Sunday’s ad is entitled Working on the Community Drive, and the illustration was done in 1955 by Douglass Crockwell. It’s #113 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 well-dressed men and women are in someone’s large, nicely appointed home, apparently Working on the Community Drive. There are envelopes, an address book, a list, index cards and someone using a pen. It looks old school and very low-tech, but then again in 1955 a computer like the IBM 702 (which was first built that year) took up a very large room and had to be leased from Big Blue, so it may have been out of the reach of the neighborhood community drive. Maybe that’s why they’re serving beer.
