clair094

The one problem with working at the P&PC home office is that you can never really get all that far away from work. Take Sally the Stenographer, for example. There she was, shopping on her own in downtown Portland, thinking she had the whole day to herself without any interruption from a P or a PC . She needed a raincoat, a couple of sweaters, and maybe a new pair of tights. She wandered here and there from Lucy to REI, keeping in mind one of her favorite stores, Title 9, as her final destination. Sally likes the sporty, casual look at Title 9. She likes their clothes that women can "live in" while "doing their thing." She likes how the catalogs don't show models but picture real employees—sometimes holding chickens, or mountain biking, or rock climbing—accompanied by little interviews with them about what they've got in the fridge or what kind of food they love. Her face lights up when she walks through the door. Then, as she's blissfully looking t...

Check out this great, Victorian-era die-cut advertising sign for "The Great Diagraphic Corset"—a 10" tall, full-color display item that was designed to stand upright with the help of an "easel" leg that once attached to its reverse side. (You can see a remnant of that leg in the second image below.) As much as we here at the Poetry & Popular Culture office love this design concept, we like the punning product-packaging concept even more, as the hourglass shape of the vase tropes the va-va-va-voom hourglass form that the female body will supposedly take on with the help of a little whalebone and some minor shortness of breath. "It is our belief," the makers of The Great Diagraphic Corset state on the reverse side, "that no corset has yet been produced, uniting in so great a degree the qualities of support, ease and beauty." Beauty indeed. How better to complete the web of cultural associations linking femininity, flowers and fashion ...

In 1949, Arthur C. "Fuzzy" Rahill —son of Ray and Lillian Rahill who immigrated to the U.S. from Lebanon in 1907—went to work for a restaurant located at 1232 Classen Boulevard in Oklahoma City. He bought the business a year later and opened Fuzzy's Supper Club , which he owned and operated until 1983 when he retired and sold the joint to a Mr. Lobb who apparently spent $100,000 remodeling it to feature a "sports motif ... decorated with antique sporting equipment." Then, in a series of events that news reports don't fully explain, Rahill "took the business back through litigation" in 1984. P&PC can't discover when exactly Fuzzy's finally shut its doors—the place was still open in 1987 when people were instructed to go there to buy tickets to the Oklahoma City Golden Gloves amateur boxing tournament—but Rahill died in 2003 at the age of eighty. In the mid 1970s, then in his fifties, Rahill extended Fuzzy's to include Arthur's...