Remember how you woke up last night, screaming and drenched in sweat, and reached for your phone to give me a call? You sounded pretty unhinged, I’ll be honest with you, and if you can deal with even more honesty, you were scaring me a bit. You asked – no, wait – demanded that I get the hell out of bed and immediately dig through one of the stacks of magazines that make up my sleeping litter and find the June 1969 issue of Popular Science. You were very specific about that. It had to be June of ’69.
I agreed, but asked what you wanted me to do with it. You told me that you just wanted to see a random selection of ads from the magazine; car-related ads are best, but you could deal with maybe one or two non-car ads. Then you recited about 2/3rds of the lyrics to the Passenger and then you hung up.
I’m not going to lie, it was pretty weird, but the intensity in your voice convinced me I best do what you asked, because at this point I had no idea what you’re capable of. Are you feeling any better? I hope so. You really need to stop drinking before bed, if you don’t mind my saying.
Anyway, I found the issue:
Looks like there’s some interesting articles in there, like their suspiciously well-informed guesses about the ’70 cars, but you were quite clear you only wanted to see ads. Fine. Have it your way. Here’s an ad for you:
Look at that! The Kaiser-Jeep CJ-5 Camper! This was a very rare factory option, with only 336 built! And here’s an ad for it, right here!
This thing is deeply cool: designed for use with the V6 Jeep engine making 160 hp, it likely wasn’t fast, but would have been glacial with the four-cylinder Jeep engines. The design treated aerodynamics with all the seriousness a divinity student treats the Tooth Fairy, and likely wasn’t fantastic to drive.
But it was clever! A sort of hybrid slide-in camper/towed trailer, it added an extra axle to make up for the Jeep’s short wheelbase, and could be disconnected in 15 minutes. It even had a toilet! What a cool machine. We’ve covered this before, of course.
Okay, what else do we have? It’ll be hard to beat the Jeep Camper:
I stand corrected! What is he doing? Making a freaking concrete flower pot! In the comfort of, I assume, his own bed! You could be cranking out concrete gnomes and crap instead of your stupid job as a governor or ambassador or whatever you are. Alderperson? And hey, this place is based in Hickory, NC! I’ve been there!
Here’s an interesting ad: aftermarket air conditioners for imports! I can see that dashboard is from a Beetle, and it looks like a ’68 Beetle. Oh! it also seems to be a semi-automatic Beetle! Remember, I’ve gone in-depth on those before – my Beetle used to be one, and my dad had one when I was growing up!
I wonder how well those A/C systems worked? And the company would loan you the tools to do the install? Damn.
Here’s another nice full-color ad, this one for Chevy’s RVs, campers, and off-roaders. Mostly I’m interested in that K5 Blazer. I feel like I hardly even saw them without their roofs, but they sure do look fun that way.
Bruce Meyers designed the Meyers Manx dune buggy, and created a new industry. This is both impressive and tragic, because the business was soon overrun by copycat products of varying quality.
EMPI was one of the best known makers of aftermarket products for air-cooled VWs, so when they sold their own Manx-knockoff, the Imp, it was a big deal. In fact, after an original Manx, the Imp may be one of the most desirable of the fiberglass body-on-a-shortened-VW-pan dune buggies.
The Imp was derivative, sure, but damn, it looked cool.
Wheel Horse is a great name for a tractor company. They started in the mid-’40s and kept going until 2007 or so, but what I want to focus on here is that spelling of “Thoroughbred.” Here it’s spelled “thorobred” which makes it look uncomfortably like “throbbed” when you glance at it. Big throbbed.
This is clever: a thin speaker that fits in a sun visor! I have no idea what the sound quality must have been like, but the packaging is pretty clever. The Magitran Company also seemed to make other ultra-thin speakers using their poly-planar system, whatever that was. I wouldn’t mind a Bluetooth speaker like this for my 2CV!
And finally, let’s talk about the National School of Meat Cutting! Yes, the NSMC was as big a deal then as it is today!
Just eight weeks in Toledo hacking up cows and you’ll be on track to the glamour of butchering! Did they have dorms? A football team? Fraternity/sororities? Awesome parties with competitive pastrami slicing events?
Plus, I don’t see anything that says “bring your own cow, deer, or bear” so I guess the school hooked you up with the meat?
Anyway, please stop calling me in the middle of the night.
I need a College grade hacker
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Thanks.
That topless Blazer really does look the business. What color is it though? Pink? Orange? Red?
I think I’d rock the hell out of a pink 69 Blazer.
Sorry about that call Jason I forgot that pesky time zone difference. I promise you when I called it was already 4am. Practically late morning
If you don’t have a Supreme unit, you shouldn’t even leave the house.
The June ’69 PS issue must have been the only one in 15 years that didn’t have one of the greatest print ads of all time: the one from “Victor B. Mason” entitled “I’d like to give this to my fellow men…while I am still able to help!”
In the lengthy ad, a genius copywriter builds a mythology that a “fascinating and peculiar business” could free you from your current dead-end job because the product “is needed in every little community throughout this country,” as long as you could “work with your hands, use such tools as hammer and screw driver…” And of course you could trust “Victor B. Mason” because “In my own life I have gone beyond the need of money. I have it. I have gone beyond the need of gain.”
As a kid, it was worth the cost of a PS issue just to study that ad and try to guess the product.
I bet it’s gutters. Victor is going to set you up in the gutter business. He’s selling a pamphlet that tells you how to supply yourself with gutter coil and a gutter machine.
This link has somebody who says it’s a rubber stamp machine, which lines up with what he’s claiming but you’d have to sell an awful lot of stamps…
That’s a great link, fascinating, especially the comments.
Damn. All of those years in school. All of those science classes. All of that time learning how to do chemistry and stuff. When I could have just started making concrete flower pots in eighth grade. Why, oh why, did I waste my life so?
It’s never too late! Don’t let your dreams be dreams!
Can you imagine off-roading in that unstable, barely held together, slide in camper Jeep thing… with your kids in the cab-over?
Put on your seat-belt, drive a little reckless, and soon you will be rid of those unwanted 70s swinger party children!
The Magitran Company product(s) look like “exciters”. I messed around a little with them, a coworker is using them on her 7.1 system. Basically affixed to a smooth surface they turn it into the “cone” of the speaker. I experimented with a lot of materials; plywood (good) aluminum honycomb sheet (horrible) foamcore (good), the fender of my car (horrible). The ad references “doors, chairs, tables”, this is definitely something an exciter can do.
Dayton Audio – Exciters & Tactile Transducers
Thin film magnetic speakers can be very good within their size limitations.
Foam speakers with conventional drivers were very good for the price too.
The fun thing about exciters is that you can use really nice (like Baltic birch) plywood, and apply your favorite movie poster or art prints. rather than potentially attenuating the sound the poster or art is the sound.
I’ve never experimented with those.
I always liked magneplanars though.
I have some very long ribbons that were originally used full range.
I plan to roll off lower frequencies myself.
With the Jeep camper you could even bring the kids along on your overland adventure. They’ll love the commanding view from above the cab. The center of gravity situation must have made for a fun crow’s nest type of experience!
I used to have a box of old popular science magazine from the 1950s I’d picked up at a yard sale. I liked the section where people would send in plans for a project they had built recently, like poolside drinks caddy that looked like donkey or something like that. My favorite was a small wind-up boat you could put your toddler in and send them out into the middle of a lake that some guy had built, and launched his toddler in. I’m sure everything went fine.
Every man had a workshop in his garage that was his sanctuary to try and forget the horrors of WWII of Korea. They built stuff, they fixed cars, they escaped the world.
I still have a box of old Cycle Magazines from the late fifties, early 60s that I got with and old AJS motorbike I’d bought. One has an early story about Evel Kinevil, he was traveling around with a dwarf doing stunts at county fairs, and the dwarf would do the same stunts in miniature on a minibike. Something I’d never heard about until I found that old magazine.
Those concrete flowerpot ads were such a part of my parent’s lexicon it entered mine, and I don’t think I ever saw one in the flesh.
To this day, there’s a part of my brain that always answers the question “what’s he doing” with “making a concrete flowerpot”.
Oh if you spent any time in an Italian neighborhood in the 70’s you saw them!