Ask a nice person out for pie. Date ’em for four-plus years. Get married. Eat pie every Friday for more than a decade. It works every time.
This one was a homemade apple pie. It was delicious.
family
21
Feb 19
It’s a site day
We’re once more spending today with my grandfather’s books. Specifically his old magazines. We Reader’s Digest, and today we’re continuing our gander at a few of the ads from this third issue of Reader’s Digest, the October 1966 issue. There are five images to check out today. And if you click on this one we’ve already seen, you’ll get the updated joke, and can skip forward from there to today’s additions.
If you’d like to check out all of the stuff I’ve posted from my grandfather’s books so far, start here.
And that link makes me realize I need to update the page so if you’ll pardon me for one second … (which turned into six minutes of fun with CSS) … there!
Well … you know how it goes. You start playing with one bit of code then you realize how fun that can be, so you roll up your sleeves and start back working on some other page you’ve put on the back burner.
And so, tomorrow, if everything works out, I’m going to roll out the new mobile version of the website. So it’s a site day. What’s in your sites?
24
Jan 19
To the books, and to the moon!
For a third week in a row we’re going back my grandfather’s books. That’s called a streak!
We’re working through the illustrations of a 1961 issue of Reader’s Digest that I got from the family compound a few years back. There are a stack of other magazines, too, and pretty soon we’ll be working our way through some classic issues of Popular Science. Which fits my grandfather’s interests just fine, but the work we’ll see today surely did as well.
Four images to see today; click the book cover below to jump right in to today’s additions.
See all of the interesting bits from this book here. If you’d like to check out all of the stuff I’ve posted from my grandfather’s books so far, start here.
17
Jan 19
More fun in advertising
Two weeks in a row we’ve returned to the section of the site that looks at my grandfather’s books! If we do it next week that’s called a streak!
Anyway, we’re now sneaking into a 1961 issue of Reader’s Digest that I picked up in a big pulp grab a few years back. There are a stack of other magazines, too, and pretty soon we’ll be working our way through some classic issues of Popular Science. I’m sure the ads there will be great. The ads in the Digest are pretty good, but we’ll only see a few in this issue unfortunately.
Some child scrawled in crayon on a lot of them. A child that favored orange and purple, by the looks of it. So the ads and clip art we’ll see from the January 1961 edition of the Reader’s Digest over the next few weeks will be ones that escaped the toddler Picasso.
Four images to see today; click the book cover below to get started.
To see all of the stuff I’ve posted from his books so far, start here.
9
Apr 18
Stuff from after the conference
We were in Nashville over a long weekend at a research conference. It was nice to see friends and do smart-people things. And we stayed with friends who happen to live by the conference location. So we’re going to need them to move around and follow this event around the region. They should do this to the detriment of their own social lives and careers so that they could have the pleasure of hosting us for three or four days each year, and enjoy barbecue and the like, and our delightful company.
So we’ll start sending them some brochures.
Anyway, some extra things I saw over the weekend.
Look! Up in the right corner!
That doesn’t look like a familiar Sears font. A commenter on Flickr notes:
Sears Department Store was located at the southeast corner of Church St and 8th Ave North (the building is still standing) … Remember that agriculture was, for a couple of centuries, The primary source of revenue in and around Nashville. Sears, like Montgomery Wards and others, sold farm supplies and equipment.
Just south on 8th, right behind the main store, was the farm and auto supply store … The “Ghost Sign” you photographed is located across 8th Ave North from where the farm and auto store once was and this sign once had an arrow that pointed across the street. Sears moved to their new brick bldg on Lafayette (Now the Nashville Rescue Mission) in the late 60’s. I suspect this sign was repainted in the 60s just prior to Sears moving, hence it has survived (sans arrow).
That comment is eight years old and, today, it is just a parking lot:
But you can see a picture here, it was a grand old 1930s art deco building. Sears, this Nashville history site tells me, stayed in the building until 1956. A Ben Franklin went in, and then a jewelry store. Eventually it became a building for state offices. That site, in 2014, said the building was still there, but its fate was nigh. And the Google Street view, from 2017, tells the tale:
They paved downtown shopping and put up a parking lot. But The Tennessean put together a photo gallery.
Hey, look, this is where my folks got married!
Union Station in Nashville, Tennessee.
Farmland when we got back on the road:
And I don’t know what these are for …
Some agricultural concern, no doubt.
