Tuesday’s ad is entitled Thanksgiving Dinner, and the illustration was done in 1954 by John Gannam. It’s #101 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 young woman carries a very large turkey to the table, and all the man sitting there can think to do is get out of the way. Which is essentially what all the men are doing, staying out of the way while the womenfolk do all the work putting on the Thanksgiving Dinner. It was certainly a different time. That’s how I remember Thanksgiving, which growing up was always at great-grandmother’s home (and then later by great aunt who live there, too) when the men would be in the living room watching television (usually sports) while all the women would be in the kitchen. Then we ate in two shifts because it was a small house but a large family. Then we’d split up again by gender as the women cleaned everything up, and the men watched football. It seemed strange to me, even then.
