The 20th century was a time of wonders for the average American. A postwar consumer products boom put exciting modern conveniences within the reach of every home, and only one question hung on the lips of ad agency execs - how best to get the word out about these technological marvels? The solution, strangely enough, happens to be the same solution you see here every week - comic books. If all you have is a hammer, every problem is going to look like a nail!


And thus the venerable Henry Aldrich was enlisted as a selling wizard in this mystical marketing battlefield. What's that? Kids today don't know Henry Aldrich? This bumbling, likeable all-American teenager began as a character in a Broadway play, was the star of the Aldrich Family radio show, was featured in eleven movies, an early 1950s television series, 22 issues of a Dell comic book, all the while amusing a nation with a popular, what we'd call today "meme-worthy" call-and-response catch phrase that... well, see for yourself.


There you go, got that out of the way, now we can move on.


Selling TVs! Repairing radios! Hitting on the local half-your-age talent! It's all in a day's work for your friendly neighborhood merchants.


We're so far back in time that the concept of merging a clock with a radio was a novel idea that demanded every avenue of promotion possible in order to fully explain its technological advancements to a dubious public.


"A radio that will turn itself off? And then turn itself back on again? Am I dreaming? Are such wonders truly part of our world?"


Yes, your clock radio can be set to activate any electrical appliance with its amazing timer! Just the thing for, say, detonating explosives while you're at a safe distance.


Selling yourself on the merch? That's what we call "getting high on your own supply." But $49.95? That seems like a lot of money in 1951. Let's run that through the inflation calculator and... holy cow, that's six hundred dollars today. Wow. On the other hand, you can pick up a clock radio today for about twenty of our current bucks.


That's a lot of cash for an early 1950s teen! What are you going to do? The minimum wage is peanuts and McDonalds isn't hiring because it doesn't exist yet! My advice is to write a lurid tell-all expose of the communists in your local school board. It'll sell like hotcakes, and maybe liven things up in your dull town!


Uh oh, here it comes... The Question. Time for that awkward conversation about the birds and the bees!


I was joking, but this really *is* turning into a conversation about his parents' preferences in bed.


FATHER is the singer in THIS family and he's the BEST and you'll NEVER beat him because you're not man enough! Now go and use this abuse to write a series of best selling novels, those award winning films aren't going to script themselves!


Look Dad, I'm just saying, think how much better your life would be as part of some sort of polyamorous moleclue, or "polycule."


Meanwhile Mary is planting the seeds of women's liberation in Mom. Yeah mom, think about it, think about... making Father responsible for his own coffee.


That's right Alice. Present it as an exciting new opportunity for Father's personal growth and efficiency!


Gee whiz Mary, now we've started our parents on the road to divorce! And we're 1950s radio characters, so divorce doesn't even exist for us!


Here's the plan, Henry will get paid $25 to get the coffee started every single morning for the rest of time! Just divide twenty-five by "eternity" and you'll see that it comes out to less than a tenth of a cent per day. Much, much less.


Meanwhile Mary gets $25 from Mother for... the exact same job? This is against every ethical guideline of every leading association of every kind of home employment everywhere!


Mary and Henry are great at financing gifts! Terrible at surprises, though.


Henry and Mary's plans for using an alarm clock to make coffee have been dashed by Mother's insistence upon using the alarm clock as... an alarm clock.


Henry has an idea! Namely, he's due to get drafted in about ten minutes so why is he even worrying about this?


Well, they saw to it that Father was awakened by the gentle tones of Rosemary Clooney singing "Come On-a My House" - AND his coffee was perking and hot! Now all Father has to do is sleepily navigate a steep stairwell while carrying a steaming hot percolator of boiling coffee.


And here the full power of the comic strip medium is used to hammer home important technical details to a readership that might at first have believed that the temperature of their coffee was directly related to the volume of the music. People were kinda dense in the 50s.


Husbands! Wake your wives up to tell them of the marvels of the CAPEHART CLOCK RADIO! They'll thank you for it someday!


But don't forget the main benefit; less work for Mother. Hey! I imagine you're confused and frightened by the bewildering controls of your new CAPEHART CLOCK RADIO. Would you like some further instruction? Sure you would!


Simply turn SLEEP KNOB clockwise while adjusting the small projection to approximate the length of operational time required. It's easy and you'll never accidentally set the radio to come on at full volume somewhere around 3:45am. Never.


Why not treat yourself to one of the incomparable CAPEHART line of Televison Phonograph Radios? We definitely guarantee it will, instead of merely playing LPs, actually break the records in the record changer, thereby driving CAPEHART into bankruptcy. True story! Also true, 195 River St in Troy NY is now a vendor's mall next to the Beat Shop record store! I guess we're gonna have to check it out the next time we're in the Capital Region, gonna buy some records for our CAPEHART.

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