Thrifty Acres: Where Are They Now?

I gladly buy up vintage magazines when I come across them inexpensively, which is usually the case at thrift stores. My latest such acquisition was this:

The September 1948 edition of Woman's Day magazine, which set me back just 20c more than its original price. Such a deal, eh?

I loved the sweet photo of that cat on the cover, and I also loved the content inside: a typical blend of fashion, interior decorating, various perceived threats to the American Way Of Life (comic books, apparently, were considered a source of trouble), recipes and several short stories. 

But what I loved most of all were the ads. Many of them were for products still produced today, but there were a number of promos for consumer goods I'd never heard of. I thought it'd be interesting to see, via the Internet, what had happened to these unfamiliar brands. 

As it turned out, in some cases I got my answer, but other searches only seemed to come up with images of the same (or similar)vintage ads I'd seen in my magazine. But here goes with what I learned:

Purity cheese products, from Mayville, WI. The company was founded in 1936, but alas, no more "festive summer sandwiches" can be made with this brand, as it was gone by 1975.

Another cheese brand:

Yes, the "Pabst" in Pabst-ett gets its name from the Pabst beer folks. Needing a way to make money during the Prohibition era, they turned to cheesemaking. After Prohibition was repealed, Pabst sold its cheese operation to Kraft. I couldn't find a definitive link between Kraft and the Phenix brand, and also didn't learn when this brand disappeared.

Morgan-Jones dish cloths. I read that this company began in North Carolina in 1872 and was bought out by Spring Industries in 1963. On eBay, the label seems to be most associated with chenille bedspreads, but the company made other types of bed linens - and obviously kitchen linens as well.

Now, Foot Rest shoes may very well have been "A JOY TO WORK IN...PLAY IN...LIVE IN", but the only live-in being done now is the old shoe factory in Cincinnati that morphed into an apartment building. However, I didn't discover when the parent company, Krippendorf-Dittmann, had closed down.

In 1948 there may very well have been "No Substitute for Chiffon" soap flakes, but folks today will just have get along with a substitute. This is another brand that appears to have disappeared, and I didn't learn when or why. 

Another cleaning product:

Glass Wax. Despite that name, the full page ad in which the above image appeared also trumpeted Glass Wax as a cleaner of appliances, metal furniture, copper utensils, tile, porcelain and more. I guess that "wartime chemical discovery" (WWII, I assume) that made Glass Wax possible was a very good thing - but unfortunately, the ad makes no mention of what exactly that discovery was. 

My Internet search didn't come up with the info about that "discovery" either, but I did learn about yet another use for this already-versatile product: the decorating of windows with holiday-theme stencils and good ol' Glass Wax. You can read about this past time here.

The link is for a blog post, which besides talking about the window stenciling, also mentions that this product is no more. I guess the "wartime chemical discovery" and the claims about how many surfaces Glass Wax could clean only went so far. I didn't find out why its parent company, Gold Seal, is no longer around. 

Ah, so many disappearing products represented by the ads in this great old Woman's Day magazine (there were several more I could have shown off). But like I'd said, there were also a lot of ads for products that are still around - albeit in different packaging. So for my next post, I'll show off some of those ads!