Politically Incorrect Christmas Ads – 1959, 1967 & 1968

One of the things that continues to surprise me when I’m looking at old newspaper microfilm is the amount of cheesecake that the Journal served up each day (and I’m not talking about the kind with a graham cracker crust). Ads featuring illustrations and clip art of attractive women that were designed to get the attention of male readers could pop up anywhere in the paper during the 1950s.

It seems that Christmas-themed ads were no exception.

Here's one for Gary Motors at 1532 Broadway in Lorain. Since men were probably the ones looking at car ads back then, the advertisement (which ran in the Lorain Journal on December 5, 1959) includes a Santa babe riding on a reindeer.

Hey that Rockette wanna-be looks familiar. Longtime readers of this blog might remember that she already made an appearance here back in 2014 (here), in a Chronicle-Telegram ad from December 1958.

But in case you think that this Christmas Cheesecake trend was merely a 1950s thing, here’s evidence that it was still going strong in the late 1960s. The ad for Putnam Furniture Carpet and Appliance on Routes 2 & 6 in Vermilion ran in the Journal on November 13, 1967.

By George, I think I recognize one of the Brady TVs in that ad. One of our first color televisions (if I remember correctly) sat on a metal rack with wheels.

Lastly, here’s an ad for Diamond’s Men’s Store at Midway Mall, featuring a Santa Babe with a particularly vacuous look. The ad ran in the Journal on December 22, 1968.

Anyway, I’m guessing that by the 1980s things had become more sophisticated advertising-wise. The printing company that I work for still has its clip art library from the 1980s, and the type of illustrations as seen in these ads were pretty much gone by then, with a few exceptions. But I think my boss would have raised an eyebrow if I had used anything like that in an ad anyway.