Scanning Around With Gene: Ye Olde Country Corn
The term “country” has a lot of meanings and can be applied to music, art, lifestyle, animals… But there’s one form of country I hate: the feather-bed, spinning-wheel, cracker-barrel, maple-syrup, pot-belly-stove, ye-olde-shoppe variety.
It’s not that I dislike old-fashioned values, and anyone who reads this column knows I find interest in almost everything nostalgic. But there’s something about ceramic geese dressed in gingham, playing checkers in the old hardware store, sittin’ a spell, and attending services in a picture-perfect steepled church that gives me the heebee jeebees. I don’t think such a time ever existed.
Click on any image to see a larger version.
All of this week’s images are from an early 1960s magazine called Ideals, which seems to have existed purely to show people how much simpler (and thus better) times once were. The magazine had a circulation of just over 300,000.
I admit it: I don’t value fresh-baked apple pies, a good ol’ hunting dog, big-wheeled coffee grinders, and sugar and spice and everything nice.
In Indiana’s Amish country, I discovered a store that sells nothing more than hundreds of outfits for geese statues people display on their porches and lawns. Thirty years earlier, these people might have have read Ideals, cut out poems from Reader’s Digest, and hung Norman Rockwell prints in their living rooms.
I know I’m being a judgmental curmudgeon, but to me that world is a little too sweet. Perhaps it’s because I was raised a city boy. I sincerely love what I consider true country quaint old-fashioned times that accurately reflect an era. But did boys really dip girl’s pigtails in the inkwell while Mom made fresh griddle cakes and Dad chewed the fat with the other men down at the country store next to the pickle barrel?
And as far as color schemes and artistic sensibility go, what could be worse than a hodge-podge of Pennsylvania Dutch, ornate Victorian, red and white checks, and calico?
Only in Ideals would you find poetry of the sort that rhymes mittens and kittens. Does it get any cuter than that? Well, yes, it does actually. There are Tin Lizzies, patchwork quilts, paisley shawls and “violets drenched with morning dew.”
Perhaps if I had ever been on a hayride or driven a horse and buggy, I might feel differently. And I’ve never had sassafras and I didn’t have freckles, either. In Los Angeles where I grew up people were nostalgic for a time when the air didn’t make your eyes red and your lungs hurt.
I don’t have any issue with these things individually, and I respect the right of anyone to cherish such images and values. But when you put them all together, especially in the way Ideals magazine did, they come off as condescending towards the not-so-simple lives most of us lead. Or worse, like a bad theme restaurant where the food is “hearty” but not so good.
[Editor’s note: To each his own! Next week Gene embraces Mexican flea market art, an entirely different kind of kitsch.]
Gene, I agree as a designer that esthetically this type of stuff won’t win many awards. But, for those of us who grew up in those simpler places, there is a healthy comfort in that lifestyle. Many people who grow up in city environments develop a cynicism that can easily interpret one’s fondness for this simple way of life as condescension. Don’t be so quick to equate simplicity with ignorance. I’ve known many sophisticated people whose “wisdom” pales in comparison to a seasoned man of the earth.
I don’t think it’s about disdain for simpler ways.
There’s creepy stuff going on behind those ideal scenes out in the country.
Great column as usual, Gene! I agree that these times probably never really existed or have been really heavily embellished upon.
I think they still print Ideals – I have seen them at my local library.
Gotta go, it’s time for my checkers game down at the General Store! :)
I hate the geese dressed in aprons type of country too. Its that pseudo country that permeated the suburbs in the eighties and nineties, which I call baby nursery country (teddy-bears, cow motifs, geese in clothing, farm and kitchen implements with no real use) that I find maudlin.
Rural life on the other hand is wonderful. There is nothing better than homemade jam on a piece of crusty homemade bread straight from the oven (what is now referred to as artisanal bread) and a cold glass of milk. Or organic vegetables, which I now pay a mint for, but grew for just the cost of seeds when I lived on a farm in the nineties.
I now have a really beautiful house in the historic district and a postage stamp sized yard. And, as much as I enjoy sitting in front of a computer for eight to ten hours a day dealing in abstractions and marketing concepts, I would leave it all in a hot minute for the farm life just so I could get off the anti anxiety meds, be debt free, and have the kind of good health that comes from daily sustained physical labor. I just can’t afford it financially.
Your column brought back memories cause when I was a kid, my grandma and my mom got Ideals for a while. Believe it or not, this mag–poems and pics–accurately described my grandma’s childhood growing up a county girl. It really was like that for some people.
Brighten up Gene. Not everyone grew up with the same experiences as you. Ideals was one opinion of the glories of the past that appealed to a large subscriber base. I grew up out in the country and I didn’t like the magazine as a child because it portrayed pictures of my life as it was and seemed boring at the time. Looking at the pictures now I see memories portrayed fairly and since my family didn’t take a lot of photos, it’d be nice to get my hands on some issues, even though they were a little too “ideal” much of the time.
The LA air must have singed more than your lungs! I’ll agree, those poems are just a LITTLE (read: WAY) over the top with sweetness. But don’t disdain what you don’t know, city slicker. Most of all those experiences were put together for a reason in the 60s, to evoke a simpler time before WWII. I can’t wait for the nostalgia of macrame, acid washed jeans and the Jonas Brothers.
I see from the first seven comments that Gene has stirred something up here–and good for him!
I’m gonna side with Gene on this one, thinking of what History left on the nation’s doorstep within a matter of three or four years. The sheer improbability of that depicted world is nicely symbolized by the photograph of the water rushing into the pail of fruit hanging from the spigot.
When I saw the picture of the boy on the dock, my first impression was that he was playing a hand-held video game. Talk about a time warp.
This stuff may be based on real memories and experiences, but most of it strikes me as artificial and staged. I think that’s what makes it feel “kitsch” more than anything.
I’m sorry you don’t think “everything nice” existed. It did, My family was one of the 300K. Stop at a ‘cracker barrel’ some time. You’re welcome to come over and have some fresh apple pie. JohnM. Victorville, CA
If I would have received this magazine “back in the day”, I would have thought they were trying to sell me something.
I was talking with a young web designer the other day. She could not comprehend what I was telling her about gallies of type, Bestine, and Daige waxers. She got the gist of it, but could not relate to it. KInda like the difference between a city kid and a country kid. You can explain the lifestyle of a city kid vs a country kid, but you gotta live in each place to truly understand it. Me? City kid – Fairfield, CA. Small town back in the mid-50s to early 60s. Grandpa died in the early 60s in Black, MO so the family loaded up the 1960 GMC pickup and went to Phil, KY to drop us kids off at Grandma’s (divorced from Grandpa for many years, remarried). Phil, KY – population 6. Picture a “T” intersection of two country roads. Grandma Dot and Uncle Will lived above the Post Office, Aunt Chloe lived next door and was the Post Mistress, Cousin Steve and his parents lived across the country road from them. Across the road from Cousin Steve’s and across the road from Grandma Dot’s and Uncle Will’s stands the old country store under the trees, next to a creek and bridge. Uncle Will ran the country store – huge wooden-sided building with a chewing tobacco ad painted on the side. Inside: huge wooden counter with a giant jar of coiled bologna in brine, giant pickle jar, big bin of soda crackers, and a soda vending machine (you open the lid and slide the bottle you want towards the dispenser) and in the back of the store – yes, a pot-bellied stove, chairs, rocking chair (Uncle Will’s) and a checker board on an old barrel. We kids loaded up on candy and soda pop and went down to the creek to hunt crawdads. At night, we would catch lightning bugs.
I look back at that time and understand the nostalgia.
We came back to California after a couple of weeks in KY. I grew up, Fairfield grew up, board art is now in the dinosaur age, and I want to upgrade to CS4! Thanks for your article, Gene. :)
I must agree to disagree – I don’t agree with Gene on this one! Fun to parse the design techniques of a magazine – but what’s so different about that today??? More technology? No “heart-pulling” moments? No “poems?” No views of a desire to advertise urban life of yesteyear? Of course, it’s ideal !!
Well, I’ve always enjoyed Gene’s visual expressions but found this one rather condescending to view another era used in Ideals to comment on a simpler time.
Perhaps, someone in 50 years will look at the current mags/ads in the same way.
Love ya Gene – but a miss on this one.
Great article Gene.
I was astonished to read this entire article on “country charm” with nary a mention of the obsessive use of italics alternately with normal text within EVERY SINGLE POEM posted here! Surely that is just as wrong and annoying as the entire concept of the magazine in question….I’m left to marvel silently to myself “Did people get paid to publish this?”