Too good not to share

Okay, so I spend my Saturday mornings doing weird things like reading issues of Life from the '40s. This morning I'm reading a very hopeful 1946 edition that I bought at a book sale in 1985 and have somehow avoided reading until now. I bought it for the spring fashions; the New Look hadn't quite hit yet and skirts were still slim (but longer; also, jackets hit "fingertip-length," a change from the shorter skirts and jackets necessitated by rationing).

Actually, I found the fashions a little disappointing. Too much beige and brown (still a military influence?) and really ugly hats. Life always has such interesting articles, though. In "Shall I Remarry?" a war widow (one of 83,500, two-thirds of whom were under 30; 21,000 of those had one or more children) and her friends and family weigh in on remarriage. A year and a half after her husband's death, Bernadine feels that she's ready to start thinking about marrying again. At 24, she doesn't want to go through life alone. Her best friend thinks Bernadine should "take her time and shop around. Still, with two children you can't be too choosy, you know."

Lovelorn Editor Molly Mayfield of the Rocky Mountain News offers this advice:

"Bernadine should get out and meet lots of young people. The Y.W.C.A. offers splendid opportunities and there are two clubs right here in Denver, the Business and Professional Women and the Industrial Girls, who hold dances once a week. She also might join a sorority like the national Beta Sigma Phi, which is made up mostly of young professional women. She would come to know her sorority sisters, be invited to their homes and through them, perhaps meet eligible brothers, cousins and friends. She should remember that it's through other girls that you meet other men.

Many a man and woman has met his or her future mate through interests in a hobby. Here in Denver we have several photography groups and an active Mountain Club which Bernadine might care to join. There are also organized groups interested in stamp collecting, wildflower studey, first editions, choral singing and goodness knows what else. I would advise Bernadine to join, meet and enjoy. But I want to caution her about one thing. She should make sure that no one thinks she is anxious to marry. The minute a young man suspects he's being preyed upon, off he bounds. I would recommend taking quite the other stand. Convince him you eschew the very idea of marriage. I've seen this technique put into practice--and it works."

[Yeah, all the way up until he leaves you for his dream girl, who makes no pretense about her desire to greet him at the door every night with dinner on the table, kiddies scrubbed and sleepy, with a nice quiet evening of companionable television-watching to look forward to. -- Ed.]

So anyway. Bernadine's late husband's fraternity brother thinks that his friend Shel would be jealous because he was a quick-tempered kind of fellow, although he admits that Bernadine is "a mighty pretty little Irish girl" and that marrying again would probably be the best thing.

Apparently, the man she's been dating, Al, agrees. Al seems like an all-around good guy who says that he would have to be very sure "inside himself" that he could take the place of a father with her two sons, that he encourages her to talk about her late husband when she's feeling low, that any money from her first marriage should go toward the boys' education, and that the only thing holding them back is the housing shortage. Al is such a good guy that I'm betting war widows from all across America started showing up on his doorstep in Denver within days of publication of this issue of Life.

Bernadine's four-year-old Jimmy is even more persuasive, though:

"If I can't have Daddy back, I'd like to have a new daddy. Couldn't Al come and live here with us?"

Of course, the 21st century cynic in me wonders just how much Jimmy was coached before the reporter showed up, or maybe how much coaching the reporter did.

I thought it was interesting how often the housing shortage was mentioned in this article, considering the enormously biased article on said housing shortage that appears earlier in the magazine. Since I happen to agree with the pro-1946-government, anti-price-gouging-real-estate-company bias, I didn't mind it so much, but then I saw some truly appalling photos of how they could throw up eight cookie-cutter houses in a day in one of the ugly little postwar developments that are prevalent in my area, and re-started the internal battle between my sense of aesthetics in residential architecture and my admiration for building methods that could at least help provide affordable housing for the tens of millions of Americans with critical housing needs.

At which point my brain exploded.

Tuesday, September 09, 2003