Remember fur chokers, muskrat coats, and Carter’s Little Liver Pills? Long gone from the shelves and from the memories of anyone under 100 years old, these items and other products, mundane and unusual, were once sold in Lynn stores and were featured in elegant, eye-catching advertisements from decades past.
You have to journey back to 1923 to find fur chokers and women’s fashion selections with names like “normandy coats,” “jacquettes” and “overplaids” on sale in P.B Magrane’s. A stroll down Market Street over to Munroe Street and Berry’s offered an opportunity to buy “home outfits” — essentially a set of furniture and other items — for $295.
That amount was certainly an exorbitant sum to spend 90 years ago unless you took the former Lynn Institution for Savings’ sage advertising advice to “make payday save day.” Daily Evening Item pages were full of ads for places where Lynn residents could borrow money in the 1920s, ranging from storefront loan businesses to big local banks like the Lynn Institution.
The tendency to hand out money or urge people to invest and save offers, in retrospect, on ominous look at the years preceding the Great Depression.
Lynn may have been a city bursting at the seams in the 1920s, but it still had a proverbial foot firmly anchored in the 19th century. Fuller Electric Company on Summer Street had this question for Item readers: “By the way, are you using electricity.” The ad urged residents presumably illuminating their homes with gas lamps to call Fuller for electrical wiring and installation estimates.
The 1920s also retained the feel of a more genteel age with Sunbeam “on the state road between Lynn and Salem” offering lunch and afternoon tea.
Travel ahead to the 1930s and Magrane’s declared its crepe twist chiffons as “a hosiery triumph” “made by a secret process.” The women’s stockings cost a dollar a pair and Magrane’s also sold poster beds for $7.95 and men’s shirts were priced at 69 cents each — “worth up to $1.39.”
R.J. Reynolds ran big advertisements in the Item in 1936 touting Camel cigarettes “for digestion’s sake.”
World-class bicycle sprinter Willie Honeman attested in the ad to how smoking Camels can “help my digestion to proceed smoothly.”
Journeying back into yesteryears to view old advertisements is an education in commercial artists’ talents and copywriters’ skills. Relatively few ads featured photographs and almost every one included a catchy line like the one accompanying the 1942 advertisement for Carter’s Little Liver Pills: “You feel sour, sunk and the world looks punk” without Carter’s.
It’s amazing to think anyone had $158 to spend in T.W. Rogers Company in 1942 on “mink-dyed muskrat” coats. Nevertheless, the store heralded the arrival of a certain Mr. P.B. Clark —”one of New York’s recognized furriers”– who came to Lynn to orchestrate a fur fashion show, complete with muskrat creations.
Lynch Brothers on Humphrey Street in Swampscott sold two pounds of coffee for 45 cents, bacon for 35 cents a pound and “freshly-ground hamburg” — two pounds for 39 cents in 1942. Flash ahead to 1958 and Burrows & Sanborn sold back-to-school shoes that year for $5.95 to $6.95. Anyone 70 or older will not be surprised to read that the store’s selection of “American Juniors” footwear did not include a single pair of sneakers.
Not to be outdone, Rooks on Union Street sold “man-made fur coats” for $48 and offered something called a “revolving credit plan” to help finance such an intrepid expenditure. Empire on Market Street upped the ante with its sale of “rain or shine coats” with the advertisement promising “bright young fashion for the cloudiest day.”
Empire, Rooks, Magrane’s and Burrows & Sanborn employed Lynn residents and sold goods to Lynn customers in an age when people bought what they needed downtown and gazed longingly at the muskrat coats in T.W. Rogers, perhaps while puffing a stomach-relaxing Camel.
Ten years later and the Modern Television Center on Franklin Street sold giant console television sets even as a galaxy of North Shore theaters strove to put viewers into seats for a couple hours. There was Swampscott Surf and the Saugus Cinema. The Capitol on Union Street and E.M. Loew’s (formerly the Warner in the 1968) as well as the Lynn Open-Air Drive-In, to name a few in business in the Sixties.
The Preston Beach Motor Inn, still open in 1968 on the Swampscott-Marblehead line, offered a hot buffet special for $3.45 “all you can eat.” Down at Cargill Dodge on the Lynnway, $2,595 in 1968 dollars bought you a 1967 GTO convertible. Wow.
Alas, we come to 1976 and Munroe Street where The Pant Shop — “the store with a smile” — tailored to “the young man and the man who thinks young!” Life may have not been a bowl of cherries 90, 70 or 50 years ago. But advertising from bygone eras made it sound pretty pleasant.
