Mid Century Memories

Mid Century Memories If you miss the way America used to feel, you’re in the right place.

For almost forty years, the funniest thing on the American highway was an ad for shaving cream. 🚗Burma-Shave planted its...
08/27/2026

For almost forty years, the funniest thing on the American highway was an ad for shaving cream. 🚗

Burma-Shave planted its first little red signs along a Minnesota road in 1925, and the idea was almost too simple to work. Six boards, spaced just far enough apart that a car doing forty five would unspool the rhyme one line at a time, and the last board always said the same two words. Don't stick your elbow out so far, it might go home in another car. Burma-Shave.

At their peak there were roughly seven thousand sets of those signs standing in forty five states, and the company paid a hundred dollars a verse to anyone who could write a better one. Thousands of people mailed in jingles every year. Families kept score on road trips, kids read the lines out loud from the back seat, and a long dull stretch of two lane blacktop turned into something to look forward to. ✨

Then the interstates came, traffic got faster, the company was sold in 1963, and crews went out and pulled the signs down. Two of the last sets ended up in the Smithsonian.

Do you remember reading those signs out loud from the back seat of the family car?

08/26/2026

🎙️ By 1952 the most famous singer in America could not fill a room.

Frank Sinatra's vocal cords had hemorrhaged. His marriage to Ava Gardner was coming apart in public. Columbia Records dropped him. One screenwriter who saw him then said he was flat on his rear.

Then Columbia Pictures bought the rights to a novel called From Here to Eternity, and Sinatra went after exactly one part in it. Not the lead. Angelo Maggio, a scrawny working class private who gets beaten to death in the second half. The studio head did not want him and had another actor in mind. Sinatra took the role for eight thousand dollars, a fraction of what Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift were paid. 🎬

In 1954 he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The records came back too, with Nelson Riddle writing the charts, and the second half of his career dwarfed the first.

He bet everything on the smallest part in the picture. When did taking less get you further?

08/26/2026

🎤 In 1952 a woman answered back on a country record, and the radio banned her for it.

Hank Thompson had a monster hit called The Wild Side of Life, and the line that stung was the one about God making h***y tonk angels. Decca brought in a singer named Kitty Wells to answer it. The song, written by Jay Miller, was called It Wasn't God Who Made H***y Tonk Angels, and she cut it at Castle Studios in Nashville for a flat session fee of one hundred twenty five dollars.

NBC radio banned it for being suggestive. The Grand Ole Opry would not let her sing it on the air. It went to number one on the country charts anyway and sat there for six weeks, the first number one country hit by a solo woman in history. 📻

It is in the Grammy Hall of Fame and the National Recording Registry today.

Who told you no and turned out to be wrong?

He was seven shots back with eighteen holes to play, and he decided that was close enough. 🏌️Cherry Hills, Denver, June ...
08/26/2026

He was seven shots back with eighteen holes to play, and he decided that was close enough. 🏌️

Cherry Hills, Denver, June 1960. Arnold Palmer sat in fifteenth place and mentioned to a couple of writers in the lunch room that a final round of 65 might just win the thing. They laughed at him. So he walked to the first tee, took the driver out on a 346 yard par four, and put his ball on the green. He birdied six of the first seven holes, shot the 65 he promised, and won the United States Open by two.

He was a steel town kid from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, son of the man who kept the greens at the local club. He hitched his pants, squinted down the fairway and swung like he meant it, and something about that made ordinary people feel like the game belonged to them too. The crowds that followed him got their own name, Arnie's Army, and the television cameras found him at exactly the right moment. ⛳

By the end of that summer he had the Masters and the Open both, and a sport that had always been played behind hedges was suddenly on in the living room on a Sunday afternoon.

Who taught you the game you still love playing?

08/26/2026

🎢 The happiest place on earth opened so badly the staff called it Black Sunday.

July 17, 1955. Walt Disney sent out fifteen thousand invitations and roughly twenty eight thousand people got in. Counterfeit tickets were everywhere, and one enterprising man leaned a ladder against the back fence and charged five dollars a climb.

Then it hit a hundred degrees. A plumbers strike had left the park with almost no working drinking fountains. The asphalt on Main Street was so freshly poured it went soft in the heat, and women's high heels sank in and stuck. Rides broke down, food ran out, and attractions closed with children already standing in line. All of it went out live on national television to something like seventy million people, in a country of a hundred and sixty five million. 📺

Walt told reporters it might take a month before everything ran smoothly. Seven weeks later the park had passed a million visitors.

What is the worst opening day you have ever lived through?

08/26/2026

🎷 Nearly every famous face of the jazz age was photographed by the same man.

William Gottlieb started at the Washington Post in 1938 and wrote the first regular jazz column ever to run in an American daily newspaper. After the war he moved to Down Beat, and he shot all of them. Billie Holiday. Louis Armstrong. Duke Ellington. Dizzy Gillespie with his cheeks full. Ella Fitzgerald in a New York studio. Thelonious Monk at Minton's, somewhere else entirely. His whole world was one block of Fifty second Street.

Then in 1948, at the very peak of it, he put the camera down for good. The street was going under, and by his own account he was something of a square with a wife and children who no longer loved staying out until four in the morning. He spent the rest of his life making filmstrips and children's books. 📷

What would you have walked away from?

Before a dress was something you bought, it was something somebody made for you. 🧵In the late fifties a pattern envelope...
08/25/2026

Before a dress was something you bought, it was something somebody made for you. 🧵

In the late fifties a pattern envelope ran about thirty five cents and a few yards of cotton did not cost much more, so a mother with a Singer and a free Saturday afternoon could turn out a school dress for a fraction of what the department store wanted for one. The tissue paper pieces came folded like origami, and once you opened them up there was no getting them folded back the same way ever again.

Then came the standing still. Up on the footstool, arms straight out, told to quit wiggling while she worked her way around the hem with a pincushion strapped to her wrist. It felt like an hour. It was probably ten minutes. And what you got at the end of it was a dress nobody else in your class had, because there was exactly one of it in the world. ✨

The rickrack. The pinking shears. The tomato pincushion with the little strawberry dangling off the side. The button tin that was really an old cookie tin, and the sound it made when you tipped it out on the rug. Every house on the block had that tin.

Did somebody in your family sew your clothes, and what was the button tin at your house?

08/25/2026

On August 7, 1955, Boeing test pilot Tex Johnston took the company's brand new jet prototype out over Lake Washington during the Seafair races and rolled it all the way over. Then he came back around and did it again. ✈️

Boeing had bet nearly everything on that airplane, and the airlines were still loyal to propellers. Johnston flew the roll about four hundred feet above the water, in front of the exact people Boeing needed to convince. Company president Bill Allen was watching from the crowd and reportedly asked a guest with a heart condition to borrow his pills.

Asked the next morning what on earth he thought he was doing, Johnston said he was selling airplanes. He kept his job, the orders came, and the airplane he rolled sits in the Smithsonian today. 🛩️

Would you have kept your nerve at four hundred feet, or kept your job?

08/24/2026

On February 20, 1962, John Glenn climbed into a capsule not much roomier than a phone booth and became the first American to orbit the Earth. 🚀

Three orbits, four hours and fifty five minutes, and somewhere in the middle of it a reading called Segment fifty one warned the ground that his heat shield might be loose. Mission control told him to keep the spent rocket pack strapped on and did not tell him why. He rode down through a fireball watching burning pieces stream past his window, and came out the other side alive.

The warning turned out to be a faulty switch. And before he ever launched, Glenn had asked for the trajectory numbers to be run again by hand by a mathematician named Katherine Johnson, because he trusted her arithmetic more than he trusted the new machine. ✨

What would you insist on having checked twice before you climbed into that capsule?

He turned down the parts that would have made him richer and took the ones that let him sleep at night. 🎬Gregory Peck gr...
08/24/2026

He turned down the parts that would have made him richer and took the ones that let him sleep at night. 🎬

Gregory Peck grew up in La Jolla, California, worked as a barker at the 1939 World's Fair, and wrecked his back in a dance class badly enough that the war passed him by while nearly every other young leading man shipped out. That injury is the reason he was suddenly one of the few available men in Hollywood, and he made five pictures in his first two years. He never once pretended it was anything but luck.

What people remember is the steadiness. That low unhurried voice. The feeling that whatever was going wrong on screen, this man was going to do the decent thing about it. In 1962 he played a small town lawyer named Atticus Finch, won the Academy Award for it, and decades later the American Film Institute named that character the greatest hero in a hundred years of American movies. Peck always said it was the closest he ever came to just playing himself. ⭐

He stayed married to the same woman for forty eight years, quietly paid for things he never put his name on, and kept showing up for charity work long after the cameras stopped caring where he was. Some stars burned bright and burned out. Peck simply stayed lit.

Which Gregory Peck picture has stayed with you the longest?

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