by Anura Guruge
on October 16, 2022
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Whenever I see a ‘very’ old publication being given or thrown away I invariably pick it up for perusal in the future. In this manner I have quite a collection of “Reader’s Digest“, “National Geographic“, “Popular Mechanic“, etc. publications — some of them quite old. When I get the time I look through these magazines, one at a time, to see what treasures they hold.
This National Geographic, as you can see from the above picture, is from April 1961. 61 years ago. A different ear, all together, though I was alive & 8 years old at the time. I remember many of the products advertised in this issue — though I was still living in Ceylon at the time (& did not come to the U.S. (for my initial stay (as opposed to my current stay till 1967)).
This Ad for ‘Shell Oil’ caught my eye — or more to the point the photo & write-up got my attention BEFORE I realized that it was an Ad. That is clever. As soon as I started reading it I realized that this had to do with ‘Compostela‘ — I at onetime having been quite the ‘Holy Crusades‘ buff.
Different age. Oil companies didn’t have to justify themselves or the products they sold. Gas & oil were good, widely used. Oil companies could afford, quite literally (given that they were making a lot of profits in those glory days), to be suave. They didn’t have to pander. They didn’t have to be brash. They could be just cool.
Yes, I miss those (somewhat) uncomplicated days — 20-years prior to PCs & a lifetime prior to today’s smartphone-centric, online/social media world.
