ApexUSA is a stab into the darkness, an attempt via ad images to locate the exact point in the 20th century when America reached its cultural peak.
Is a LIFE ad for Pullman coaches really indicative of what was going on in America in 1937? Isn’t that a distorted view? Yes. But a serious, tight-lipped historical account would be equally distorted. Pick your distortion.
This is not a yearning for the past. As time goes by, you gain some things, lose others. There are no answers here. Only evidence.
Anybody who is under a certain age will not remember how mall department stores once ruled the retail roost. Before their peak and then eventual decline in the 1980s, these massive shopping cubes, which often went by a single name moniker (Alexander’s, Dalton’s, Gottschalk’s, etc.), were the place to buy everything from clothing to books and sporting goods.
To keep the shoppers imprisoned in the store for the longest period of time, these stores usually had a self-contained restaurant. They ranged from the Heather House, with its white tablecloth veneer of fanciness, to the Kmart Family Cafeterias, where, in 1977, you could dine on a full Salisbury Steak meal, with potatoes, gravy, mixed vegetables, roll and butter for only $1.08.
Vista Restaurant, Yorkdale Mall, Toronto – 1960s
Yorkdale Mall Toronto Vista Restaurant – ca mid 1960s
Honeysuckle Lane. It sounds too good to be true, too mid-century-modern-suburban, like Desperate Housewives’ Wisteria Lane or a David Lynch dream. But it did exist in the imagination of two Southern California brother developers, two famous MCM architects, and it still does exist today. And it promised a new kind of building that would never rot, catch fire, or succumb to earthquakes. A building like that could only go by one name: The Forever House.
1948: Development Begins
The United States was settling into the idea of peace and prosperity. Just three years prior–just the blink of an eye–Japanese delegates stood on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri and surrendered to General MacArthur. The war was now over. Time to get home and pick up on life again.
Southern California boomed in the post-war years. Still fueled by war industry money, the Los Angeles area prospered, and people needed places to live. Every morning, a reader of the Los Angeles Times or Herald-Examiner could sip coffee while viewing big quarter-page ads for new housing developments.
A new type of house was being built in Whittier, near Los Angeles. With design help from famed Southern California architects A. Quincy Jones and Frederick Emmons, two brothers who were partners in a building and development operation, the Hughes, began with a 100 acre sub-division of these miracle homes just off of the Santa Ana Freeway.
They would eventually be called The Forever House, and that one building material that had been the staple of homes for thousands of years would be curiously absent: wood.
1948-1952: Weaving Homes from Steel and Concrete
Hugheston Meadows Steel Weaving Machine – 1948
The Hughes’ idea was that since pre-stressed concrete was already used to build many things–bridges, retaining walls–it could be used to build houses, too.
Engineers first created, from scratch, machines that would turn long, straight lengths of “pencil steel” into the diagonals that would then become the woven steel panels or mattresses that form the core of this building process.
These machines were transported to the site, so that the entire process would happen there–not in a factory.
Hugheston Meadows Steel Weaving Machine – 1948
After a panel had been created, they were hoisted into place, both walls and roofs, and plywood forms put in place and moistening. Then, much like the building of a swimming pool, an operator “shot” gunite, or shotcrete, against the plywood, amassing about two inches of gunite.
The operator would let that 2-inch layer dry before coming back to it and layer by layer filling in the entire woven steel lattice. After the panel was filled, it would be covered by a 1/8″ thick hand-applied finish layer.
1953: Selling Begins
Hugheston Meadows House, Whittier, CA – 1948
In the spring of 1953, the ads went up for 136 homes that were “precision engineered of steel, aluminum, glass, & masonry.” Because of this, they would be termite proof, fire proof, rot proof, earthquake proof, and just to make sure that all bases had been covered, “deterioration proof.”
Another big selling point of the time was the nearby new $2,000,000 Clock Country Club and golf course.
Common to housing ads of the time, World War II vets could put down a smaller down payment ($450) than non-vets ($2,500).
Forever House Ad, LA Times – 1953
Curiously enough (and perhaps wisely so), not much else was made of Hugheston Meadows’ radically different building process. A May 1953 article in the Los Angeles Times only says that the homes had recently received an award from the National Association of Home Builders.
By May, sales agent James B. Hickey reported that Hugheston Meadows was already 50% sold out.
Many of Hugheston Meadows’ homes still exist and can be viewed by driving down Honeysuckle, Starlight, Sunnybrook, Breckinridge, or Viburnum Lanes in that circle of homes bound by the golf course.
Interestingly enough, the Honolulu Advertiser, October 1952, relayed a story from The Daily People’s World, a Communist newspaper, that future U.S. President Richard Nixon (then a senator) lived in Hugheston Meadows, “a subdivision where Negroes and other non-Caucasians are barred from owning and renting.”
What to call these men who, in decades past, did fearsome things for a purpose and did so with utter aplomb? While dangerously close to yes men, the term yestermen works for me.
He’s the man who saves the woman from falling off of Mt. Rushmore–all without taking off his tie. The polar opposite would be the Jackass pussies who do purposeless things with complete vanity.
F. Bert Farquharson is one such yesterman.
Tacoma Narrows Bridge Is Ready To Collapse
On November 7, 1940, the Tacoma Narrows, south of Seattle, Washington, was beset with gale force winds. According to the Washington Department of Transportation (WSDOT), by early morning the Tacoma Narrows Bridge began
undulating, “galloping,” with several waves 2 to 5 feet high. At 7:30 a.m. the wind measured 38 miles per hour. Two hours later, engineers clocked the wind at 42 miles per hour near the bridge’s east end.
Because “Galloping Gertie,” as it was nicknamed, was a suspension bridge, it had the ability to flex, bend, and ripple, all without breaking–for the moment, as least. Galloping Gertie was the world’s third largest suspension bridge.
Tubby the Dog is Trapped
By now, spectators, bridge officials, and newsmen had begun to gather on both ends of the bridge, with a number of them still cautiously driving across the bridge.
One such newsman, Leonard Coatsworth, of the Tacoma News-Tribune, was actually there not as a newsman. He was driving toward his summer cottage on the Olympic Peninsula. In the back seat was his black cocker spaniel, Tubby.
Coatsworth did not complete his trip across the bridge. The bouncing bridge threw his car against the curb, and Coatsworth managed to crawl from the window and stumble back toward the East Tower, a good 480 yards away. Coatsworth later said of his escape from the bridge:
On hands and knees most of the time, I crawled 500 yards or more to the towers…My breath was coming in gasps; my knees were raw and bleeding, my hands bruised and swollen from gripping the concrete curb…Toward the last, I risked rising to my feet and running a few yards at a time…
One problem: Tubby was still trapped in the car.
Enter Frederick Bert Farquharson!
F. Bert Farquharson (1895-1970), a professor of engineering at the University of Washington, had been involved with fixing wind-related engineering issues on Gertie prior to this gale. When he heard about the problems with the bridge, he hopped in his car and drove an hour south from his home in Seattle.
When he reached the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Farquharson began filming the bridge from various angles. After hearing about the predicament with Tubby trapped in the car, Farquharson decided to walk out onto the bridge and save Tubby.
Two huge problems. First, by this time, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was shaking so wildly, one edge of the bridge was often as much as 28 feet higher than the other side. Second, concrete chunks of the bridge had already begun to fall off.
Another problem that no one knew at the time: the bridge was only 6 minutes from collapse.
Prof. Farquharson Tries To Save Tubby
Farquharson ventured over 1,000 feet to Coatsworth’s abandoned car. But when he tried to grab Tubby, the dog bit his finger. Realizing that this was a lost cause and that his own life was at stake, Farquharson wisely retreated. WSDOT tells us:
Farquharson ran from the East Tower toward the Toll Plaza, covering the 1,100 feet of the side span length as fast as his legs could carry him. He followed the centerline, where he knew there was least motion. Twice, the roadway dropped 60 feet, faster than gravity, then bounced upward, finally settling into a 30-foot deep sag.
But here’s what propels Farquharson to true titanium-balls status. When he arrives at the end of the bridge, he is still dressed in his tie and trenchcoat, and holding his pipe.
If you didn’t catch that: wearing his tie and holding his pipe.
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapses
By 11:10am, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge–good ol’ Galloping Gertie–had fully collapsed, into the cold waters of the narrows.
A video of the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The section with Farquharson, aplomb intact and pipe in hand, begins at 2:05. Be sure to mute the sound, so you don’t have to listen to the nasty New Age music that the YouTuber put on this video.
Recently, I read an Associated Press assessment of how the American suburbs are no longer “your father’s suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s” and have become educated communities with vibrant arts scenes, and where Brazilian grocers and Vietnamese nail salons reside joyfully next to one another.
Civic leaders in the city of Shawnee and county of Johnson Kansas are planning a National Museum of Suburban History.
Naturally, this leads to wild speculation. Wise-ass commenters at Gawker provide some of the funniest takes on what this Museum of Suburban History might look like:
“Au Bon painkillers”
“The grinning, waving fireman from the beginning of Blue Velvet“
“The last decent high schools in America”
And my favorite, “a desk with a guy from Countrywide Mortgage approving 12-year-old museumgoers for $600,000 balloon mortgages.”
I wonder if there is any more juice left in this cultural trope. In order to experience the glee of tearing something down, you need to have something to tear down.
A Very Short List…
In film, American Beauty, The Ice Storm, and Blue Velvet showed how the American suburbs, perfect and placid on the outside, are crumbling and corrupt inside.
In literature, anything from John Cheever, anything from Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road; Easter Parade), The Ice Storm by Rick Moody.
On TV, it’s Desperate Housewives, Weeds, Hung, Breaking Bad, and a countless other shows. Mad Men kills two cultural birds with one stone: the stifling 1950s and stifling suburban life.
Another indictment against this trope–Sinclair Lewis’ novel from 1922, Babbitt–which we will get to in a moment.
Weeds
The promo for the Showtime program sums it all up: actress Mary-Louise Parker dressed in a 1950s-style one-piece bathing suit, pumps, and perfectly made up (evoking the perfectness of the 1950s suburbs)…paired with the evil marijuana leaf! The garden hose neatly connects the two, since it’s both an icon of suburbia (got to keep that lawn watered) and a item for irrigating pot.
Christopher Hitchens mentions how Hollywood has always reverted to this trope–and had much success with it. It’s what he calls the “continued stern disapproval of anything ‘suburban’ by the strategic majority of our country’s intellectuals.”
Hitchens also reminds us of how Tom Lehrer calls “Little Boxes”–the 1962 song by Malvina Reynolds that was used as a Weeds theme–“the most sanctimonious song ever written.”
Lewis wrote Babbitt in the late ‘teens of the 20th century–right at the intersection of Prohibition and the spread of American suburbs. Lewis devotes many pages to the uniform and mundane suburbs, describing them in close detail, down to the color of the lampshades.
(Two out of every three houses in Floral Heights had before the fireplace a davenport, a mahogany table real or imitation, and a piano lamp or reading-lamp with a shade of yellow or rose silk.)
Right after that, we hear that
(Eight out of every nine Floral Heights houses had a cabinet phonograph.)
This evokes the opening credits for seasons one and two of the Showtime program Weeds. Identical SUVs file into the fictional community of Agrestic/Magestic (Stevenson Ranch, CA, in real life). Identical men jog in the park. Identical children leave a school bus.
Lee Siegel, in a Wall Street Journal piece called Why Does Hollywood Hate the Suburbs, reminds us that after Sam Mendes directed American Beauty, he boldly explored new territory by directing…Revolutionary Road.
Perhaps, like Mendes, it’s time to move on to other themes, or at least a more complex vision of the American suburbs.
So what happened here. How, in the span of 19 years, did we go from this to that? The first image is from a beer ad dated October 31, 1949. The second image is from a tick spray ad dated August 9, 1968.
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.”
