Ghost of An August Past
… in which a birthday is quietly celebrated in Digest form
Admittedly, it’s an odd ritual. But every year around this time (early August) I dig out and re-read my copy of a vintage magazine (August 1960 Reader’s Digest) — picked up years ago at a flea market (don’t judge me) — as a way of marking my birth-month (though not the actual birth-date).
(And never you mind.)
I just find it interesting to see how things have changed and how they haven't and how they keep changing and how they don’t since the decade I was born.
All the regular features are here: Laughter is the Best Medicine, It Pays to Increase Your Word Power, Humor in Uniform, Points to Ponder, Life in These United States, Quotable Quotes. They wrap around a mix of pieces that the Digest promises are (fittingly) “Articles of Lasting Interest.” A mix that wouldn’t necessarily seem out of place if published — err, posted — today.
World events (“How Cuban Freedom Was Really Won”), government scandal (the anonymously written “This Is How Payola Works in Politics”), labor (“Strikes Are Not Inevitable”), sports (“Biggest and Most Beautiful Olympics,” touting the summer’s Games in Rome), medicine (“New Weapons Against Cancer” and “At Last, a Prospect for Painless Dentistry”) — a variety of reading to meet a variety of appetites.
Curious sign of my aging: With each passing year, I’ve tended to gravitate toward a re-reading of the health-related pieces first.
(The new weapon, by the way, involves regional perfusion, an approach to chemotherapy designed to target the bad cells while sparing the healthy ones. And among the innovative dentistry prospects is the introduction of music-supplying headphones for the patient, to distract from the sound of the drill and maybe from the pain that it can cause.)
There’s a handful of articles that have proven … let’s go with … timely, such as “Why Don’t Our Churches Practice the Brotherhood They Preach?” and “Let’s Face the Truth About Gas and Germ Weapons.”
SPOILER ALERT: That truth is that they’re bad. “We can no longer afford the luxury of ignoring such weaponry. It is a hard real fact of military life. We must learn to live with it and see to it that such weapons are never to be used against us.”
(Of course, the “seeing to it” as explained in the piece involves developing an arsenal of our own so huge that no country would “dare risk retaliation.”)
(So there’s that.)
Throughout these August 1960 pages, compiled in the dark months of the Cold War, there’s article after article that in one form or another clearly positions the Russian empire as a daily threat to the United States — to be feared, to be distrustful of, to vanquish if it comes to that (which it will, given the empire’s steely determination to infect the world with communism.)
But if there’s fear of the empire, there’s a bit of worry about, if not pity for, the people living under it. The August issue’s book-selection is The Future is Ours, Comrade: Conversations with the Russians, by Joseph Novak, then the pen name for Polish-born-professor-turned-American-author Jerzy Kosinski, in which everyday Russians talk of their lives. The word that’s applied to much of its citizenry: bleak. (Under his real name, Kosinski later publishes the prescient Being There, adapted into the Oscar-winning 1979 Peter Sellers film.)
America, on the other hand, most definitely remains civilization’s best hope. Home of bravery and of heroism. And of Strong Men. In “What’s Wrong with Rugged Individualism,” condensed from the Wall Street Journal article, Harry M. Riston’s writes that American leadership, in fact, “requires” rugged individuals and that “today’s students [are] getting bad counsel to pursue security and paycheck, not individual, intellectual, spiritual, and emotional satisfactions.”
Of course, Riston also weighs in with “not all people are equal” — which no matter how well-intentioned or even well-reasoned in 1960 seems more and more … is the word problematic? The assessment is up there with Francis Vivian Drake’s blanket contention in “Don’t Decry Colonialism” a few pages away that without it “Africans would still be living in a primitive wilderness.”
Okay then.
One of Digest’s signature adventure pieces, “The Incredible Survival of Demi McClure” tells of McClure’s involvement in the late-1950s U.S. space-project called Manhigh, which sent manned balloons to above 99% of the planet’s atmosphere in order to study the effects of cosmic ray on humans. (Very 1950s cinema-sounding, to me.) I do always appreciate the piece’s more ecumenical take on the era’s battle for the moon being fought between the United States and Russia: “The space race is not about proving ourselves superior … but to extend the frontiers of human knowledge.”
Fine, fine, fine, I hear you thinking about this weird ritual involving an incredibly old magazine. But what about the fun stuff? What about the ads?
Here’s hoping you like Jell-O.
In the 240-pages that make up the issue, there are 39 full-page and 11 half-page ads. Top draw: domesticity. Kitchen and bath. Canned pineapple, canned hash, canned soup, canned Chef Boyardee, canned lives.
Drilling down, there’s French’s Mustard, Swifts Premium Bacon, Siesta Coffee, Sealtest Ice Cream, Fleischmann’s Margarine, General Mills High-Protein Flakes, Coke and 7-Up.
And, yes, Jell-O.
Moving further into the issue — and the house — there are ads a-plenty for (women’s) hair color, toothpaste, floor wax, flea-and-tick spray, Hanes underwear and more. They join full-pagers for car manufacturers and oil companies and general automotive products in numbers greater than you can shake a stick-shift at. (In 1960, Big Oil was big on Madison Avenue.)
Reassuringly, all the car stuff is matched by ads for insurance. State Farm has been our good neighbor since for-freakin-ever.
In the 240-pages that make up the August 1960 Reader Digest, there’s not a single non-white face seen — not in any of the editorial illustrations, nor among any of the WASP-y ads. None. (There’s a small public-service ad from, like, the Magazine Council or something, that’s about helping those in need; it features Asian children.) Nothing but white couples getting married and then having white children. In that order. At which point they seem to favor Swift’s Premium Bacon for breakfast.
A meal overseen by Mom, but paid for by Dad.
It’s a motif reflected in the issue’s humor scattered as editorial filler, too — jokes predicated on wives’ cooking skills inside the home and their unfamiliarity with how to fill the family car’s gas-tank outside of it. And the husbands’ resulting frustrations with both.
It ties in nicely to “What Is A Nervous Breakdown?” adapted from an article in The Rotarian, in which author Robert O’Brien points to a growing trend of anxiety in the country in the late 1950s among both overworked businessmen and “overwhelmed” housewives due to “endless … exhausting household chores.”
My Reader’s Digest birthday ritual concludes each year in the same way: I take from the freezer a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food ice-cream and while allowing it to thaw a tiny bit to a smoother consistency I re-read my favorite of all the articles found inside: Bruce Bliven’s “Emerson’s Vital Message for Today,” a reflection on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s canonical 1841 essay Self Reliance.
Bivens sums up Emerson’s paean to following one’s own instincts with what will become a 21st century publishing necessity — the italicized list of tips:
Life Is an Ecstasy, Trust the Universal Harmony, Find the Harmony Through Nature, Trust Yourself, Live Dangerously, You Are Better Than You Think, There is Some Good to Everyone: Find It!, Scorn Material Things, and Always Try Your Hardest.
“Trust thyself,” Bivens quotes Emerson: “Every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
A vital message for today’s today, too.
Though the Ben & Jerry’s definitely does its part.
Jim McKairnes has a birthday sometime in August. Though not every year.
