75 Years Ago

(The weekend became unexpectedly interesting, such that I find myself four hours from MOCCA instead of an hour away, which calls for a posting I can do the night before in order to bolt in the morning. Nothing anywhere near as amusing as the funnies from April 8, 1943.) 

Mussolini may not have found it an amusing time, given that the Allies had just about driven the Axis out of North Africa and the next step was obvious to all. 

The Yanks had been in the war for less than a year and a half and were still adjusting to a wartime economy, and the need for rationing.

Here's an example of what they had to figure out and keep track of.

And here's an example of some Goofus-and-Gallant style nagging to help them with the task.

But I liked this Nabisco advertisement for a couple of reasons, the main one being that I had assumed that the recipe would involve mashing up crackers at some point, but they simply provide a good low-meat recipe and suggest you serve some crackers on the side. Not bad.

The other factor to note here is that it's a nationally-placed ad for a product, not a grocery ad placed by a particular store. Before TV, newspapers regularly had advertisements for food, toiletries and other products, and that shift in advertising was a blow that led to a lot of consolidation of newspapers, ending the two-paper-town tradition.

Anticipating that loss of revenue during the war was the loss of appliance and automobile ads, since those factories had shifted to war production. Add in the rationing of paper and newspapers had some serious belt-tightening to deal with.

Thank god for the funnies!

Cartoon buffs know not to stir up the waters by wondering aloud if Skippy Peanut Butter ripped off Percy Crosby. So we won't mention it.

But here's a way to get a similar response from a lot of WWII vets:

The thing with the Red Cross and doughnuts ... don't even go there. But here's where it came from.

Never mind. Back to the funnies:

(Strikes me that Nancy's teacher looks a lot like her aunt. Maybe it's just me. Also strikes me that, if I had a chimp in the house, I'd make sure I knew where he was before I painted the basement floor. Maybe that's just me, too.)

And speaking of Nancy, here's Iodine in an early form that little resembles her ultimate self, except for the brattiness, of course.



Somebody forgot to add the heds for these two -- the upper one is Little Orphan Annie, the lower the Gumps. Not a lot of detective work needed in either case.

 

Juxtaposition of the War Effort

Well, you had to laugh. Otherwise, you wouldn't.

 

Comments

[Kip W]

Always a fan of Major Hoople. I have a scrapbook with quite a few of those pasted in from about 1943, along with Out Our Way from the same days, thanks to a friend's uncle (who I never met). I've scanned a few of them, but the amount of work it takes to overcome the dark yellow newsprint, plus the rubber cement darkening that, and the awful printing, is considerable.

[Ronnie]

I'm delighted to see details about the rationing we lived with all those years ago. It was fairly complex but we managed. Worth noting: parents got very few new shoes - growing children needed new ones as their feet grew and the inferior quality available wore out really fast. The parents' coupons were used. It wasn't like being under fire, just another part of ordinary civilian life.