black and white TV sets too, for a long time. It was what people were used to, you know, and for that matter, most magazines and books had only b&w pictures on the inside pages until the 1980's (except perhaps for colorful advertisements - and also excepting Playboy and that ilk).

So I never used Kodachrome, and its demise touches me only tangentially as a sign of the times, the inexorable flow of days and years, the unending loss of the present moment, the familiar, the expected. There's a comfort in the usual patterns of life which is always being eaten away at the edges, as the waves pull at the sands of the seashore. Everything in this mortal life is transitory, impermanent as a dream no matter how solid it may seem. Including our very selves and all that we hold dear.

Be that as it may, there are compensatory additions from time to time. Who now could do without a microwave oven? Which I recall was, forty years ago, strictly a luxury item, very expensive, which took me a couple of decades to see the use of. Now I use it all the time, practically every hour of the day when I'm at home: a most useful invention.

Cell phones are another great convenience - even though your Head Trucker still hasn't figured out how to take a picture with his, and doesn't much care. I marvel now that we used to take long road trips to see family and friends perhaps a thousand or more miles away - and embarked merrily on the journey, trusting only to God and Chevrolet against the chance of being broken down and stranded on some lonesome stretch of highway, far from any help. I don't even go to the grocery store now without my phone, but we were braver in those days.

Your Head Trucker has, however, gotten the hang of using a digital camera, and boy howdy, what a treat it is. I've had my little Kodak C-330 for five years now, and I dearly love it. In my teens and young adult years, I used to have a vague hankering to learn photography - at one time there was a PBS how-to show on the subject that I used to watch sometimes. But it required a really good single-reflex camera to start with, which was beyond my pocketbook for many years. Then too, it seemed to be de rigeur that to be a real photographer, you had to have your own darkroom and know how to use it - which required more expense, and space that I never had anywhere I lived. So that was a little daydream that never went anywhere.

But the digital camera was a revelation. Suddenly, for only $150 or so, I found I could take endless pictures from all angles in all kinds of light, and actually produce a few that were worth keeping - all quite easily and cheaply. You can even see the picture on your camera screen as soon as you take it, and know whether to try again. And no counting frames, or worrying about how much it would cost to develop all the photos you took - very liberating, and a new creative outlet that I've enjoyed immensely. A very good change, despite all the laments over the passing of film: the expense of film and equipment made it a hobby only for the affluent.

And then, of course, there's the internet, which is quite frankly a godsend to anyone who lives in the sticks as I do. And for people who live in town, too: an unending source of entertainment, communication, and creative endeavor that as far as I'm concerned is an unquestioned necessity now. In recent weeks, for unrelated reasons, both the ex-roommate and I have each experienced a few days without internet service. And we both agree, it was nearly unbearable - just as much as if the water were turned off.

Which is odd, when I stop and think about it. I perfectly recall life before home computers - I used them at work a long time before I got one of my own, in 1999 - and how I was quite content to come home and in my leisure time read a book, call a friend, or simply flop in front of the TV. But now times have changed, and I've changed. Life is that way; the tide is always tugging at you, pulling you on, whether you will or no.

So we must always be balancing the losses against the gains, and adjusting to the shifts and turns of life. And always, human life is a mixed bag of blessings and curses, advances and retreats. Just yesterday, for example, surfing through Wikipedia with no particular goal in mind, as I am wont to do, I stumbled across this paragraph in an article about a British politician most Americans have probably never heard of, Roy Jenkins:

As Home Secretary from 1965–1967, he sought to build what he described as "a civilised society", with measures such as the effective abolition in Britain of capital punishment and theatre censorship, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, relaxing of divorce law, suspension of birching and the legalisation of abortion.

Perhaps all that is well and good - but it did give me pause. More than four decades later, is our Western civilization really a more "civilized society" than it was before the 1960's?

PRR ad, 1948

Or merely different? Human nature never changes, merely the outward forms and fashions. All our scheming, inventing, and rearranging may make the world more comfortable in some ways - but convenience is not quite the same as progress - is it?

Only one thing is certain:  you can't go home again.