Exploring Home and Family
Fleck, Fernandez and Munvez
1965
This book showed up in a book donation and I had a blast flipping through the pages. From what I could tell, it is a refugee from a high school and it is practically showroom new! WorldCat shows holdings in mostly university libraries which is where this gem needs to reside. In the meantime, you can enjoy this flashback to the early 1960s. Every picture seemed to be reminiscent of a Doris Day movie. My personal favorite picture is the “pajama party”.
Mary
Friends at school? Those definitely look like the mean girls.
That’s a lot of butter!
It is somewhat telling, at least to me, that all of these photos are courtesy of some corporation’s/commerce commission’s PR departments.
Friends are important? That one guy looks pretty annoying to me, trying to talk in the middle of a photo shoot! How rude!
What, for the love of god, is on the edges of the grapefruit in that first picture? And I love the crossed sausages. We always do that at my hou…well, no, we don’t.
Housekeeping in a skirt and heels? Makes me glad I wasn’t born in that era.
It was widely believed in the 1960s that crossed sausages would prevent vampires from coming to brunch.
As a writer who does a lot of short stories set in the 1950s/60s, this is a gem for research, but yeah, I can’t imagine it’s general collection stuff.
My mom hates houseplants. Thinks they’re breeding ground for mold spores. It’s why she wouldn’t even let me have a Chia Pet as a kid. (I was probably the only one who wanted one.) If she saw that kitchen she’d go on a rant for days about how dirty that kitchen is.
Re: the edges of the grapefruit
I know! I keep going back to that photo to figure it out? Could it be Tabasco, since that is one of the sponsors for that photo and I see no Tabasco products there? But then… Tabasco on grapefruit makes no sense.
(plants in the kitchen photo) Remember ladies that appearance is important at all times, one never knows who might drop by………don’t be caught in those fuzzy slippers! Always do housework in your pumps.
hmmmm……do I even own pumps??
I too wonder what those are on the grapefruit.
Didn’t the mom of the house always fix her family Sunday morning breakfast?
What’s the butter for? There is nothing there to butter!
My family does put our matches under water before throwing them out! I didn’t know that was a real “tip.”
The slumber party looks very dull. 2 girls doing each others hair, one on the phone, one reading a book, and one left out.
Looking at the large version of the breakfast picture, the orange garnish appears to be tiny leaves. Can’t say what kind.
And yes, that is a truly amazing pile of butter.
It looks the the boy in the yellow cardigan is grad the backside of the girl with the 10″ waist.
In episodes of “I Love Lucy”, Lucy always did housework in a full skirt and maybe not high heels, but some low heels for sure. I do believe that those creepy things on the edge of the grapefruit are live snails.
Squeal! I unashamedly admit that I want, want, want that book!
There are rolls (to butter) above the eggs. The Tabasco is next to that.
Surely it can’t be OLIVE bits on the grapefruit?!
@BC–yeah! They’ll give you paper cuts with their starched pleats!
Or poke your eyes out with their Maidenform…
I waaaaaannnnnnt this book sooooooooo baaaaaad! I also want a kitchen that looks like the one in the photo sans the plants. You can keep the mean girls by the locker (Are those high school students or college ones) and the slumber party girls.
I can’t believe the lady with the plants is wearing stripes with polka dots. What WAS she thinking?
I’m guessing the garnish on the edge of the grapefruit is fresh mint or something similar, but I could be mistaken.
I love this book–Stepford family in the kitchen and all!
Definitely one for the book sale or auction. Though if you put it in a library display of nostalgia, it might catch some eyes!
Pink Dress Girl is totally coming on to the photographer…
Not the absolute best home ec book you’ve posted on ALB, but pretty good! The balls of butter scare me.
don’t drop the soap!
Calling James Lileks! I’m sure he’d know what was on the edges of the grapefruit.
The kids by the locker remind me of the scene in ‘Back to the Future’ where Marty meets his mom as a teenager. “Hi, Calvin!”
Weirdly enough, the 1959 ed. is readily available used, as is the 1971 ed….But 1965? I only found one copy, though it’s a bargain at 20.00 + 13.00 shipping (the seller’s in Germany).
Yes, you indeed MIGHT surprise your family by garnishing the rim of a grapefruit with hand-sliced jalapenoes from that jar in the back of the fridge you bought four years before, then giving them all tight smiles of disapproval when they picked them off and left them uneaten in small, shameful piles. But you might not.
Sent an e-mail to James and he sent me this back –
James Lileks to me
1:17 PM (3 minutes ago)
Augh! Tried to comment, but it kept giving me “internal server error.” Here’s what I was going to say:
“Yes, you indeed MIGHT surprise your family by garnishing the rim of a grapefruit with hand-sliced jalapenoes from that jar in the back of the fridge you bought four years before, then giving them all tight smiles of disapproval when they picked them off and left them uneaten in small, shameful piles. But you might not. ”
Feel free to add it in the comments, if you wish. Thanks! Great pix.
1965! Even my mother wasn’t wearing dresses like that anymore in ’65. I was in high school. I remember the almost matching knee length boucle suits we wore for Easter that year. Everything I had was mostly knee length and A-line.
@ Mehitabel: Yes, but there are way more balls of butter than there are rolls. And why would you need a three-tablespoon ball of butter? It boggles the mind.
Hey, *I* was there and some of us DID look like that and I kept the Merry Widow and prom dress with all the crinolines to prove it. Ask Carol.