It Tickled Granny’s Fancy

The Australian Women’s Weekly, Saturday 9 January 1943

It Tickled Granny’s Fancy

Australian Women’s Weekly

It Tickled Granny’s Fancy

The Australian Women’s Weekly, Saturday 11 July 1942

Vintage Adverts

Burgled from Phil

Everything Old Is New Again

Here in Australia, where the GFC either never happened or was narrowly averted, depending on whether you read the Murdoch Press or history, we are told we have a “Two Speed Economy”.

Where the mining states of Queensland and Western Australia are generating jobs and wealth and the south-eastern states are lagging behind.

In fact Western Australia, being so big, has its own in-build “Two Speed Economy”. The North is producing huge amounts of wealth, much of which heads straight overseas to assorted foreign shareholders and the agricultural South is suffering a decades-long drought.

Yet nothing is new. I have a habit, as some may have noticed, of reading old newspapers and magazines. This morning I found this little Advertisement in the Perth Sunday Times of 17th May, 1942. In the middle of the Second World War. Seventy years ago!

We are still almost totally dependent on the Mining Industry for our wealth as a State.

And the holes just get bigger and deeper!

In Granny’s Kitchen

 The Australian Women’s Weekly, Saturday 21 March 1942

In Granny’s Kitchen

 The Australian Women’s Weekly, Saturday 14 February 1942

Vintage Adverts

The Australian Women’s Weekly, Saturday 31 January 1942

Vintage Adverts

Australian Wireless as it was.

Not a Shock Jock in sight!

 The Australian Women’s Weekly, Saturday 24 January 1942

It Tickled Granny’s Fancy

 The Australian Women’s Weekly, Saturday 24 January 1942

Vintage Adverts

The Australian Women’s Weekly, Saturday 10 January 1942

I had thought that insecticides before and during WW2 were DDT based. How wrong can I be? Wikipedia set me right.

The original product, launched in 1923 and mainly intended for killing flies and mosquitoes, was mineral oil based and manufactured by the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey before the company, now part of ExxonMobil, renamed itself first Esso and later Exxon. Later marketed as “FLIT MLO,” it has since been discontinued. A hand-operated device called a Flit gun was commonly used to perform the spraying.

In 1928 Flit became the subject of a very successful long running advertising campaign. Theodor Seuss Geisel created the artwork for this campaign, years before he started writing the children’s books that made him famous as Dr. Seuss. The ads typically showed people threatened by whimsical, menacing insect-like creatures that will look familiar to fans of Dr. Seuss’s later work and contained the tagline “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” This advertising campaign continued for 17 years and made “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” into a popular catchphrase in the United States.

It seems I was not completely wrong. DDT was discovered to have insectidal properties in 1939 and by the middle of WW2 was being added to Flit.

This has been today’s lesson from the Archive. With added Dr Seuss!

In Granny’s Kitchen

The Australian Women’s Weekly, Saturday 10 January 1942

It Tickled Granny’s Fancy

In Granny’s Kitchen

 The Australian Women’s Weekly, Saturday 3 January 1942

It Tickled Granny’s Fancy

The Australian Women’s Weekly, Saturday 3 January 1942