Today is my birthday. If my father, flush with excitement over a first-born son and delirious from all the anxiety, felt the need to leave Montgomery Hospital to get some fresh air and wandered over to the newsstand in the five and dime across the street, here are the magazines options he would have found.
Time Magazine. The big cover story was the controversy over whether Princess Margaret should be free to marry the man she loved, even though he was – gasp – a commoner. “The excitement, the strain, the uncertainty in Britain had reached such a pitch that it could not long continue. In a nation which sets such store by seemliness, the situation was too unseemly to last. What had begun as a simple and sentimental story of a Princess in love had now become a crisis that deeply involved institutions close to the heart of every Briton: the Crown and the Established Church. In the beginning, almost everyone had seemed to be on the side of romance. Young Margaret, for years the kingdom’s royal darling, should be allowed to marry the man she loves, people said. It did not seem to matter that her choice, the airman who had been her father’s equerry, was a commoner; it mattered only a little that at 41 he was 16 years older than she; it would matter only to some that he was a divorced man.”
Esquire. The cover model looks remarkably like Sherilyn Fenn as Audrey Horne at the height of Twin Peaks mania in 1990. There was an article by Richard Gehman on “The Young Turks of Television: Behind the new medium – a new breed of prodigy.” Several articles about Mexico: Helen Lawrenson assures us that “Mexicans Love Women;” and Richard Joseph weighs in with two travel articles, the instructional “Vacation Now: Venturing south of the border – how to get there, how to live it up” and the daring “Land of Endless Discovery: Mexico – New roads open the hear of off-trail Mexico.” There was also a spread about the Italian actress Elsa Martinelli, appearing that year with Kirk Douglas in Indian Fighter.
Playboy. Not sure what has the sharper point, the knife the woman on the cover holds in her hand or the bra she’s wearing. Fun facts: The cover and centerfold model is credited as Barbara Cameron, but unfortunately this is not the Barbara Cameron who is a conservative Christian author and mother of Kirk and Candace, as funny as that would be. There is virtually no information about this woman – prior to 1959 Playboy didn’t publish much about the models – and there is a good chance the name is a pseudonym. Terrible photo, by the way.
Life. Guy from the woodworking stall at the big country craft fair on the cover, representing all the European people who inherited the Earth from someone or something else, it isn’t clear. There are articles about the rising popularity of football, the war against the British by the “brainless” Irish people of the IRA, how teenagers are designing their own party dresses, and a profile on Andy Griffith who was appearing in the Broadway hit No Time for Sergeants. Also a two page spread about the new boats from Chris Craft, and another two page spread about the 1956 Oldsmobile 98 Deluxe Holiday sedan and Super 88 Holiday coupe!
Vogue. The cover says it all: new stars, new clothes, new parties, and new places, all dazzling you this season. Articles include a look at Cole Porter’s apartment, a “country house on the 33rd floor,” and how it was a “Brilliant New Season for Black” which goes to show that the old black is still the new black no matter what anyone says. There was an Alexander Liberman profile of the painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky, who died in France eleven years earlier, so I’m not sure what Liberman was doing other than pumping up the Kandinsky market but to be fair Kandinsky was included among other Bauhaus artists in the first Documenta that year in Kassel, West Germany.
Scientific American. Finally, a publication addressing the profound mystery of why leaves fall! Also articles about synthetic diamonds, radiation and human mutation (bring on the sci-fi horror movies!), Etruscan metallurgy, and the problem of “Too Many Deer.” (Save your fifty cents! You don’t need to design and build a time machine to go back to 1955 to pick up this issue. Leaves fall because they are no longer converting sunlight into food and the tree sheds the leaves to conserve resources. There you go.)
Better Homes and Gardens. “A few years ago, the stylish house offered as many rooms as there were activities. While house size shrunk, activities expanded. And the small, postwar house sent the family in all directions but home for their activities.” I want to know what songs are on those 45s they’re trying to decide on. The top songs at that moment were Autumn Leaves by Roger Williams, Love is a Many-Splendored Thing by the The Four Aces, and The Yellow Rose of Texas by Mitch Miller. Good grief. Also an article on driving in the winter: “In snowstorms and ice, there are always a few drivers who seem to ‘get through’ while others skid and stall. Why do salesmen usually get through? And news trucks, highway police, and ‘food drivers’?” Why do salesman always get through, anyway?
True: The Man’s Magazine. Men needed their own magazine, apparently, and this was it. I remember my dad subscribed for a while even though he didn’t hunt, didn’t fish, didn’t work on cars, didn’t wrestle alligators or whatever the magazine suggested men do. Or maybe real men like to look at paintings of geese. The Russian “White Death” that John Noble says he cheated was NOT the Finnish sniper named Simo Häyhä who may have killed as many as 500 men during the 1939-40 Winter War against the Soviet Union. Noble and his German-American family stayed in Nazi Germany during WWII, were captured by the Soviets, and imprisoned in the Gulag system.
Master Detective. There’s a lot going on with this cover. My big question is, okay, maybe the cases are “true” but from which “police headquarters” are they from? This seems a little generic to me. We sometimes get garbage calls from scam artists claiming they know I am in trouble with the “Chinese police” and they can help me get out of it, if I send them money. Are these the same police? Are they looking for this runaway family and they think we’re them? By the way, $90k in 1955 would be worth roughly $921k in today’s money, so I’d be chasing after that family too. But it’s not us!
True Love Confessions. This guy’s name is Jim. My name is Jim. I’m a junior, but my father never went by his first name James, but his middle name Richard. Maybe my father did cross the street to that five and dime, and picked up this comic because he imagined he, too, was a mechanic who was more than just the guy who fixed a woman’s car. That she would gaze into his eyes and think about his lips, even though she couldn’t recognize her own false values of love! But it couldn’t be him because he failed to use his first name, and used his middle name instead, and was cursed to be known as Dick. And that led him to name me after him so I could break the cycle and get a woman who would kiss me in a garage, before pushing me away and running.