Back in 1967, the Haband mail-order company of New Jersey wasn’t selling many of its sandals, until it came up with the idea of advertising them as “captured” Vietcong slipper sandals, claiming they were the “First big style find of the war!”
You had to read the fine print to realize that it was simply the design of the sandals that had been captured. And even so, not really, because they had been selling the same sandals for years.
The company later reported that it was the most successful ad they had ever run, and that the 'captured' sandals sold "like mad."
As far as I can tell, they ran this ad for at least a year.
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The album Sing-Along in Yiddish came out in 1960. Part of a fad for sing-along records. The clips below are from the follow-up, More! Sing-Along in Yiddish.
Posted By: Alex - Sat Feb 24, 2018 -
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Category: Music, 1960s
In 1964, Jayne Mansfield recorded an album for MGM that featured her reading selections from the poetry of Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, Yeats, and others, as Tchaikovsky's music played in the background. Apparently she hoped the record would show off the asset she was most proud of, her 164 IQ.
The album isn't available on CD or MP3, but you can pick up a copy of the original vinyl on eBay for around $30 or $40.
Here's one for Paul's unauthorized dwellings theme:
Able to afford tuition at Yale, but not housing, 22-year-old Allan Kornfeld lived surreptitiously in a ventilation shaft for seven months, from 1963 to 1964.
Ambitious failure, or noble travesty? Decide for yourself!
"The opera contains human sacrifice, burning at the stake, stabbing, stoning, rule by terror, cannibalism, a love story, war, homesickness, intrigue, a ritual dance, and the supernatural...[T]he opera's greatest defect is its libretto, a 'farrago of poetasty', which is 'a ghastly example of self-parody that even a Robert Benchley could not have topped.'"
At the International Beauty Congress held in Los Angeles in August 1963, when Miss Luxembourg (Catherine Paulus) learned during rehearsals that she was expected to appear in a bathing suit during the contest, she started laughing hysterically and was reported to have said, "I will look like a horse. The people will all laugh at me. And then I will laugh. I can't do it... I can't do it."
The judges had to give her a tranquilizer to calm her down.
Somehow she was nevertheless talked into wearing a bathing suit the next day. And, of course, because of her outburst the picture of her wearing it then ran in papers nationwide.
She received a round of applause during her appearance, but didn't make it through to the finals. However, she was awarded the title of "Miss International Friendship" during the contest.
The undergrads at Tampa University had major complaints about their 1967 yearbook. For a start, all their yearbook photos were destroyed in a warehouse fire. So they didn't appear in it at all. And then, the yearbook they got was dominated by pictures of one person, the yearbook editor Carmen Gonzalez. Her picture appeared 24 times in it, including a six-page spread devoted to her as yearbook queen.
When people complained, Gonzalez explained, "I got into every section because I was in everything." She elaborated that she was not only yearbook queen, but also belonged to at least 10 clubs, was named a member of Who's Who, and had the highest scholastic average at the university. Therefore, it was only natural that she gave most coverage to herself.
The students responded by holding a rally at which they burned 500 of the 2000 yearbooks that had been printed.
Sounds to me like Gonzalez was a woman ahead of her time. She would have thrived in the age of social media.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.