Category: 1960s

Haverhill’s: a weird stuff-emporium of the 1960s and 1970s, with goofy ads in big magazines like LIFE.

Let’s start with the name, stylized as: haverhill’s. Why? Because this is post-apex America and it’s time to be humble. Fonts go Helvetica on us and upper-case bows meekly into lower-case. The ad copy, too, no longer is no longer boasting and preening about miracle ingredients in gasoline or hair tonic. Instead, it’s all goofy and loopy and prone to tangents, like this for a simple serrated knife:

In our most compulsive desire to make new friends we decided to give away a whole truckload of MAC THE KNIFE…masterpiece of Vulcan’s art.

And later:

But, alas, our generous impulse was thwarted by one of our superstitious supernumeraries of officiously insisted that giving away a knife is very bad luck…

So forth and so on for a knife. A serrated knife.

Or for an AM-FM radio:

When Fred Spanberger, our Controller, returns from his cost accounting seminar at the Wharton School of Finance, he might just decree a screeching halt to this whole crazy scheme.

For a radio. If you dress it up well enough, people will buy.

At the time, Haverhill’s operated out of the very 1960s-ish address of 582 Washington St., San Francisco.

Now, Haverhill’s is operated out of a house at 16911 Grays Bay Blvd, Wayzata, Minnesota.

As some of us sit around in the burgs and hamlets of the United States, knitting our fingers and wondering about the shape that China’s “invasion” of the U.S. will take, need we look any further than Hong Kong? In 1997, Hong Kong’s sovereignty was transferred to China, and the “one country, two systems” principle that helped everyone feel better about the hand-off has been diminishing ever since. While Hong Kong is still a freer type of China than Mainland China, those freedoms are winnowing away.

Changes subtlely happen. Nick Frisch writes in The New Yorker that

interference and intimidation have become more common. Phone calls from Beijing operatives to Hong Kong officials and journalists are now routine. Chinese security agents have disappeared dissidents from the city’s streets. In 2015, several men who published salacious books about the Party leadership were kidnapped, and later…[confessed] to subversion.

Three decades before the hand-off, the Hong Kong branch of the Bank of China, at no.2A Des Voeux Road Central, Central, Hong Kong, became a giant protest sign. In true globo form, we find three countries’ cultures jammed together into one view: the U.S. Hilton hotel corporation, the Bank of China, and English cricket (in the other image) being played

Explains LIFE magazine, October 13, 1967:

Possibly Red China’s proudest monument outside its borders is the Hong Kong branch of the Bank of China, which towers over the neighboring British Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (right). Last week, to celebrate the 18th anniversary of the Communist take-over, the Chinese bank got a festoon of posters with the predictable slogans: “Long life to the Chinese People’s Republic,” and “Raise the Red flag of Mao’s thought and march forward courageously.” On the same day, however, the Communists once again began supplying water to the British colony, the Hong Kong stock market hit a two-year high and a cricket game proceeded in leisurely fashion opposite the Red bank.