Magic Highway U.S.A. was produced by Disney in 1958.

It was just a waterpark, although one of the first generation of waterparks.  Here are the rotting water slides:

Some fake rocks:

And a map of the whole sorry affair:

Spite fences are built by people who want to “spite” their neighbor, building a fence that often blocks the view of the unoffending neighbor or otherwise is designed to irritate him or her.

Here is a spite fence built by wealthy businessman Charles Crocker on San Francisco’s Nob Hill to frustrate German undertaker, Nicolas Yung, who owned the smaller house and refused to sell out:

An architectural holdout is a building whose owner refuses to sell out to a larger project.  New York was at one time filled with these places in the 20th century; now, not so much.  A typical architectural holdout is a cottage house with a modern hotel wrapped around it.

Now, I hear of spite houses, which seem a weird combination of spite fences and holdouts.

According to Wikipedia, in its spite house entry:

At the turn of the 20th century, the city of Alameda, California, took a large portion of Charles Froling’s land to build a street. Froling had planned to build his dream house on the plot of land he received through inheritance. To spite the city and an unsympathetic neighbor, Froling built a house 10 feet (3.0 m) wide, 54 feet (16 m) long and 20 feet (6.1 m) high on the tiny strip of land left to him. The Alameda Spite House is still standing and occupied.

We see this everywhere at some point towards the latter half of the 1960s.  Helvetica font runs rampant.  It’s everywhere:  in the LIFE copy, in the ads.  It permeates other publications, as well, but rarely as much as in LIFE.

Not only that, but lower case.  It’s more of that faux humility.  Helvetica is a very fake-humble typeface, almost pretentious in its lack of artifice.

One thing that elevates this shot of Jean Hersholt and wife Via is that this does look like a real library.  That award on the upper-right looks real.  It looks…Danish (Hersholt was a Dane).  And then there’s that book dead-center in the picture laying horizontally.  Finally, those curtains look so weirdly arranged, they have to be real.  Hersholt was a rarity in Hollywood, an authentically humanitarian guy who helped found the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills.

Apparently, Pabst Blue Ribbon wasn’t yet the darling brand of pretentious downwardly-mobile art-types, because this advertising segment tries to put some gloss on the product.  Notice the touch-up of the PBR bottles.

Most people might actually be more familiar with the 1949 image.  It’s a common image…the sunny-smiling white-toothed guy with limitless confidence.  It’s almost so common and familiar that we don’t see it anymore.  It has become simply a meme, a symbol.

Now, look at the image from 1968.  Part of what’s happening is this shift in advertising copywriting during the Sixties.  We find a lot of this closed-mouth, we’re-straight-shooters posturing from advertisers and companies.  So, we’ve got a black and white photo of a can of tick spray.  Period.  Copy says, “Sergeants.  The largest selling spray flea and tick killer in the whole world.  Because it works.”

Read that copy again.  “…in the whole world.”  “Whole” gives the copy this faux-juvenile spin, something you start to see during this period.  Then that last line is  understated and flat:  “Because it works.”  Finally, see how they aren’t capitalizing the copy?  We want flat, flat, flat.  Graphically, lower-case is flat.  Also these are not sparkling words.  No “amazing, wow, and gee” kind of words.

All of this is intentional.  I imagine that some bearded, sideburned ad exec said, “Listen Phil, let’s take an understated approach to this next Sergeant’s campaign.”  Phil said, “Kind of like the Volkswagen people?”  And Sideburns says, “Right on, Phil.”

This 2008/9 commercial for Van de Kamp’s fish is another indicator of a cultural shift.  Yes, the kid is a mouthy, disrespectful brat–kids are kids, and they have always been kids*.  So that’s not the point.  Point is that in this commercial we’re saying, “The kid is right!”

No longer is there an authoritarian voice, the over-riding voice of reason (i.e., the parent).  In this day of democratization, everybody is an authority.  Everybody has a say.  Everybody is right.

* Though they may be kids, hopefully we guide them toward better behavior.

At some point in the mid-1960s, we start to see non-centeredness.  This ad for Chevrolet “OK” Used Cars from 1968 is a prime example.  The green box has been added by me.

What’s at the center?  Usually, the most important information is at the center of the image.  But here we’ve got a bored kid who is leaning against one of the products that are being advertised.  The Mom is half-heartedly peeking into the window of the red car (which is halfway cut out of the picture).  Dad is fuzzified in the background doing…something.  It’s meant to be very “human,” a slice-of-life image.

It’s that fake humility again cropping up that we’ll start to see so much of.  It’s that anti-hero posturing that permeates all areas of 1960s culture.

More than anything, it’s saying:  Yes, there is a center, but the center is empty and rotten.

It began at age 17, the year 1981.  An instrumental song from the 1960s began to play through my head, and would continue playing for the next 27 years.  I would hear it at the Kmart on Blackstone Avenue in Fresno, California, at the old 1967-era Grille that had been so well-preserved that it could have been placed in the Smithsonian’s American History Museum–an absolute period piece with translucent primary-colored plastic panels dividing the dining area from the store.  The Kmart Grille was a place I would visit to visit 1967, that gateway year between narrow ties and psychedelia.  But that damn song!  What was it?

Year after year,  I would hear it.  But it was never significant enough for the DJ to mention it (if even played by a DJ – more often, it was administered by the people-less Muzak robots).

Pitted Windshield in Palm Springs

Another blast of memory.  Age 22, I am driving down that long stretch of mountains down I-10 westward to Palm Springs.  40 miles before, a sandstorm pitted my windshield beyond repair.  It’s more like coasting than driving.  And that damn song again on one of these Palm Springs radio stations for retirees.  Here’s the thing – the song dredged up some kind of deep latent memories of being a child in 1967.  God only knows where I had originally heard it.

Over the years, I valued my non-knowledge of that song.  It was the Final Mystery.  It was my personal Sasquatch, my Lochness Monster.  It’s more fun not-knowing than it is knowing.

Mystery Solved in 2008

Alas, the secret would be revealed in 2008.  It is called “Music to Watch Girls Go By.”