The year was 1959. NASA selected seven military pilots to become America’s first astronauts. The Xerox 914, the first plain-paper copier, was introduced. Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone premiered. The Barbie doll was born. Glen Raven Mills of North Carolina introduced pantyhose. Four members of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas were murdered, inspiring Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood. “Weird Al” Yankovic was born. Frank Lloyd Wright, Lou Costello, and George “Superman” Reeves died. And these ads appeared in the Star-Telegram:
Out at Casino Ballroom on Jacksboro Highway, for one night only, Denny Beckner and his Madcap Merrymakers were making, well, merry. Note the CEdar phone exchange for Lake Worth/Azle.
Remember film?
At Stripling’s, The great-great-great-grandfather of the GoPro.
Foreign cars were all the rage. That $1,459 Renault would cost $12,000 today.
Overseas Motors, of course.
Even the full-sized Mercury was marketed as an “economy car.” It weighed about four thousand pounds. Gas mileage was just a scooch under thirteen miles per gallon.
A 1959 Buick land yacht.
“Boots Cut-Outs” was a syndicated newspaper feature that had spun off of the newspaper comic strip “Boots and Her Buddies” by Edgar Martin. The strip began in 1924. Notice that a design submitted by a Fort Worth girl was featured.
This panel is from 1939. (Photo from Wikipedia.)
The comic strip also spun off comic books. This issue is from 1948. (Photo from Wikipedia.)
The character Boots (“Sweetheart of the Comics”) attended Monmouth College from 1924 to 1945. Perhaps she just couldn’t get past that frog dissection in freshman biology. In 1945 she married Rod Ruggles. Soon Boots was knitting booties. Her son Davey was born in 1946—a gestation considerably shorter than Boots’s college career.
The strip ended in 1969.
Nancy,
I have heard the name Harold Cockerham, but we are not related.
Was this your birth year, Mike? I was 12- and I went to school with (I think!) Peggy Cockerham’s brother Harold.
Born in 1949, Nancy. Peggy, it turns out, is a cousin of my 1967 classmate Terry Cockerham. She told me she drew that design when she was fourteen.