Saturday’s ad is entitled Trying Out The New Camera, and the illustration was done in 1948 by Douglass Crockwell. It’s #21 in a series entitled “Home Life in America,” also known as the Beer Belongs series of ads that the United States Brewers Foundation ran from 1945 to 1956. In this ad, a group of people are drinking beers in a living room. One of them is trying out his new — gasp — film camera. Remember film? This one doesn’t even have an automatic flash, but uses single bulbs, which have to be replaced each time. I still have a camera that uses them, although to be fair I haven’t actually used it in a long, long time.
Don’t forget to lick the base of the flash bulb before you put it in the flash gun. Still don’t know why we did that…