Tom Stafford
Commentary
A Page 3 advertisement in the Jan. 4, 1957, Collier’s magazine was a treat for techies of the time.
Holding a metal stylus attached to a wire, Byron Jensen looked out from a photograph, poised to do whatever was necessary to make sure a dialed call got through.
“He keeps an electronic brain thinking clearly,” said the headline of the Bell Telephone System ad.
“Whenever I watch those dial switches work,” he said, “I get the feeling I’m at the nerve center of the community.”
By then, Springfield was having a nervous breakdown. That Collier’s edition was the last printed in Springfield just before Christmas of 1956, when the company shuttered its Springfield plant and laid off all 2,275 employees.
With its cover graced by an expectant Princess Grace (former actress Grace Kelly), Page 2 carried an abbreviated carcinogenic message from the American Tobacco Company.
As people today know “lol” means laughing out loud, all of America then knew L.S./M.F.T.: Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.
Racial codes were different, explaining Collier’s use of the word Negro.
And in “48 states of mind,” bits and pieces from around a nation that did not yet include Alaska and Hawaii, Walter Davenport made gender statements that might land him another job today.
Among his first three items were a quote from Mike Jackson of the Laguna Beach Post saying, “There’s nothing so attractive in a woman as a little merry ignorance,” and an item mentioning that the marriage license bureau in Seattle, Wash., was dis-graced by a Patrick Henry quote: “I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
Among the Collier’s contributors were photo legend Ansel Adams; future Kennedy Administration spokesman Pierre Salinger; and Peter Maas, future writer of a book that was the basis for the early Al Pacino movie “Serpico.”
The final Collier’s also told its readers that Ford Motor Company had just finished the year-long, $200,000 process that named its next line of cars the Edsel, and the magazine carried a letter from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover complimenting it on a story that gave radio man Walter Winchell credit for being a crime-fighter.
The magazine also told its readers that Christian missionaries who had braved cannibals and disease faced new challenges from Communism, third world nationalism and “the rising color consciousness of Asians and Africans. More and more the white man, whether in a church robe or business suit, is regarded as intruder.”
Whether race might have been involved in white men’s desires to influence or intrude on the lives of those of other colors went unmentioned.
For its Feb. 1 edition, the magazine promised a complete mystery novel, “Devil’s Doorstep,” but the edition never appeared.
And as to the real life mystery as to what would happen to Springfield?
There was not a word.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368.
About the Author