Wednesday’s ad is entitled Hi Fi, and the illustration was done in 1956 by Haddon Sundblom. It’s #116 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, some couples lounge in a pink room, drinking beer, and listening to those old-fashioned vinyl disks that used to hold music in grooves. One woman pages through a book of records, with another woman watching, as if they’re looking at a scrapbook. As usual, they got pretty dressed up to listen to some records at a listening party. Opera, sure. The den? Not so much.
Those records could well be 78 rpm and given the size of that album, they could be listening to opera, so maybe it was an occasion to dress up. We did things differently back then. A simple cocktail party was always attended by a well dressed crowd.