MOUNT VERNON — Our encounter in last week’s column with downtown Mount Vernon Christmas activities was widely shared, also prompting a comment by the Dancing Bee Market & Studio that there are great shops downtown today, too.
This is true, and to further get us in the holiday shopping mood, I decided I wanted to visit another year for comparison. What I found were some advertisements from 111 years ago.
The first thing that is obvious perusing Christmas shopping ads in the 1912 Democratic Banner is that while some of the popular gift items remain the same after all these years – toys, fine clothes, household goods – marketing styles sure have changed.
In 1912, a smalltown paper like the Banner had just begun running news photos, and no effort had yet been made to bring photography into the ads.
How difference that is from today! After decades of high-quality, full- color print, television, and now internet, we have become accustomed to ads that are more visual than anything else.
The 1912 ads are only just beginning to show visual elements. A few proprietors in town took out very large ads that offered detailed lists of the goods and/or services available, but included no images whatsoever.
The Meyer-Lindorf Company, so confident in its local presence that they didn’t even bother including their address, promoted “good hosiery in Xmas boxes,” bath robe blankets, and “huck towelings”… whatever that may have been.
Levison’s Department Store offered such Christmas specials as men’s suits as low as $3.78 and men’s leather shoes at $2.98. The men’s shirt prices reflected practicality over prestige.
Dress shirts were $0.29 cents while actual work shirts were $0.32 cents. The A. A. Dowds Dry Goods Company made much of their offerings of dolls ($0.01 cent up to $2.98) and children’s furniture, but they clearly didn’t think it through when they chose the headline for their ad:
“Good Service a Feature of This Store From Now Until Christmas.” I guess that doesn’t say much for their service the rest of the year.
J. M. Blocher & Co. led the cutting edge with some actual illustrations in their furniture sale ad, but they still leaned hard on the written word:
“This Is No Fake Sale … where the prices of the articles have been raised to offset the reduction, but a purely bona fide sale with all the original prices marked in plain figures, the same figures that were placed there when the piece of furniture was placed in stock.”
Their ad is striking and bold, and their 25% off price sounds competitive, but I can’t say I have encountered the store’s name much in my perusals of local history.
They at least identified their address as 216-218 West High Street, which was much later familiar for many years as the downtown location of Mazza’s Restaurant.
One curious ad, not seasonal, was an advertisement by Dever’s Drug Store noting that the following Monday, Dec. 9, for one day only, they would have a noted optometrist from
Cleveland, one B. F. Alexander, who would be on hand, doing free eye examinations. Eye care has certainly gotten a lot less free-wheeling in the last century!
The Young America Clothing House very self-assuredly describes itself as “the big store on the corner,” though it neglects to mention what corner.
In visual style, it is perhaps the most modern ad, with strong, clear images and typeface.
The images, though, are most certainly of the time, showing a man in an ivy cap, wearing an overcoat, who is lighting a pipe as another man in the background is evidently playing. hockey.
The other illustration is a dapper gent in a bowler hat and three-piece suit, carrying a cane with his gloves, sporting a high collar.
The styles just about scream 1912, and were soon to be obliterated by the massive change in style that swept the country after the chaos of the Great War (now known as World War I) from 1914 to 1918.
How little these stylish models knew they were about to be knocked out of fashion by the Jazz Age.
Perhaps it is the ad for the J. S. Ringwalt Co. that makes it clear just how big a business Christmas was even in those days:
“In the territory contributing to Mount Vernon live upward of 50,000 people. To plan a Christmas Store big enough, and active enough for them is the task of six months …. We ask for your critical inspection of what we’ve been so busy assembling for the
last six months.”
I like that sense of a retailer offering their work up for scrutiny, so different from the repulsive tendency of all too many modern marketers to just throw numbers at the situation without ever pausing to consider what it is the shopper actually wants and needs.
Maybe I’m just being nostalgic for the small-town touch. Or maybe there are still those who know how to make the season about quality, kindness, and meaning. Support them this holiday season, and make our world a little better.