I thought I had seen every type of Valentine’s Day card there was, but apparently I was wrong. Apparently it was a thing in the early 20th century to give out cards with a suffragette theme, as evidenced by the two cards I am sharing with you today. They both directly address the issue of a woman’s right to vote, which as we know was granted with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.

The first card, which I’m guessing was printed pre-1920, is pretty blunt in its message:

I’ll give you time to think it over!

Fairest Suffragette
Be My Valentine
And With This Bracelet
Link Your Hands & Fate With Mine

The imagery of the handcuffs is pretty evocative, wouldn’t you agree?

The second card, which looks like it might have been produced after the 19th Amendment was ratified, seems to be decidedly less bold and progressive to me.

MY VALENTINE
If I can vote, why not propose?
If I am bold you must excuse me.
I’ve loved you for ages, goodness knows!
And don’t you dare, Sir, to refuse me.

Maybe it’s just my 21st century self pushing judgment, but this reads like the lyrics to a Dusty Springfield song. Having won the right to vote, I guess it’s time to get down on your knees and snag a man?

(via Heritage Auctions)

It took more than five decades, but Botany 500 is finally getting the props from me that they so richly deserve. Well, their advertising agency anyway.

I speak of this 1960 ad, which seemed awfully familiar when I spotted it on an eBay auction yesterday.

Faithful readers of mine will remember this as a modified version of a recruitment poster from the Quasi-War (1798-1800), as first seen in my gallery of wartime recruiting posters.

That is some damn fine design and ad copy right there, and I think it deserves to be typed out for your enjoyment.

TO ALL BRAVE, HEALTHY, ABLE BODIED, AND WELL DISPOSED YOUNG MEN who have any inclination to express their individuality, maintain freedom of thought and dress, resist the pressure to conform to mob rule, THE WILES AND BLANDISHMENTS OF FEMALES determined to dictate their choice of apparel, and the connivance of certain parties to unfairly tax their good taste by inflating the price of fashionable attire beyond the limits of REASON AND EQUITABLE PROFIT and despite all precedent and public protest: TAKE NOTICE.

Daroff, tailor, of the City of Philadelphia (The Cradle of Freedom in Menswear) offers to one and all, whigs, tories, and free-thinkers alike, INDEPENDENCE FROM COMPROMISE. Neither styles that make grown men ludicrous, nor workmanship that tries their patience. Rather, a well-tempered balance combining the much-desired AUTHENTIC NATURAL CUT with the lasting benefit of HONEST TAILORING at a fair, sensible, and equitable price calculated to GIVE SATISFACTION. BOOTLEGGERS, CHARLATANS, IMITATORS, AND COUNTERFEITERS TAKE WARNING: all Daroff of Philadelphia garments are clearly marked to prevent fraud and each and every one carries THE ‘BOTANY’ 500 LABEL as a mark of pride and a proof of QUALITY AND SINCERE INTENT. ‘BOTANY’ 500 tailored by Daroff clothes are sold only by apparel stores of HIGH REPUTE and EXTENSIVE EXPERIENCE IN CATERING TO GENTLEMEN OF GOOD TASTE and democratic sympathies. Prices begin at $65.00 and if your local merchant is not one selected to carry ‘Botany’ 500 Clothing, write: H. Daroff  & Sons, Inc., 2300 Walnut Street, Philadelphia 3, Pennsylvania, or 200 Fifth Avenue, New York 10, N.Y. for the name of the store most convenient to you. Prices slightly higher in the West.

Actually, don’t write to that address in Philly, Botany 500 hasn’t been there in years. But still, this is a fantastic advertisement.

I’ve been clean for several years, but at one time I was a hardcore Weather Channel junkie. From the late ’80s through about the mid-1990s, I watched the Weather Channel more in one week than I watched most other channels in a year. And so it makes me just a little bit sad to see what has become of my once-favorite TV destination. Instead of the sober, lo-tech and slightly geeky take on weather that the network used to specialize, we now have a cesspool of lame reality programming and ugly public disputes with cable providers.

But it was not always so. When it was launched in May 1982, the Weather Channel had one mission and one mission only — to broadcast the weather. Sounds so simple, how could it possibly work? Because the internet is so awesome, we have footage from TWC’s first day on the air. (Head to the 15:10 mark to witness cutting-edge TV weather graphic production.)

Warning: Severe weather/Weather Channel geekery to follow. This is one of those things you either get or just shake your head over.

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My love affair with the Weather Channel began some time in the late 1980s, judging by the dates on the clips and images shown on the outstanding TWC Classics website. Although I already was keenly interested in weather and meteorology from about the age of 7, that turned into a straight up obsession thanks to TWC. During the summer especially — when I was home from school — I kept it on almost all the time, even if it was just background noise.

Not only was I genuinely interested in the weather content, I just found everything about the station so… soothing. I’ve recently read a description of old-school TWC as “TV valium” and I agree with that, in the best way possible.

For several years I felt like I had a connection with the station’s on-camera meteorologists, whose names and faces I still recall easily and with some fondness. In no particular order, some of them were…

The lovely Jill Brown…

Jim Cantore (with hair!)…

Bruce Edwards…

Marny Stanier…

Bill Keneely…

Marshall Seese…

Cheryl Lemke…

Jeff Morrow…

Sharon Resultan…

Declan Cannon…

Jeanetta Jones and her rockin’ hair…

Dave Schwartz…

Dennis Smith…

and the king of hurricanes, John Hope (seen here with Charlie Welsh).

But I didn’t watch just for the on-air personalities, no sir. TWC also ran charming little segments on how to fix up and improve things around your home. One that sticks in my memory years later is this one with Marny Stanier, who explains why you should run your ceiling fan all year long.

And here’s Marny shilling for Kraft cheese. Yummy!

Perhaps one of the greatest aspects of TWC for me was the music. The network got somewhat of a bad reputation as a clearinghouse for bad smooth jazz and cheesy canned jingles — usually included as part of their local forecasts that I watched thousands of times — but that’s unfair. If they gave me absolutely nothing else, the Weather Channel was responsible for introducing me to one of my favorite all-time songs — “Last Train Home” by the Pat Metheny Group — in one of their Travel Forecast segments.

During the late 1990s, as I flamed out of my college meteorology program and my passion for weather died down, so too did my interest in the Weather Channel. Not helping things was how the network got slicker and slicker over the years, and began to stray further from its core mission. The death knell for me and many other fans was when the channel was acquired by NBC in 2008. To watch the station now is to see it bear precious little resemblance to the charming, calming signpost it represented on the dial 20+ years ago.

Luckily, we longtime fans are not without anything to remember the good days by. Sites like TWC Classics or YouTube’s wxretro, hookecho80, and theweatherchazz channels have hours upon hours of great footage from the days when the Weather Channel aimed to inform and educate rather than entertain and titillate.

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Seeing as we’re just weeks away from the start of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, I thought I should try to work in at least one Olympic-themed gallery. But this one is a little different, in that it doesn’t show any actual competition. Rather, these are scenes from the construction of the venues at Lake Placid, New York, in preparation for the 1980 Winter Olympics.

According to my information, these shots were taken in the 1977-78 time frame. Click on any photo for the full-size version.

This Sunday is a special day for AFL fans, as we will witness the first AFC Championship game featuring two AFL squads since the New England Patriots beat the San Diego Chargers six years ago. This time it’s the Patriots once again, who will face the Denver Broncos at Mile High.

The Patriots and Broncos are charter AFL teams, and so they’ve been squaring off regularly for more than 50 years. This is the first time, however, that the two teams will play for the right to go to the Super Bowl.

Here, then, is a gallery featuring regular season game programs from Patriots/Broncos games taking place in Denver (Mile High Stadium, formerly known as Bears Stadium). All of these come from Football in Living Color, my exhibition of vintage AFL programs. Visit it today!

Well I know one movie that won’t be seen in Jenny McCarthy’s house any time soon — Star Wars. At least not once she gets a load of this pro-immunization poster from 1977, featuring C-3PO and R2-D2 on it.

This is great ad copy right here:

“Parents of Earth, are your children fully immunized? Make sure – call your doctor or health department today. And may the Force be with you.”

If only there was a vaccine to prevent midichlorians.

(via eBay)

This week I started rolling out my newest and most ambitious project yet, and paradoxically the one I’ve spent the least time promoting — The Press Room. Basically, the Press Room is an extension of my popular and beloved gallery of American Football League covers but with one major difference.

Not content to waste dozens of hours scouring the internet for vintage AFL programs, I’ve decided to expand to all four of the major North American pro sports leagues — MLB, NFL, NHL, and NBA. So I’ve begun the long, painstaking task of assembling a collection of images from those four leagues featuring game programs, media guides, yearbooks, and more. I’m hoping to be able to cover just about everything up until the early 1990s.

I use that as the cutoff point for no particular reason, other than I think that’s when pro sports started feeling way too corporate and homogenized for my liking. That could also have to do with my age as well, as I entered college at about the same time. Who knows. In any case, I have to put some kind of cutoff in or I’ll go nuts collecting this stuff.

In a perfect world I would have rolled this thing out fully formed. But it’s not a perfect world and I’m too damn impatient. So as of right now, all I have are a handful of NFL items for the San Francisco 49ers and Chicago Bears. I am adding new teams and items as quickly as I can, which is one of the reasons the blog has been fairly quiet as of late.

I’m really excited about this project, as I’ve wanted to get it off the ground for some time. The response to my AFL site has been positive and I think you’ll love this one as well. Because the scope is so vast, I’m going to depend pretty heavily on user submissions to help. So if you want to provide me with any images for the Press Room, please read this.

I’m really looking forward to seeing this thing become more fully formed, and I hope you will dig it too. Don’t forget to spread the word via Twitter, StumbleUpon, and the usual social channels. I don’t make a dime off this stuff, but it’s nice to see it take off just the same.

It’s a brand new year, so what better time to look to the past, right? Well anyway, I’m going to do it and I hope you’ll join me for yet another pop culture capsule.

To start off this year’s capsules, I’m taking us back 30 years and putting us knee-deep in the 1980s. By this point in American popular culture, the last vestiges of the ’70s have been shed and we’re smack dab in the middle of the Reagan Era.

For those of you on Spotify, a lot of the tunes listed here are included on some of my Ultimate ’80s Hit Collection playlists. Specifically, the ones for 1983 and 1984.

Top 10 Movies

1. Terms of Endearment ($11.5 million)
2. Sudden Impact ($9.6 million)
3. Scarface ($5.6 million)
4. Yentl ($5.5 million)
5. Uncommon Valor ($5.2 million)
6. Two of a Kind ($5 million)
7. The Rescuers ($4.2 million)
8. Silkwood ($3.8 million)
9. Christine ($3 million)
10. D.C. Cab ($3 million)

Top 10 TV Shows

(Note: Most shows were not airing new episodes the first week of January, so these rankings are from the week of January 8.)

1. Something About Amelia [TV movie] (31.6)
2. 60 Minutes (26.6)
3. Dynasty (25.7)
4. The A-Team (25.3)
5. TV’s Bloopers, Commercials and Practical Jokes (25.0)
6. Dallas (24.2)
7. Simon & Simon (24.1)
8. Hotel (23.0)
9. Falcon Crest (21.5)
10. Magnum, P.I. (21.5)

Top 10 Albums

1. Michael Jackson, Thriller
2. Lionel Richie, Can’t Slow Down
3. Linda Ronstadt, What’s New
4. The Police, Synchronicity
5. Quiet Riot, Metal Health
6. Yes, 90125
7. Culture Club, Colour by Numbers
8. Billy Joel, An Innocent Man
9. Barbra Streisand, Yentl
10. Daryl Hall & John Oates, Rock ‘n Soul Part 1

Top 10 Singles

1. Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson, “Say Say Say”
2. Daryl Hall & John Oates, “Say It Isn’t So”
3. Duran Duran, “Union of the Snake”
4. Yes, “Owner of a Lonely Heart”
5. Olivia Newton-John, “Twist of Fate”
6. The Romantics, “Talking in Your Sleep”
7. Matthew Wilder, “Break My Stride”
8. Elton John, “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues”
9. The Rolling Stones, “Undercover of the Night”
10. Lionel Richie, “All Night Long (All Night)”

The New York Times Best-Selling Fiction Books

1. James A. Michener, Poland
2. Stephen King, Pet Sematary
3. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
4. Bill Adler & Thomas Chastain, Who Killed the Robins Family?
5. Mary Stewart, The Wicked Day
6. Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn
7. Danielle Steel, Changes
8. Anne McCaffrey, Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern
9. Bette Midler, The Saga of Baby Divine
10. Joan D. Vinge (adap.), Return of the Jedi

The New York Times Best-Selling Non-Fiction Books

1. Erma Bombeck, Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession
2. The Best of James Herriot
3. Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., In Search of Excellence
4. Art Buchwald, While Reagan Slept
5. Ken Follett, On the Wings of Eagles
6. John Naisbitt, Megatrends
7. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History
8. Robert H. Schuller, Tough Times Never Last, But Tough People Do!
9. Jonathan Miller, The Human Body
10. William Manchester, One Brief Shining Moment