Appreciating the Flip Side

A "TEAR-SHEET" I SAVED IN MY YOUNGER DAYS — Sometimes, instead of saving an entire magazine or newspaper, I ripped out specific pages. Since we owned a new 1966 Fairlane 500XL in bright red, I'm sure that I saved this sheet for the ad of a red '67 Fairlane as it reminded me so much of ours. On the flip side is the cover for the March 25, 1967 issue of The Saturday Evening Post featuring the Mamas and the Papas. In hindsight, the ad for the car is really nothing special, but I adore the photo of the singing group. The colors used on the cover, and the pose and their clothes are so evocative of the sixties, I think I'd frame it on that side now if I was the framing type. (And yes, I'm pretty much ignoring the Vietnam War reference on the cover, although its "10 More Years" prediction would prove to be pretty damn close to coming true. The war wasn't technically over until 1975, fully eight years after this Post cover. 

NOTE  ON TYPOGRAPHY — One interesting aspect of the car ad though, is the typography of the tag line, "Show your stripes." Notice the very swinging-sixties font, and the use of capital and lower case letters in a non-traditional way: Randomly. The "y" and "r" in "your" are lower case, but the "R" in "Stripes" is capitalized, but the "i" is lower case as well. I can't really think of another use of random cases like this off the top of my head, but I'm digging it, as the kids would have said back then.

DEEP BACKGROUND, LOL — Even though I was only 10-12 years old when the Mamas and Papas were popular, I was really influenced by their clothes and songs. I would walk around our yard, which had lots of wooded acres, and sing songs like Monday, Monday and California Dreamin' at the top of my lungs, lol. My dad worked in Manhattan three days a week and I managed to have him buy me plenty of paisley and polka dot shirts, love beads, medallions and bell-bottoms from the city. They weren't the clothes the other kids in my small Connecticut town were wearing—jeans, flannel shirts and Keds—and only served to make me odder than I already was in their eyes. I was always encouraged at home to be who I was, and not who someone thought I should be. The other kids had already "pegged" me as being gay as early as kindergarten, although it's not a term anyone used then and I certainly wouldn't have understood what it meant, but it wasn't as if I tried to hide who I was. But being one of the three "smart" kids in my class, (the other two were girls), and wearing purple satin elephant sleeve 20 button shirts, headbands, wildly flared pants, Beatle boots and lavender granny sunglasses wasn't exactly the way to fit in! Other M & P songs included Creeque Alley, Dedicated to the One I Love, Words of Love, and at least a million other #1 hits, lol. All links are YouTube vids of the songs listed. 

Gosh, we could use their melodic singing voices and songs of peace and tranquility today! Make Love Not War should have been my generation's mantra, not Make Lottsa Money and Give Me All Of Yours Too, as it has worked out.