Seagram’s, Anacin, and the Common Good

I was recently thumbing through my copy of the Dec. 19, 1949 issue of Life magazine. If you're a history fan like myself, you'll know this is the issue celebrating our town's Red Flannels, with the now-famous photo of schoolchildren all dressed in red outside the Hilltop building.

For Cedar Springs, it’s a remarkable artifact. A local tradition was captured on film, printed in a national magazine, and carried into homes far beyond Michigan.

As I turned the pages, I found myself pausing over something else: the advertisements.

There were ads for liquor, cigarettes, headache medicine, and the usual mid-century promises. Some were elegant. Others were dramatic. Some were unintentionally funny in the frozen-in-time way old advertisements often are.

I have a friend who, like myself, appreciates vintage advertising, so I started taking pictures of the ads and texting them over with captions of my own. The Seagram's ad became something like, “This Christmas, get Dad what he really wants. Whether he’s blending a batch of eggnog for guests or sipping neat with work associates, let Dad see Seagram’s.”

This, of course, was followed by an ad for headache medicine: “Does Dad have the after-holidays hangover? Is it from the several bottles of Seagram’s you gifted him? Whatever the cause, Anacin IS the answer.”

We laughed, of course. The whole bit was intentionally crass, but in our defense, the ads invited it. Cigarettes were sold with sophistication and liquor was dressed up as holiday cheer. Headache relief was promised with the certainty of a courtroom verdict.

After several more laughs from our own faux ads, I noticed something I couldn’t quite shake. Those ads were very public. Everyone who opened that issue of Life saw the same pages, the same bottle, the same carton of cigarettes, the same family gathered in the same room, and the same promise printed in bold type.

That doesn’t mean the ads were better. It just means the delivery was different.

The advertisement entered the home as part of a shared object. It sat on the coffee table, then was passed from hand to hand. A husband, wife, child, neighbor, guest, or visitor could see the same page and laugh at it, question it, ignore it, or remember it together.

The old advertisement wanted a place in the living room.

New ads want a place in the mind.

Today, much of what reaches us doesn’t arrive through a shared magazine, newspaper, or television program. In fact, advertising in these arenas have rapidly dwindled. It now comes through a private screen, selected by systems and algorithms we don’t see and shaped by habits we don’t always realize we’re teaching them.

Two people can sit in the same room, inches apart, and be shown entirely different worlds. The pitch is no longer aimed at the room. It’s aimed at the individual, with advertising being only one piece of it.

A community depends on shared reality. But more and more of our reality is privately delivered.

That’s the part I keep coming back to, because this column really isn’t about advertisements. It’s about the way people come to understand the places they live.

One person sees Cedar Springs as a growing town full of opportunity. Another sees it as a place being overrun from Grand Rapids transplants. Another sees it as a charming stop on a video tour. Many see it as home. Yet, another sees only the complaint that crossed their feed that morning on a “community” page, with heavy skepticism applied to “community” in this case.

Some of those views may contain truth, but they’re rarely formed together. More often they're delivered separately, one private stream at a time. And when everyone is handed a different version of the world, it becomes harder to remember that we’re still responsible for a common one.

A community can’t be built entirely from private feeds. Quite the opposite, a town needs shared rooms.

Not just literal rooms, although those are needed too. Council chambers, church basements, school gyms, libraries, coffee counters, bleachers, front porches, and volunteer meetings all give people a place to step out of their private worlds and back into a common one.

But a shared room is more than a physical place. It’s a place they can look at one another, ask questions, disagree honestly, laugh at the same joke, and remember that their neighbors aren’t lifeless screen names or variations of “Anonymous Member 839” online. They're real people.

That’s part of what made this old issue of Life so interesting to hold. In the same pages as these old ads was Cedar Springs: a group of schoolchildren at Hilltop, dressed in red flannel, standing together in a single frame.

That photograph didn’t become meaningful because one child wore red. It became meaningful because they all did.

A town's young tradition had gathered them into the same picture. Then that picture traveled outward, carrying a piece of Cedar Springs with it.

That’s why local newspapers, (ahem, insert shameless plug for The Bugle here), public meetings, festivals, churches, schools, libraries, service clubs, social clubs, sports teams, and volunteer departments still have a place. They interrupt the private stream.

They remind us that neighbors are not usernames or political caricatures. They’re real people, and a town works best when we still meet each other that way.

I don’t necessarily want to return to 1949. I don’t want the cigarette ads, the questionable remedies, or the blind trust in every printed promise. But there’s something worth noticing in those old pages: the common view.

Everyone who opened that magazine saw the same thing. Everyone who came across the Red Flannel photograph saw the same children, in the same place, representing the same town.

Cedar Springs doesn’t need to live in the past. But from time to time, we should remember that we’re not just people living near each other. We’re people with the opportunity to experience some part of life together.

And before you say it, I know, dear reader. This is another one of those columns about citizenship and community connection, which makes sense when you think of it. After all, this is called The Sunday Citizen. But citizenship isn’t only voting or paying taxes. Sometimes it’s as simple as showing up in the same places and remembering that the people around us are part of the same town.