Sunday’s ad is entitled Showing Off the Engagement Ring, and the illustration was done in 1950 by John Gannam. It’s #43 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 celebrating an engagement. The bride-to-be sits, as if on her throne, and is receiving peasants to view the ring, while the men stand father back, drinking their beer. Dad appears to be pouring himself a second one, though I can’t tell if that’s because he’s so happy he’s losing a dependent or because he got a good deal for her. Either way, it looks nothing like my own engagement.
Oh come now! This is a lovely image of what a private, upper-middle class American engagement party was to look like for the time.
Then again, I’ve never had an engagement party nor have I lived in the above mentioned time period. Let’s call it Vintage Pinterest.
(and if Dad was upset, he’d be pouring the Scotch, don’t ya think?)
N.