These appeared in July, 1973. How many cultural references from that particular time can you recognize?
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A reference to Alvin Toffler’s book about things coming at us too fast.
Gasoline shortage – stations closed or out of gas.
Primal scream therapy.
Bloomingdale’s as upscale clothing store.
The end of Vitamin C fad for colds (per Linus Pauling) and the beginning of the Vitamin E fad (antioxidants).
Watergate hearings on TV. Baker was one of those involved in the investigations.
I think this is all of them. All without looking anything up online. How’d I do?
I had numbers attached, but the editor apparently ate them.
I got none of them except the OPEC crisis one, which I learned about in my history class.
The only one I didn’t get was the Bloomingdale’s one. I don’t know if Mark’s explanation @1 is really enough for a joke. Maybe it’s more NYC-centric than the others. Still, I figure 5 out of 6 is pretty good for the year I turned 11.
I remember reading Future Shock several times in the 1970s. I read it repeatedly because, as a teenager, I found it fascinating, but in every case I couldn’t remember any of it a few months later. I still can’t, maybe I should read it again as a technically-senior-citizen.
A prominent futurist, though I don’t think she was directly affiliated with the Tofflers, was the delightfully pseudonymed Faith Popcorn.
A “gift link” to a 2016 NYT article, Why we need to pick up Alvin Toffler’s torch.
Why does the “Bloomingdale couple” appear to be a pair of alligators?
(OT) New gravatar, Downpuppy?
Thank you, I was completely lost on this.
It’s what I use elsewhere. Finally dug into WordPress to bring it here.
In the Washington area in the late 70s and early 80s, Bloomingdale’s had a reputation as an upscale, slightly “preppy” alternative to J.C. Penny, Hechts, or Sears. Their prices were higher, but the merchandise tended to be somewhat better†. Dedicated aficionados often referred to it as “Bloomie’s“‡, which could have been used in the caption of the cartoon, but that might have been misunderstood (such as for “bloomers”).
P.S. @ Powers (9) † – The alligators are probably a reference to Izod Lacoste products, which have an alligator logo.
P.S. ‡ – Then there was “Neiman Marcus“, which had luxury stuff at much higher prices, resulting in the nickname “Needless Markup“.
I love trying to explain the pioneering Sociolinguistics work of William Labov, in particular the 1966 New York Department Stores “fawth flaw” experiment. But for reasons of time — and tbh accuracy, since I don’t remember any details accurately — here instead is a study guide summary. (Sadly, it turns out that Bloomie’s is not one of the three stores they picked to visit.) https://www.studysmarter.us/explanations/english/language-and-social-groups/labov-new-york-department-store-study/
@ Mitch (14) – I was going to say that Bloomingdale’s did not even exist when that study was conducted, but that’s not quite correct. The company was founded in (surprise!) 1861, but they did not launch their “first store outside of the New York City area” until 1976, which explains why I had always thought of them as an “upstart” department store.
I thought the gasoline one had something to do with car-centric Americans, trekking through south east Asia, and concerned about finding gasoline for their cars, upending the expectation that they are truly trekking, but yeah, ’73, gas shortage… 🤦
I never read Future Shock, but I still got the cartoon.
The only one that gave me pause was the alligators — was that a thing? Or are they meant to be hobos or bums or, or, alligators, but because they are dressed up in Bloomingdales’ clothing, they suddenly think they are upscale?
I suspect I’ve seen alligator-head people in New Yorker cartoons before. Maybe if someone with access to a lot of NYer material could research this cartoonist, he may have been the one just drawing this way as a personal mannerism?
Mitch @ 14: Ah, I remember one of my linguistics classes, the professor had us go out to downtown Rochester to the department store (I’m embarrassed I can’t remember the brand! And me who had a roommate from the Hutzlers family… (Yes, that’s Baltimore, but it should have made me conscious of local department store brands…)) We were trying to gather evidence of the north midwest vowel shift; I think the methodology even included us going to upscale and working class stores…
@ Danny (17) – The search engine at the Conde Nast store is not perfect, but the results it produces for Edward Koren seem to indicate that he frequently mixes people with anthropomorphic animals in his cartoons. I could not find any “true” alligators on the first page of the results, and an independent search for “alligator” did not produce anything by Koren, but I did discover a cover he did in 1982 (the animals look similar, but seem too furry to be alligators):
Koren’s characters often look animal like. The second one here (gasoline) is also by him, and while those characters look more human, they also look pretty quirky. I think Kilby’s probably right that it’s a reference to LaCoste’s logo, since LaCoste products were also very trendy then.
@ zbicyclist – I went researching only because of the CamelCase “C”, but the surprise that I discovered was that Izod & Lacoste were never a single company, but rather a marketing partnership that was dissolved in the early nineties, after the “preppy” fashion bubble had burst.
I was 15 in 1973. I knew about Toffler’s Future Shock, though I never read it, despite being interested in such things, so I got that. Also the 1973 oil price crisis. I knew plenty about Watergate but I didn’t remember Howard Baker… I think I was confusing him with someone else, as I thought he was one of those televangelist preachers. I’ve heard of primal scream therapy, though I don’t know what I knew of it in 1973. I didn’t get the Bloomingdale’s one, and though I’ve heard of Vitamins C and E I wasn’t aware of any particular faddishness about them.
Narmitaj, the other people who were interfering with your memory of Howard Baker were evangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker (spelled thus but pronounced just like single-k Baker). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bakker
@ Narmitaj (22) – Howard Baker was the ranking (minority) Republican member of the Senate’s Watergate Committee, and fairly well-respected on both sides of the aisle.
P.S. Jim and Tammy Faye were skewered on several occasions by Berke Breathed in Bloom County:
Howard Baker was a pre-Modern ERA Republican who put Country before Party. He gained a lot of respect and was one of the Senators who convinced RMN to resign for the good of the country. I think he ran for the Presidency several times and was even considered a front runner for a brief while.
I was a bit of a political geek in my early teens, so the Baker reference was right in my wheelhouse.
@Narmitaj: Linus Pauling, a Nobel laureate, pushed large doses of vitamin C incessantly in his later life, although the medical evidence for the use of heavy vitamin C supplements was and is lacking. Vitamin E supplements became the next big supplement thing, but while vitamin E itself is vital, trials of the supplement (i.e. taking vitamin E in pills rather than just in food) didn’t show much and the fad ran its course.
@ zbicyclist – To be overly precise, Pauling was awarded two Nobel Prizes (Chemistry ’54 & Peace ’62), and he is one of only five individuals who have achieved this distinction. It was largely this renown that made it difficult for the scientific community to dismiss his unfounded theories about vitamin C out of hand, and the effects of his propaganda are still felt even today.
Thanks. I have heard of Linus Pauling, especially in relation to DNA, but I didn’t know about the C business. And I have heard of the Bakkers, so yes, they were the people glitching the withdrawal process in my memory bank.
Hey! 50 years ago, Howard Baker was cute.
I expect he’s not any more, tho
The Bloomingdale Couple look furrier than they look reptilian to be croco/gators. Also, they don’t appear to have tails.
The furry crocogators look like the Wombles of Wimbledon Common as much as anything. Although originally a book series by Elisabeth Beresford, starting in 1968, they maintain 1973 relevance through the TV series that started production then. They “aim to help the environment by collecting and recycling rubbish in creative ways”. They also released several singles and appeared on Top of the Pops (a popular weekly chart rundown TV show on the BBC).
@ narmitaj (31) – Thank you for resolving a gag in an old “Vicar of Dibley” episode that I never really understood until I saw that photo and glanced at the link. As I recall, Alice was testing some interview questions on the Vicar, one of which went something like “If you could invite anyone in the world to your house, which one of the Wombles would it be?” It was clear from the context that they were characters from a children’s book or TV show, so I never bothered to look them up.
P.P.S. @ 24 – Later that week Tammy is discovered in Binkley’s “closet of anxieties“:
The only reason I didn’t connect the “alligator” one with Lacoste was that they weren’t wearing the golf shirts that were the most ubiquitous product with the alligator logo on them. My dad used to call them “the five dollar shirt with the twenty dollar alligator”.
I had several when they were licensed for the downscale market by Izod, but once they split up, the shirts took a leap in price. Never bought one since.
larK (18): Rochester’s most popular downtown department store was Sibley’s, though McCurdy’s and B. Forman were also there.
Sears had an Izod knockoff with a dragon. I like polo shirts, and used to wear them to work every day once Megacorp went to casual attire. Now it’s tees all day most of the time,
@ Mark H. (34) – I don’t think I ever actually purchased an alligator polo with my own money (from either company), but my dad liked to give them to us as Christmas and birthday gifts, so I used to have a fair sized collection. A decade or two ago when I was visiting Washington, I looked into buying a few on my own, and was absolutely staggered by the fashionably upscale pricing (as I recall, somewhere between $80 – $100 per shirt), far more than I was willing to pay for a little family nostalgia. (I would guess that when my dad was buying them, they ran from about $25 – $40.)
@ Brian in StL (36) – Three or four decades ago, Britches came out with a line of “Warthog” shirts, which I thought was a hilarious “alligator” parody. I had a number of those polo shirts, too.
I have commented on this before: I have found myself running into life-time inflation of around a factor of ten, meaning stuff from my childhood (when pricing was reasonable!) would cost 10 times as much today. (Comic books, Mad Magazine, candy bars, movie tickets, all held up pretty well to that; I then ran it back another 40 years before my time, and found it held up pretty well, there, too, if I can trust Charlie Brown that with a quarter he could see the movie and have two candy bars…) Actually, the clock is still running, and I made that observation already a number of years ago, and we’ve recently undergone a punctuated equilibrium of inflation, so it’s even moreso now, probably; I expect if I live past my to my threescore and ten to see a lifetime inflationary price increase of 100 times.)
@ larK – I can confirm the five-cent candy bars, but the Peanuts strip that I found quoted 35¢ for the movie:
I can’t make out the copyright year, but from the artwork, I would place it in the early to mid 60s — since I’m sure I’ve seen cartoons referring to a quarter for the whole shebang, that gives a 100% inflation rate for ~10-15 years….
When I was a kid in the 60s, we lived for a time in a small city, Pawhuska OK (now slightly famous due to the Pioneer Woman). It had one theater, which we’d usually walk to once a week in the summer. My parents considered everything in town to be walking distance, for us anyway. The movies were 35c unless they were Disney ones, then they were the lofty price of 50c. I remember seeing “Blackbeard’s Ghost” there.
Re Linus Pauling, it is fairly well known in the scientific community that degrees, experience and awards in one field of science is no guarantee of competence or even common sense in any particular other field. The phrase “outside his area of expertise” does come up.
One example is William Shockley, a co-inventor of the transistor. With regard to his views on race and intelligence and his writings on eugenics, he is considered to be outside his area of expertise.
For another example, the chemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons claimed to have built a device that achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature, producing more energy out than went in. Physicists who investigated their work formed the opinion that physics was outside the area of expertise of the two chemists.
@ larK – It was very early 1960s: If you click on the link that I normally include when embedding any comic, it will take you to the original source page, revealing that the date was April 30th, 1960. I’ve searched the Peanuts archives using all sorts of expressions for 25 cents, but wasn’t able to find anything like what you described, but I did find a reference to five-cent hamburgers and a 30-cent movie:
P.S. @ larK – Schulz was never 100% reliable in matters pertaining to continuity, but given that Charlie Brown paid 35¢, and his dad paid 30¢ for a movie ticket, I think that any 25¢ or 15¢ tickets (if a reference can be found) will turn out to be from an even older generation in “Peanuts“, or possibly from a completely different comic strip (“Blondie” and “Gasoline Alley” being two relevant candidates).
@Kilby: yeah, that must have been the strip, and I’m suffering from the Meryl oregano effect… 50¢ instead of a quarter, Violette instead of Shermy… I’m pretty sure my octogenarian neighbor recently mentioned how for a quarter he could do the same thing in his day (this came up naturally enough during one of our old farts movie afternoons), and that further derailed me… I searched the indices of my Complete Peanuts collections through to ’66, so unless he returns to it in the 90s (as he did with a lot of topics), this is definitely oregano effect on me.
(I’m also getting too old for the $%^&ing internet: in my day, the whole idea would be to put up useful things to aid you in finding stuff, so someone making the indices of the Complete Peanuts books available online would be a natural, to say nothing of having an actual searchable database of transcribed strips, and all that stuff existed once in the glorious olden days — nowadays it’s all self reinforcing ads: you searched for peanuts and movies and popcorn, let me show you a million pages of crappy junk food; and the only thing anybody seems to be indexing these days are the freaking TV specials and the damn movie — it doesn’t exist until it’s been animated! [grumpy face])
@ larK – I carefully did not use the whole Internet for my search, but just the GoComics website search. This has the (extreme) advantage of limiting the results just to comic strings, but has the disadvantage that the method only works on features that have had their dialog (and sometimes visual cues) fully transcribed. It works very well for Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes, but fails miserably for B.C. and Bloom County.
P.S. Then again, searching for “movie” + “twenty-five cents” produced an endless litany of Lucy’s mercenary psychiatist’s booth, because she always demanded “five cents, please” in the fourth frame.
First, larK – Meryl me or Streep?
Bloomingdales was “the” fashionable store” to go to in NYC area in the late 1960s/1970s. In additional to being more “upscale” than Macys, Gimbels, JC Penney and Sears (no Hechts here) and the like it had always unusual, interesting things – even just to look at. Always went to the one out here on Long Island the day after Christmas for the following year’s Christmas cards and interesting ornaments as they were half price.
One year I had noticed a Chanukah menorah that I liked (my old one had the 8 candles for the nights in front and the shamus – worker – candle in the back and it would be melted each night starting on the 4th night over the candles in front in it). Chanukah was early that year. Robert went back after Chanukah when Chanukah stuff was marked down and for Christmas I got that Chanukah menorah. (The advantage of being a mixed marriage.)
Though no one called it Bloomingdale’s it was Bloomies.
@Meryl: you Meryl!
Over on the “It’s the 4th of July!” thread, you were talking about oregano and the pronunciation thereof, and aside from my own anecdote, I found someone describing almost exactly what you had described, only with an episode of the Simpsons. I’ve decided to name the effect in your honor, and referred to it here when I discovered the Universe had shifted, and in this one Charles Schulz did not write a strip featuring Charlie Brown and Shermy talking about how for a quarter he could see the movie, get a popcorn and a candy bar.
Thank you Lark!
I am actual experiencing something similar while reading cidu tonight. The fonts all look different and larger than usual – I have tried making them smaller than I normally set my computer to (tried setting to 67% instead of 80%) but did not help. Names at the start of the posts particularly look different than normal, but also the body of the posts.
We both figure that the universe shifting is an idea we like better than us constantly misremembering things. ( He will be 71 soon and I will be 70 later in the year and we don’t want to think it is related to that. Mom is going fairly good, if not perfect, in memory for 94.) Also I have gone through most of my life (until this started happening) being known for my memory of details back to when I was 5 or maybe even 4 and I hate to think I am losing that ability).
Comics I Don't Understand 
A reference to Alvin Toffler’s book about things coming at us too fast.
Gasoline shortage – stations closed or out of gas.
Primal scream therapy.
Bloomingdale’s as upscale clothing store.
The end of Vitamin C fad for colds (per Linus Pauling) and the beginning of the Vitamin E fad (antioxidants).
Watergate hearings on TV. Baker was one of those involved in the investigations.
I think this is all of them. All without looking anything up online. How’d I do?
I had numbers attached, but the editor apparently ate them.
I got none of them except the OPEC crisis one, which I learned about in my history class.
The only one I didn’t get was the Bloomingdale’s one. I don’t know if Mark’s explanation @1 is really enough for a joke. Maybe it’s more NYC-centric than the others. Still, I figure 5 out of 6 is pretty good for the year I turned 11.
I remember reading Future Shock several times in the 1970s. I read it repeatedly because, as a teenager, I found it fascinating, but in every case I couldn’t remember any of it a few months later. I still can’t, maybe I should read it again as a technically-senior-citizen.
A prominent futurist, though I don’t think she was directly affiliated with the Tofflers, was the delightfully pseudonymed Faith Popcorn.
A “gift link” to a 2016 NYT article, Why we need to pick up Alvin Toffler’s torch.
Sheesh you’d think they could trim those!
Oh, Lord, Faith Popcorn is still in business!
https://faithpopcorn.com/faith-popcorn/
Why does the “Bloomingdale couple” appear to be a pair of alligators?
(OT) New gravatar, Downpuppy?
Thank you, I was completely lost on this.
It’s what I use elsewhere. Finally dug into WordPress to bring it here.
In the Washington area in the late 70s and early 80s, Bloomingdale’s had a reputation as an upscale, slightly “preppy” alternative to J.C. Penny, Hechts, or Sears. Their prices were higher, but the merchandise tended to be somewhat better†. Dedicated aficionados often referred to it as “Bloomie’s“‡, which could have been used in the caption of the cartoon, but that might have been misunderstood (such as for “bloomers”).
P.S. @ Powers (9) † – The alligators are probably a reference to Izod Lacoste products, which have an alligator logo.
P.S. ‡ – Then there was “Neiman Marcus“, which had luxury stuff at much higher prices, resulting in the nickname “Needless Markup“.
I love trying to explain the pioneering Sociolinguistics work of William Labov, in particular the 1966 New York Department Stores “fawth flaw” experiment. But for reasons of time — and tbh accuracy, since I don’t remember any details accurately — here instead is a study guide summary. (Sadly, it turns out that Bloomie’s is not one of the three stores they picked to visit.)
https://www.studysmarter.us/explanations/english/language-and-social-groups/labov-new-york-department-store-study/
@ Mitch (14) – I was going to say that Bloomingdale’s did not even exist when that study was conducted, but that’s not quite correct. The company was founded in (surprise!) 1861, but they did not launch their “first store outside of the New York City area” until 1976, which explains why I had always thought of them as an “upstart” department store.
I thought the gasoline one had something to do with car-centric Americans, trekking through south east Asia, and concerned about finding gasoline for their cars, upending the expectation that they are truly trekking, but yeah, ’73, gas shortage… 🤦
I never read Future Shock, but I still got the cartoon.
The only one that gave me pause was the alligators — was that a thing? Or are they meant to be hobos or bums or, or, alligators, but because they are dressed up in Bloomingdales’ clothing, they suddenly think they are upscale?
I suspect I’ve seen alligator-head people in New Yorker cartoons before. Maybe if someone with access to a lot of NYer material could research this cartoonist, he may have been the one just drawing this way as a personal mannerism?
Mitch @ 14: Ah, I remember one of my linguistics classes, the professor had us go out to downtown Rochester to the department store (I’m embarrassed I can’t remember the brand! And me who had a roommate from the Hutzlers family… (Yes, that’s Baltimore, but it should have made me conscious of local department store brands…)) We were trying to gather evidence of the north midwest vowel shift; I think the methodology even included us going to upscale and working class stores…
@ Danny (17) – The search engine at the Conde Nast store is not perfect, but the results it produces for Edward Koren seem to indicate that he frequently mixes people with anthropomorphic animals in his cartoons. I could not find any “true” alligators on the first page of the results, and an independent search for “alligator” did not produce anything by Koren, but I did discover a cover he did in 1982 (the animals look similar, but seem too furry to be alligators):
Koren’s characters often look animal like. The second one here (gasoline) is also by him, and while those characters look more human, they also look pretty quirky. I think Kilby’s probably right that it’s a reference to LaCoste’s logo, since LaCoste products were also very trendy then.
@ zbicyclist – I went researching only because of the CamelCase “C”, but the surprise that I discovered was that Izod & Lacoste were never a single company, but rather a marketing partnership that was dissolved in the early nineties, after the “preppy” fashion bubble had burst.
I was 15 in 1973. I knew about Toffler’s Future Shock, though I never read it, despite being interested in such things, so I got that. Also the 1973 oil price crisis. I knew plenty about Watergate but I didn’t remember Howard Baker… I think I was confusing him with someone else, as I thought he was one of those televangelist preachers. I’ve heard of primal scream therapy, though I don’t know what I knew of it in 1973. I didn’t get the Bloomingdale’s one, and though I’ve heard of Vitamins C and E I wasn’t aware of any particular faddishness about them.
Narmitaj, the other people who were interfering with your memory of Howard Baker were evangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker (spelled thus but pronounced just like single-k Baker). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bakker
@ Narmitaj (22) – Howard Baker was the ranking (minority) Republican member of the Senate’s Watergate Committee, and fairly well-respected on both sides of the aisle.
P.S. Jim and Tammy Faye were skewered on several occasions by Berke Breathed in Bloom County:
Howard Baker was a pre-Modern ERA Republican who put Country before Party. He gained a lot of respect and was one of the Senators who convinced RMN to resign for the good of the country. I think he ran for the Presidency several times and was even considered a front runner for a brief while.
I was a bit of a political geek in my early teens, so the Baker reference was right in my wheelhouse.
@Narmitaj: Linus Pauling, a Nobel laureate, pushed large doses of vitamin C incessantly in his later life, although the medical evidence for the use of heavy vitamin C supplements was and is lacking. Vitamin E supplements became the next big supplement thing, but while vitamin E itself is vital, trials of the supplement (i.e. taking vitamin E in pills rather than just in food) didn’t show much and the fad ran its course.
@ zbicyclist – To be overly precise, Pauling was awarded two Nobel Prizes (Chemistry ’54 & Peace ’62), and he is one of only five individuals who have achieved this distinction. It was largely this renown that made it difficult for the scientific community to dismiss his unfounded theories about vitamin C out of hand, and the effects of his propaganda are still felt even today.
Thanks. I have heard of Linus Pauling, especially in relation to DNA, but I didn’t know about the C business. And I have heard of the Bakkers, so yes, they were the people glitching the withdrawal process in my memory bank.
Hey! 50 years ago, Howard Baker was cute.
I expect he’s not any more, tho
The Bloomingdale Couple look furrier than they look reptilian to be croco/gators. Also, they don’t appear to have tails.
The furry crocogators look like the Wombles of Wimbledon Common as much as anything. Although originally a book series by Elisabeth Beresford, starting in 1968, they maintain 1973 relevance through the TV series that started production then. They “aim to help the environment by collecting and recycling rubbish in creative ways”. They also released several singles and appeared on Top of the Pops (a popular weekly chart rundown TV show on the BBC).
@ narmitaj (31) – Thank you for resolving a gag in an old “Vicar of Dibley” episode that I never really understood until I saw that photo and glanced at the link. As I recall, Alice was testing some interview questions on the Vicar, one of which went something like “If you could invite anyone in the world to your house, which one of the Wombles would it be?” It was clear from the context that they were characters from a children’s book or TV show, so I never bothered to look them up.
P.P.S. @ 24 – Later that week Tammy is discovered in Binkley’s “closet of anxieties“:
The only reason I didn’t connect the “alligator” one with Lacoste was that they weren’t wearing the golf shirts that were the most ubiquitous product with the alligator logo on them. My dad used to call them “the five dollar shirt with the twenty dollar alligator”.
I had several when they were licensed for the downscale market by Izod, but once they split up, the shirts took a leap in price. Never bought one since.
larK (18): Rochester’s most popular downtown department store was Sibley’s, though McCurdy’s and B. Forman were also there.
Sears had an Izod knockoff with a dragon. I like polo shirts, and used to wear them to work every day once Megacorp went to casual attire. Now it’s tees all day most of the time,
@ Mark H. (34) – I don’t think I ever actually purchased an alligator polo with my own money (from either company), but my dad liked to give them to us as Christmas and birthday gifts, so I used to have a fair sized collection. A decade or two ago when I was visiting Washington, I looked into buying a few on my own, and was absolutely staggered by the fashionably upscale pricing (as I recall, somewhere between $80 – $100 per shirt), far more than I was willing to pay for a little family nostalgia. (I would guess that when my dad was buying them, they ran from about $25 – $40.)
@ Brian in StL (36) – Three or four decades ago, Britches came out with a line of “Warthog” shirts, which I thought was a hilarious “alligator” parody. I had a number of those polo shirts, too.
I have commented on this before: I have found myself running into life-time inflation of around a factor of ten, meaning stuff from my childhood (when pricing was reasonable!) would cost 10 times as much today. (Comic books, Mad Magazine, candy bars, movie tickets, all held up pretty well to that; I then ran it back another 40 years before my time, and found it held up pretty well, there, too, if I can trust Charlie Brown that with a quarter he could see the movie and have two candy bars…) Actually, the clock is still running, and I made that observation already a number of years ago, and we’ve recently undergone a punctuated equilibrium of inflation, so it’s even moreso now, probably; I expect if I live past my to my threescore and ten to see a lifetime inflationary price increase of 100 times.)
@ larK – I can confirm the five-cent candy bars, but the Peanuts strip that I found quoted 35¢ for the movie:
I can’t make out the copyright year, but from the artwork, I would place it in the early to mid 60s — since I’m sure I’ve seen cartoons referring to a quarter for the whole shebang, that gives a 100% inflation rate for ~10-15 years….
When I was a kid in the 60s, we lived for a time in a small city, Pawhuska OK (now slightly famous due to the Pioneer Woman). It had one theater, which we’d usually walk to once a week in the summer. My parents considered everything in town to be walking distance, for us anyway. The movies were 35c unless they were Disney ones, then they were the lofty price of 50c. I remember seeing “Blackbeard’s Ghost” there.
Re Linus Pauling, it is fairly well known in the scientific community that degrees, experience and awards in one field of science is no guarantee of competence or even common sense in any particular other field. The phrase “outside his area of expertise” does come up.
One example is William Shockley, a co-inventor of the transistor. With regard to his views on race and intelligence and his writings on eugenics, he is considered to be outside his area of expertise.
For another example, the chemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons claimed to have built a device that achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature, producing more energy out than went in. Physicists who investigated their work formed the opinion that physics was outside the area of expertise of the two chemists.
@ larK – It was very early 1960s: If you click on the link that I normally include when embedding any comic, it will take you to the original source page, revealing that the date was April 30th, 1960. I’ve searched the Peanuts archives using all sorts of expressions for 25 cents, but wasn’t able to find anything like what you described, but I did find a reference to five-cent hamburgers and a 30-cent movie:
P.S. @ larK – Schulz was never 100% reliable in matters pertaining to continuity, but given that Charlie Brown paid 35¢, and his dad paid 30¢ for a movie ticket, I think that any 25¢ or 15¢ tickets (if a reference can be found) will turn out to be from an even older generation in “Peanuts“, or possibly from a completely different comic strip (“Blondie” and “Gasoline Alley” being two relevant candidates).
@Kilby: yeah, that must have been the strip, and I’m suffering from the Meryl oregano effect… 50¢ instead of a quarter, Violette instead of Shermy… I’m pretty sure my octogenarian neighbor recently mentioned how for a quarter he could do the same thing in his day (this came up naturally enough during one of our old farts movie afternoons), and that further derailed me… I searched the indices of my Complete Peanuts collections through to ’66, so unless he returns to it in the 90s (as he did with a lot of topics), this is definitely oregano effect on me.
(I’m also getting too old for the $%^&ing internet: in my day, the whole idea would be to put up useful things to aid you in finding stuff, so someone making the indices of the Complete Peanuts books available online would be a natural, to say nothing of having an actual searchable database of transcribed strips, and all that stuff existed once in the glorious olden days — nowadays it’s all self reinforcing ads: you searched for peanuts and movies and popcorn, let me show you a million pages of crappy junk food; and the only thing anybody seems to be indexing these days are the freaking TV specials and the damn movie — it doesn’t exist until it’s been animated! [grumpy face])
@ larK – I carefully did not use the whole Internet for my search, but just the GoComics website search. This has the (extreme) advantage of limiting the results just to comic strings, but has the disadvantage that the method only works on features that have had their dialog (and sometimes visual cues) fully transcribed. It works very well for Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes, but fails miserably for B.C. and Bloom County.
P.S. Then again, searching for “movie” + “twenty-five cents” produced an endless litany of Lucy’s mercenary psychiatist’s booth, because she always demanded “five cents, please” in the fourth frame.
First, larK – Meryl me or Streep?
Bloomingdales was “the” fashionable store” to go to in NYC area in the late 1960s/1970s. In additional to being more “upscale” than Macys, Gimbels, JC Penney and Sears (no Hechts here) and the like it had always unusual, interesting things – even just to look at. Always went to the one out here on Long Island the day after Christmas for the following year’s Christmas cards and interesting ornaments as they were half price.
One year I had noticed a Chanukah menorah that I liked (my old one had the 8 candles for the nights in front and the shamus – worker – candle in the back and it would be melted each night starting on the 4th night over the candles in front in it). Chanukah was early that year. Robert went back after Chanukah when Chanukah stuff was marked down and for Christmas I got that Chanukah menorah. (The advantage of being a mixed marriage.)
Though no one called it Bloomingdale’s it was Bloomies.
@Meryl: you Meryl!
Over on the “It’s the 4th of July!” thread, you were talking about oregano and the pronunciation thereof, and aside from my own anecdote, I found someone describing almost exactly what you had described, only with an episode of the Simpsons. I’ve decided to name the effect in your honor, and referred to it here when I discovered the Universe had shifted, and in this one Charles Schulz did not write a strip featuring Charlie Brown and Shermy talking about how for a quarter he could see the movie, get a popcorn and a candy bar.
Thank you Lark!
I am actual experiencing something similar while reading cidu tonight. The fonts all look different and larger than usual – I have tried making them smaller than I normally set my computer to (tried setting to 67% instead of 80%) but did not help. Names at the start of the posts particularly look different than normal, but also the body of the posts.
We both figure that the universe shifting is an idea we like better than us constantly misremembering things. ( He will be 71 soon and I will be 70 later in the year and we don’t want to think it is related to that. Mom is going fairly good, if not perfect, in memory for 94.) Also I have gone through most of my life (until this started happening) being known for my memory of details back to when I was 5 or maybe even 4 and I hate to think I am losing that ability).