Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

[LizzieMaine]

Manhattan, 1935. Photo by Berniece Abbott. "Gimme a Daily Worker and a bottle of Moxie."

The selection of magazines is interesting -- most of what's offered was considered "trash" by the pecksniffs of the time. There's a ton of movie fan magazines, a good number of Macfadden detective and confession magazines, a whole section of pulps, a couple of "do it yourself" type radio publications, a couple of "pop psychology" things and even several cartoon magazines that specialized in raunchy humor. But the only slicks that appear are the staunchly middlebrow Saturday Evening Post and Colliers. If you wanted Scribners or Harpers or some other highbrow reading you were in the wrong neighborhood -- but I do spot a copy of "Common Sense," a popular radical/socialist magazine of the time.

We never had shack-type newsstands here -- they couldn't stand up to the harshness of the weather, so all our newsstands were in rented storefronts. Our local such joint, State News, carried the local papers, the Boston papers, and the New York papers -- although when you bought the New York Sunday News, you got the current week's comic section and Coloroto magazine wrapped around *last week's* actual newspaper. This didn't bother me, because I bought the News mostly for the funnies, but I thought it was weird.

Most such joints also had a small soda fountain, and possibly sold wrapped sandwiches along with the soda, ice cream, and cigarettes. We didn't get the lottery here until the mid-70s, but when it appeared it was a great boon to such shops. There was also usually a pay phone and Western Union service, and possibly even a service allowing you to pay your telephone and electric bills. They were also usually Greyhound Bus ticket agencies. Basically these shops were the pre-internet version of the internet -- which is probably why they no longer exist.

 

[Fading Fast]

... Basically these shops were the pre-internet version of the internet -- which is probably why they no longer exist.

I've said something similar for years.

 

[BlueTrain]

Even though I my father did not smoke, I grew up around a lot of other people who did and who generally did not live much beyond retirement. So, mostly I wouldn't have noticed any tobacco smoke anywhere. These days, I would, probably. In fact, the only places that rival the strong aroma of a tobacco shop is a place that specializes in leather goods and the smell isn't that different.

We had no newsstands in my hometown, though I managed to visit one or two in larger cities, plus a couple of other places that happened to have magazines that were especially interesting to me as a fresh faced kid. What we did have, however, were drugstores. I think we had a grand total of maybe three and all three had lunch counters at the time. One in particular had a nice magazine selection, including rather adult publications. But both Life and especially Look had some pretty racy (or so I thought) photos from time to time. Naturally, being a boy, I read comic books but I don't recall where I bought them but I also would trade them, too.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Another good New York newsstand photo taken in 1941 --

An interesting selection of foreign language papers, including a couple of different Yiddish dailies alongside the Daily Worker and the Communist literary magazine New Masses, vying for space with racing sheets, love smooshes, fashion magazines, physical-culture pictorials, detective rags, and song-lyric magazines. "Friday" magazine was a leftist-oriented picture weekly, a pro-labor answer to Life and Look. The recognizable regular dailies along the front of the counter are all afternoon papers -- from left to right, the nose-pickers' favorite sheet Hearst's Journal-American, the middle-brow World Telegram, the arch-conservative New York Sun, and just a corner of the whitebread liberal New York Post. Something for everyone here, although I don't see any copies of "PM," the city's quality afternoon tabloid. Must've been sold out.

Along the bottom of the counter you'll spot several comic books suspended from clothespins. That's going to knock them down to at least G-VG condition.

 

[LizzieMaine]

And they had crowded newsstands on the West Coast too -- this one is in Los Angeles in 1939:

This is a much more full-service operation than the New York stands shown above -- there was even a grill inside for hot dogs, and you could leave film off for processing. The magazine selection is even more plebian than the New York stands -- once again dominated by detective and celebrity-fan magazines. Note that comic magazines are displayed on wires in the window, up out of the reach of kids who might run off with them without paying. All of the comics with recognizable covers are DC/All-American publications, pointing out that the Donenfeld distribution empire was just as strong in the West as it was in the East.

The only recognizable newspaper, the tabloid suspended in front of the Royal Crown Cola sign, is a weekly called "Ham and Eggs," a publication of the California "Ham and Eggs Movement," a campaign in favor of state payments of "$30 Every Thursday" for every unemployed citizen over the age of 50. Dad Bailey was no doubt worried about his own security.

 

[Zombie_61]

The only local newsstand we had when I was growing up was indoors, a narrow store with the racks attached to the walls on both sides and a wooden counter where the tobacco products were displayed. Because it had only the single public entrance/exit, the moment you walked in the sweet-scented aroma of the pipe tobaccos, mixed with the smoke from whatever the cashier was smoking, was unavoidable.

The last time I was in the Hollywood area, which was quite a few years ago, they still had a few outdoor newsstands on the side streets adjacent to Hollywood Blvd., usually manned by a surly someone who rarely acknowledged your existence beyond notifying you of the price of your purchase and handing you your change.

 

[BlueTrain]

I don't recall seeing any when we were in L.A. a few years ago and we walked around on Hollywood Blvd. But I thought the stretch there from Hollywood & Vine down to the Chinese theater looked a little sad because of a few closed up old-style movie theaters. But there were a few others that were up to the minute. I felt more at home on Santa Monica Boulevard, which is not to say I could afford to live anywhere in Santa Monica. My son lives in "Koreatown."

 

[LizzieMaine]

Here's one last newsstand photo, which bears relation to the "Dad Bailey" shot above -- the little man with the glasses and the pipe is Charles "Dad" Bailey himself. The shot is from around February 1941, and is an interior view of another of his Los Angeles stands.

Dad's merchandise focus has expanded a bit in two years, but his magazine selection remains about the same. But there are some interesting publications hanging from the wire at the upper left --"Fact Digest" and "You Can't Eat That" were both J. I. Rodale publications -- Fact Digest being a muckraking current-affairs publication, and "Can't Eat" an early organic food advocacy magazine. Rodale would go on to make his mark as the publisher of "Prevention." "Everybody's Digest" and "Magazine Digest" were left-wing alternatives to the reactionary "Readers Digest," which is also on display, just below the issue of "Better Golf." The explosion of interest in comic books between 1939 and 1941 is evident -- not only are they hanging from the wire overhead, there's a whole rack of them visible at the rear of the stand. Note also that "Friday" is on display at the rear, along with the Police Gazette and "Gags," a tabloid-size magazine consisting entirely of smutty cartoons -- likewise the subject of "Grin Annual," shown dangling from the wire at the back, and a large part of the content of "Spot," an extremely down-market swipe of Esquire. Dad must've had quite the reputation in the neighborhood.

 

[Trenchfriend]

@LizzieMaine
One of the best photos, I ever saw!

We have still many of these old-fashioned newspaper & tobacco-stores in Germany. They are all around in the streets of bigger cities, in the shopping-centers and in the lobby of bigger supermarkets. Outside the bigger towns, in all of our gas-stations, at least.

But, if you would ask me, from what these shops are existing, I would say, it must be the masses of loose tobacco for the people rolling their own. I couldn't find another explanation.

 

[ChiTownScion]

Another good New York newsstand photo taken in 1941 --

An interesting selection of foreign language papers, including a couple of different Yiddish dailies alongside the Daily Worker and the Communist literary magazine New Masses, vying for space with racing sheets, love smooshes, fashion magazines, physical-culture pictorials, detective rags, and song-lyric magazines. "Friday" magazine was a leftist-oriented picture weekly, a pro-labor answer to Life and Look. The recognizable regular dailies along the front of the counter are all afternoon papers -- from left to right, the nose-pickers' favorite sheet Hearst's Journal-American, the middle-brow World Telegram, the arch-conservative New York Sun, and just a corner of the whitebread liberal New York Post. Something for everyone here, although I don't see any copies of "PM," the city's quality afternoon tabloid. Must've been sold out.

Along the bottom of the counter you'll spot several comic books suspended from clothespins. That's going to knock them down to at least G-VG condition.

Every subway and elevated station in the Chicago Loop hosted one of these (sans the foreign language newspaper array) back when I was a 10-13 year old kid, mid- 1960's. I'd be in the Loop four times a week for rehearsal and performance demands as a boy chorister: an extra two quarters usually went for a Mad Magazine (or a Time or Newsweek, so that I could better understand the satire). Chicago has four dailies: broadsheets Tribune and Daily News, and tabloids Sun-Times and American. I'd buy a newspaper for the train ride home and read the comics, then the editorial page, and then the world & national news. Not a "typical kid," really.

I was a kid from a lily- white suburb who loved the city. I often stayed in the city for hours after a morning or afternoon rehearsal, riding the CTA trains for hours for a mere 12 cents. By the time I turned 11, I had ridden every L and subway line in the city by myself. My mom had no idea. I'd tell her, "The kids play softball in Grant Park after morning rehearsal," to explain why I wouldn't get home until 7 PM from a rehearsal that ended at noon. I never actually said that I was playing softball, so it wasn't a lie (lawyer in training, even then..).

There were all sorts of myths about how dangerous the city was back then. I never had any trouble: I'd stay on the train until the end of the line, grab the next train out, and always plant myself in the "rail fan's seat" up front, next to the motorman. As a result, I got to know the layout of the city better than most adults who lived in my suburb.

And my classmates? Feh. My attitude was that most of them still had to be reminded to take their thumbs out of their mouths. Let 'em have their Boy Scouts and Boys' Baseball: I'd rather wait hours to ride a 4000 series train up to Linden Street in Wilmette in the evening rush hour. (below)

 

[BlueTrain]

We may not have had newsstands in my hometown, only to have them disappear, but we had the institution of the "corner store," something else that has disappeared, in this case because of the proliferation of 7-11 stores as well as the expansion of gas station retail stores. There are still some gas stations that do not have a full-sized convenience store inside, surprisingly.

Where I lived, there were two kinds of corner stores and all were independently owned and operated, just like the newsstands above. The ones in town typically located on an actual store were nothing more than a small convenience store patronized more by children than anyone else. To serve their customer base, they always had a case full of candy bars, licorice, and those awful wax concoctions filled with some colored liquid. They would invariably also have a soft drink cooler and an ice cream freezer. I never saw one that was half as big as a 7-11.

There were also small retail stores on the outskirts of town that were variations on a fruit and vegetable stand. They always had the staples of milk, bread and snack foods, too. Their niche in the retail market was that they seemed to operate all the time while the supermarkets closed on Sunday. I suppose they also fell victim to the 7-11 empire.

 

[BlueTrain]

I was reminded by the post that mentioned loose tobacco that I don't recall anyone rolling their own, though it was quite likely someone did and I just never took note of it. But at least a couple of people did smoke pipes, which the newsstand vendor in the photo is doing. So more likely that is pipe tobacco for sale. Prince Albert pipe tobacco was one of the sponsors of the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday night.

I am also reminded by a few old movies that were quite realistic in a way, that some of the older stores in my hometown, particularly the cobbler, the hardware stores, all of those corner stores I mentioned, the few bars that was ever inside as a child (they weren't family friendly sports bars, either) and most of the gas stations, too, they were all old and rather shabby. The floors were plain wood and not too clean, even the places that sold food. But older buildings at the time including the elementary school and the junior high school, had oiled hardwood floors that were never mopped or waxed. Instead, the janitor would spread something that looked like sawdust, called sweeping compound, on the floor before sweeping the floor. A couple of movies that come to mind with that sort of 1930s/1940s atmosphere that was still there in the 1950s includes "Naked City," (1948), filmed entirely in New York, and "The Asphalt Jungle," (also 1950). Frankly, it's hard to be nostalgic for that era at the tale end of the Great Depression and the war when it seemed like nothing was new.

 

[Fading Fast]

As Lizzie's post references above - these newsstands (continuing our theme of them being the internet of their day), at least in NY and NJ, where also sellers of all the pornographic magazines. Each one dealt with it in their own way - in some you had to ask, others had them displayed with any offending pictures covered and others - mainly in NYC - had full-on sections with no covers etc. I am referencing the '70s on as, I assume, it was all much more discrete pre the 1960s cultural revolution.

Also, and no shock, the NYC newsstands, the big ones, carried way more of everything - newspapers, magazines, foreign publications, etc. - than the biggest NJ ones. When I first moved to NYC, the newsstands were a treat - kind of like moving from dial up to broadband internet.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I remember reading a comment somewhere on the state of NYC newsstands in the sixties -- "If a little old lady wants to buy the Times, she has to climb over three rows of 'Screw' to get it."

There were quite a few racy newsstand publications in the Era -- while you didn't see full-out porn on the street, there were dozens and dozens of different fly-by-night "art studies" magazines that featured nude photograpy and were not purchased primarily by artists, and many of the "physical culture" publications, with their fulll-length photos of glistening, oiled men in very brief loincloths, had a large audience of gents who were not bodybuilders. But probably the raciest magazines were the cartoon and humor publications, which were filled with smeary jokes about adultery and other forms of extramarital sex, and detailed, highly exaggerated drawings of bare-breasted young women. Titles like "Gags," "Giggles," "Film Fun," "College Humor," and "Ballyhoo" commonly featured this type of material. If you wanted the harder core stuff, certain magazines featured little ads in the back for "50 Exciting Poses!" photo packs that went far beyond what you found on the newsstands.

I've mentioned before that when I was cleaning out my grandparents' house after they died, I found a considerable stash of 1940s smut magazines under a loose floorboard in my uncle's teenage bedroom. I wrapped it all up in a plain brown bag and presented it to my cousin, who, I'm sure, appreciated it.

 

[Fading Fast]

^^^ At the center of "The Big Sleep" the Raymond Chandler book (and movie) is an illegal pornography ring. It's funny today - in a world of unfettered pornography - to see all the hush-hush and clandestine actions around taking and selling nude pictures.

 

[Fading Fast]

I remember reading a comment somewhere on the state of NYC newsstands in the sixties -- "If a little old lady wants to buy the Times, she has to climb over three rows of 'Screw' to get it."

There were quite a few racy newsstand publications in the Era -- while you didn't see full-out porn on the street, there were dozens and dozens of different fly-by-night "art studies" magazines that featured nude photograpy and were not purchased primarily by artists, and many of the "physical culture" publications, with their fulll-length photos of glistening, oiled men in very brief loincloths, had a large audience of gents who were not bodybuilders. But probably the raciest magazines were the cartoon and humor publications, which were filled with smeary jokes about adultery and other forms of extramarital sex, and detailed, highly exaggerated drawings of bare-breasted young women. Titles like "Gags," "Giggles," "Film Fun," "College Humor," and "Ballyhoo" commonly featured this type of material. If you wanted the harder core stuff, certain magazines featured little ads in the back for "50 Exciting Poses!" photo packs that went far beyond what you found on the newsstands.

I've mentioned before that when I was cleaning out my grandparents' house after they died, I found a considerable stash of 1940s smut magazines under a loose floorboard in my uncle's teenage bedroom. I wrapped it all up in a plain brown bag and presented it to my cousin, who, I'm sure, appreciated it.

I was not a sheltered kid - my grandmother took me to R rated movies from the time I could sit up straight as that's what she wanted to see and my father's view of bringing me up was you might as well see and hear it all now, it ain't going away - but even I was a bit surprised by the number and graphic nature of the hard-core porn at the NYC newsstands.

Playboy, Hustler, etc., was kids stuff compared to the covers of some of these magazines. I am not kidding, that was my first insight into the world of fetishes - as there seemed to be magazines oriented to every off-beat one extant. And, as Lizzie notes - they weren't tucked away: I'd buy my morning paper while seeing some eye opening stuff.

 

[Harp]

Every subway and elevated station in the Chicago Loop hosted one of these (sans the foreign language newspaper array) b (or a Time or Newsweek, so that I could better understand the satire). Chicago has four dailies: broadsheets Tribune and Daily News, and tabloids Sun-Times and American.

Brings back some memories. I helped deliver the Tribune and Daily News on the South side (Paulina); news routes were legacies handed down
to younger brothers/cousins but I broke in as an assistant when offered $2 weekly-regular pay plus tips during subscription collection days.

 

[BlueTrain]

I've often said that the 1950s were not as conservative as we think they were; in fact, they were rather progressive. But at the same time, they were very good at pretending certain things didn't exist. It was highly refined habit, too, that began decades earlier, probably as a response to the moralists and prohibitionists in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It was never better demonstrated than during the 1920s. Today's conservative movements are as much in response to the so-called liberation period from the late 1960s onward. There were always those who thought the country was going down the sewer but they finally got the upper hand. Now we're going to go up in flames.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The most important thing to remember about interpreting any era is the answer to the question "Who controlled what you saw -- and why?"

 

[LizzieMaine]

^^^ At the center of "The Big Sleep" the Raymond Chandler book (and movie) is an illegal pornography ring. It's funny today - in a world of unfettered pornography - to see all the hush-hush and clandestine actions around taking and selling nude pictures.

A pornography racket is a central plot point in the greatest American novel of the latter half of the 20th Century, John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," set in the sleazy world of New Orleans, 1962. "Make one with a teacher, doin' somethin' with a piece of chalk..."