Now, as you’ll recall, in a blog titled “And Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women,” we examined the use od cigarettes on postcards. Although cigarettes are everywhere in mid-century movies and television, we argued, on postcards they were primarily used to indicate a young woman who, like the one shown on this Seventies poster of a Twenties postcard, was advertising availability. If you don’t remember all this, do not go back and read it (June 12) right now. I just summarized it for you so we can move on. I need to get this taken care of so I can set out to find a UPS store where I can return a garment which, like a lot of modern clothing, was advertised as being the same size I usually wear and turned out to be much smaller, somehow, than I expected. The twentieth century’s dependence on AI is no doubt to blame. That and maybe the metric system and the modern inclination to…where were we?
But the cigarette does appear, less frequently, in other roles on postcards. This, from a dozen decades ago, may seem at first to be the same old plication about the young lady with the cigarette. But if you can tear your eyes from her, look at HIM. (No, I don’t know why there’s a paper lantern on his cane.) And check out the little birdie.
A cigarette could also, for a couple of generations, be seen as part of a dreamy utopian scene. In a perfect world, it is suggested, life is low on responsibilities and high on harmless pleasures. (That’s the catch. Your pleasures are harmless ONLY in a perfect world, which we ain’t got. But this “illegal, immoral, or fattening” philosophy does not sell postcards.)
Advertising of the time, of course, said the same thing more overtly. REAL fun required nicotine, calories, and alcohol (or caffeine. Or both. Kahlua was still largely in the future during mid-century, but there was Irish coffee.)
Any sort of joy could be enhanced by lighting up a slim shaft of tar and nicotine. These travelling men who, by tradition, should be smoking cigars (one of LAST week’s blogs; are you keeping up?) but here have added cigarettes to their enjoyment of the beauty of a sunset.
True, this cowboy is not getting the same enjoyment out of dusk, but the cowboy life was known for its freedom and excitement, often augmented by a hand-rolled smoke stick.
When over-indulgence is depicted on postcards, it almost always involves the alcohol part of the equation. This chap did not wind up sleeping in a crate because of his excesses in the tobacco line. (There are plenty of postcards dealing with people over=indulging in FOOD, but besides being a whole nother blog, they are always shown enjoying it very much. And over-indulgence in caffeine also came much later in the century, starting roughly at the same time Kahlua hit the U.S. market. Coincidence?)
So were there NO postcards exhibiting a negative side to all this nicotine? Well, yes, but I need to get this box to UPS while I can still exchange for a much larger size. (Maybe it’s social media; maybe social media makes your clothes—even the ones you just bought—get smaller when you’re not looking. Another nother blog.)
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