Friday, March 03, 2006
The cartoon shown above was actually kept in a little box in my Mother's desk ever since she cut it out of a magazine back in the forties. For younger readers who may not know all these terms, here they are. A "Gibson Girl", in the broader sense, was a term used for upper middle class women of the Edwardian era or slightly before. It was popularized by Charles Dana Gibson, who was a very successful illustrator of the period. A "flapper" is a term for the women of the twenties who bobbed their hair and experimented with anything modern and anti-Victorian. A jitterbug was a term for the kids in the forties who fast-danced through the swing craze, the Bee-Bop craze and every other craze that came along including "Frankie". So what did Betty turn out to be? Come on! You can say it. Actually there are several right answers. It's hard to imagine that there was once a time when the answer we know for a certainty today was actually a source of wonder.
Where I grew up, you could always find the lastest and greatest records at good old Giant Music.
Here is a very old postcard which shows a girl finding a warm moment in her correspondence. Note the Song of the Machine title.
