"Close Your Eyes and Pretend It's Yours!"

[ashetlandpony]

One evening last week while Bucky was snoozing, I decided to put away a bunch of old family photos that I'd scanned recently. In the process, I came across this old ad and realized I didn't have a digital copy of it yet. So, right then and there, to the scanner it went...



The ad copy says, "Close Your Eyes and Pretend It's Yours!" Well, I didn't have to pretend. This was the house I grew up in! I was just about to begin first grade when this ad appeared in the Home magazine section of the Sunday, September 11, 1960 edition of the Los Angeles Times.



click image to enlarge

It's funny – I still cook chili in that orange pot that's in the oven. Several of the other items in the ad weren't ours at all, though, like that copper pot on the range. That's totally unfamiliar to me. The red pitcher wasn't ours, either. What's most amusing to me, though, is that that refrigerator there didn't exist at all – it's a complete airbrush job. At this time, we actually had an ancient Servel gas refrigerator from the early 1950s that style-wise was rather dated. So the ad-makers painted an entirely fake set of "modern" chrome handles and a fictional freezer section on our old fridge.

Here are a couple more pics of our kitchen from the Gas Company photoshoot. This one has my mom in it, and this one has a much more open view of the kitchen space.





click image to enlarge



It's a bit difficult for me to cope with the fact that this was essentially a half-century ago. But yeah – it does actually feel like 50 years have passed since that time. My, how quickly life flies by... *sighs*

EDIT: I also posted these images in the LJ community vintage_ads. Click here to read all the comments!

 

Comments

[shep-shepherd.livejournal.com]

That was your kitchen? How amazing!

[ashetlandpony.livejournal.com]

The place was quite a showpiece, I guess, but to me at the time, it was just our everyday kitchen. Anyway, here is another picture from a different angle that was also taken during the gas company photo shoot. (The date on the reverse says April 1960.)



Click here if you'd like to see an enlargement.

glowMeeps!

[mejeep.livejournal.com]

I hope you have the entire magazine, those glow tiles sound kewl! But the fallout shelter *shudder* that was part of the paranoia that was fading when I was a kid. There's "the cartoon history of ..." series that covers the fad & fraud of the fallout shelters (most didn't work, leaked, etc.)