This 1952 magazine ad for Lustre-Creme shampoo showcases Ms. Taylor’s famous beauty.  In addition to her two Oscars, we learn here that she was also voted by “Modern Screen” and “a jury of famed hair stylists” as one of the world’s 12 loveliest-haired women.  The film that’s also being promoted here, Ivanhoe, was released in 1952 and also starred Robert Taylor (no relation) and Joan Fontaine.  It was one of the four top money-making films of the year and was nominated for three Academy Awards.

In this comic strip-style ad, Elizabeth Taylor says “Like satin … that’s my skin with new Woodbury Powder!” and also, apparently, “I love the super-smooth finish Woodbury gives my skin.”  Here she’s identified as one of the stars of the 1949 film version of Little Women, in which she played Amy, starring alongside June Allyson as Jo, Peter Lawford as Laurie, Margaret O’Brien as Beth, and Janet Leigh as Meg.

It’s no wonder that an actress with Elizabeth Taylor’s legendary beauty was in demand by companies marketing their beauty products.  Many other stars of the day appeared in similar print ads; for example, June Allyson, Rita Hayworth, and Bette Davis all did work for Lustre-Creme.  The men of Hollywood did their fair share of advertising, too: here you can see Humphrey Bogart for National Airlines and Bob Hope for Pepsodent.  You can find many advertisements featuring celebrities in Ad*Access here.

Most winters we have maybe one dusting of snow, or a few sleet pellets mixed in with the rain once or twice, so being threatened with the Icepocalypse every few days is something we’re not accustomed to. Every time we turn around, we are back at the grocery store kicking somebody in the back to get the last loaf of bread or punching somebody in the windpipe to grab the last gallon of milk. This is really more exercise than we are used to getting. And we won’t even talk about how the schools are constantly letting out early or just plain closed, resulting in selfish children wanting to be picked up or fed or whatever kids are into these days.

So to combat the winter doldrums, we here at Duke Digital Collections present some sunny, tropical images from Ad*Access to help you think warm thoughts. Put on your sunscreen, change into your skimpiest and most scandalous swimsuit, crank up “Vacation” by the Go-Go’s, and let’s hit the beach! (You can click on any of the images to see a larger version and more information about it.)

January is the perfect time of year to visit fabulous Runway Beach! Yes, nothing is more relaxing or romantic than lying on the beach sipping a margarita as you are strafed by a jet that fills your eyes and mouth with sand and blows the drink out of your hand. The smell of cocoa butter mixed with jet exhaust will make you contentedly lie back and say, “AaahhhhhAIIIEEEEEARGGGH KOFF KOFF KOFF.”

Visit the, uhh, glamorous Belgian coast. Now, we love Belgium and are not questioning the glamorousness of its coast, mostly because we are too busy being transfixed by this CRAZY picture. Look at everything that’s going on here! There is, like, a policeman with a donkey, and a couple of mobile cabanas or circus wagons or something, and a woman sunbathing in a shadow, and the Coliseum, and a guy watching a 3-D movie with his pet dinosaur, and we don’t even know what else. With all this going on, there is of course no room left to show the coast or ocean or anything, but we feel confident that if we look hard enough, we will find Waldo somewhere in this picture.

A cruise can be a wonderful vacation, apart from inconveniences like rogue waves capsizing the ship, losing power in the middle of the ocean and being towed back to shore, and, worst of all, having to put your shoes on and leave the ship to visit exotic ports of call. What a drag! That’s why the West Indies, or possibly South America, have recently completed a street-widening-and-liquefying program that allows cruise ships to sail right down Main Street through the middle of town. You can lean out the porthole of your stateroom right here in downtown South America to pet a horse, or pick a coconut, or say hello to Carmen Miranda, all without having to get dressed and put your flip-flops on.

Are you allergic to the ocean? Or maybe you’re like us, and there’s a warrant for your arrest in every seaside resort in the Western Hemisphere. Don’t worry – you can go catch some rays in the desert! Lounge by the pool in sunny Phoenix, fabulous Las Vegas, earthquakey southern California, or tropical Branson, Missouri. We are pretty sure all those places look like this. And if you’re lucky, like this couple, you may catch a glimpse of Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower wandering in from the dude ranch next door. Yeehaw!

Wherever your vacation takes you, whether it’s sunny Florida with your family or your dingy basement with a bottle of tequila and the complete “Dukes of Hazzard” on DVD (what, just us?), it’s critical to look good. In our opinion, nothing says “healthy hair” like a shampoo whose name sounds like “anthrax.” Yes, Canthrox shampoo “gives such massy fluffiness that the hair appears much heavier than it really is.” That’s why all the top beauty magazines such as Vogue, Elle, and Popular Mechanics are stressing the importance of heavy hair this year. Remember, if your hair doesn’t look so heavy that your friends wonder how your skull and neck can support it, then YOU ARE NOTHING.

Be thankful … for consumer electronics. Finally, Dad got the hint and got us that Pentron tape recorder we’ve been Tweeting, Facebooking, texting, graffitiing the bathroom walls, and whining around the dinner table about! It’s just what we need to record the sounds of Little Susie stomping on his feet and holding his arms while Big Sister (or Mom or Crazed Neighbor or whoever that is) chokes him from behind.  Family togetherness!

Be thankful … your name isn’t Mallory Elkonite. Oh, that’s not the woman in the apron’s name?  Okay, then be thankful you have a handy switch in your kitchen that operates the Grand Coulee Dam, like not-Mallory does.  No more trudging out into the desert to open the floodgates!  And now that we think about it, “Mallory Elkonite” would be an awesome name for a character on a soap, or maybe a sexy spy.

Be thankful … you can travel in style with your typewriter, pipe, and stripey pajamas. Except it will cost you $25 to check your pajamas, and you have to be able to fit the typewriter under the seat in front of you, and don’t even think about tampering with, disabling, or destroying the lavatory smoke detector so you can light up that pipe.  (Perhaps you were expecting some kind of airport-security–related joke here.  We try not to go for cheap laughs here at Duke Digital Collections.  We try to go for free laughs, because we have $0 in our comedy budget.  Obviously.)

Be thankful … your hands are as soft as a velvet child, even on wash day. “My hands used to be so rough and brittle that I couldn’t even play the piano!  My husband and I had nothing to do but discuss my hair-do and perfume until, mercifully, it was our 8 o’clock bedtime.  Golly, I sure hope they invent TV soon!”

Be thankful … you can now watch the Slack-Jawed Gawking Channel in crystal clarity. Thanks to the Mallory Inductuner, your TV is more inductunicated than ever.  In fact, non-inductunification is down over 80 percent since last Thanksgiving.  What an age we live in!

Most of all, take a moment — or two — to be seriously thankful for some serious stuff, for real.  Friends, family, your health, your pets, your Snuggie, whatever you have that brings you joy.  And, you know, if you want to show some gratitude for Duke Digital Collections, that would be cool, too.  We wear a size Large, green goes with our eyes, and our birthstone is diamond.  Just puttin’ it out there.

In the 1930s, players often wore sesame-seed buns as helmets, as seen on the cover of this Duke/Davidson program from our Duke Football Programs digital collection.  We originally thought the Davidson player here was falling down and throwing up, but upon closer examination we realized he has bitten the trousers of the Duke player.  We like our original interpretation better.  Either way, we love the 3-D Viewmaster-y style of the whole tableau.

Early football was much more interactive than today’s sport.  In this 1940 football program, we see a fan climbing over other spectators to reach the field, where she is going to pummel the opposing team with her tiny megaphone.  Eventually this became such a popular activity that by the 3rd quarter of many games the bleachers were practically empty and there was complete chaos on the field.  This is the reason that today tiny megaphones and hats with big feathers are forbidden in most stadiums.

By 1941, local football teams consisted almost entirely of gondoliers.  Previously this group had fought chronic underemployment as there are hardly any canals in central North Carolina.  Eventually the NCAA banned gondoliers in college football, however, because their long oars caused too much damage to the field.  Today most American gondoliers are employed in Las Vegas casinos or telling people to keep their hands and arms inside the boat on “It’s A Small World” at Disneyland.

The hot new technology in 1947 was watching TV on a microfilm reader projection TV, as seen in this magazine advertisement from Ad*Access.   The whole family could gather around the gigantic 20 by 15 inch screen.  This was cutting-edge technology for the era, as it is almost half as big as the typical movie screen in today’s multiplex theaters.  Of course, TV sizes increased over the decades, peaking around 2005 before collapsing under their own weight and shrinking again; today we enjoy watching TV on our tiny netbooks, cell phones, and wristwatches.  Progress!

Down the road in Raleigh, our friends at North Carolina State University formerly played football at Riddick Stadium, which was apparently served by many forms of public transportation, including train, plane, covered wagon, snowshoe, elephant, and mule caravan.  In 1966, the team moved to Carter-Finley Stadium, where today a favorite activity is sitting in traffic on I-40 trying to get to it.

In 1985, football met fashion in a special episode of Project Runway.  This was especially impressive since Project Runway had not been invented yet.  The outfits above were not well received  by the judges.  Heidi Klum said they were “too matchy-matchy” and “not sexy at all.”  Nina Garcia called the color palette “ghastly” and found the proportion on the jacket “confusing.”  Michael Kors said it looked “like a disco grandma at the mall” and yelled “the fit on the pants is CRAZY!”  Guest judge January Jones, however, found the beret “cute” and said she “might wear the scarf, if it were really cold.”

We hope you’ve found this look at great moments in football history informative and enjoyable.  We cannot be held responsible for any bad grades that may result from presenting any of this as fact in a school project or report.  Please spend some time checking out our Duke Digital Collections to see what other football-related resources you can find – or enter any other topic that interests you in the search box on the Digital Collections home page.

First, here’s a British Overseas Airways Corporation advertisement offering travel to the 1948 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz, the first Games held after WWII (the host city was selected at least partly because Switzerland was neutral during the war). These Olympics were noteworthy for the figure skating gold medal won by Dick Button, now well-known as an “amusingly opinionated” TV commentator. The 1948 Games also introduced a new demonstration sport called “military patrol,” which combined cross-country skiing with shooting at targets and later, of course, was renamed “ice dancing.” (Ha ha, we kid. It became biathlon. But admit it, you would watch ice dancing if there were shooting at stuff involved.)

This ad is interesting for a couple of reasons: BOAC no longer exists, having later merged with British European Airways to create British Airways, but the “Speedbird” name endures to this day as the callsign used by air traffic control to refer to British Airways flights. The $746 round-trip fare is about $6700 in today’s dollars; for comparison, round-trip fares between NYC and Geneva today begin at $448. Of course, in 1948 you probably didn’t have to pay extra for checked baggage, pillows, food, and armrests.

Next, here’s a 1925 ad that vaguely and unconvincingly attributes America’s Olympic success to using Lifebuoy soap. Maybe Lindsey Vonn should’ve used it on her sore shin instead of wrapping the injured area in cheese. (We swear we are not making this up. Look it up — it was in the news.) It’s good to know that Lifebuoy kills germs picked up in “stuffy cars,” which are breeding grounds for disease, as everyone knows. Apparently.

Finally, here’s another airline advertisement, this time for Trans-Canada Air Lines‘ service to Vancouver. No fare this time, but note that it mentions coast-to-coast service across Canada and to Newfoundland, which at the time wasn’t part of Canada. When this ad was published in 1945, Newfoundland was a separate dominion within the British Empire; it didn’t become Canada’s tenth province until 1949. Trans-Canada Air Lines, meanwhile, became Air Canada in 1965.

The Duke University Libraries have an outstanding collection of materials from and about Canada, reflecting the university’s strong and unique Canadian Studies program. This area of collecting strength is well represented in our digital collections: check out some of our great resources about our neighbors (or is that neighbours?) to the north here.