1982

In keeping with the holiday spirit, I took it upon myself to relieve my mother-in-law of some of the many stacks of aging and dusty magazines she archives around the old homestead. While she was busy in the kitchen getting ready for dinner, I decided to go through some of the stacks underneath the coffee table in the sunroom. And what should I find there -- not, mind you, in some far off corner of the attic, but in a room used by the family every day, looking out at the beloved Long Island Sound and before that Manor Park, apocryphally rumored to have been designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. What should I find indeed, but an issue of Smithsonian magazine from 1982. 1982!

And the amazing thing about is that every advertisement in the magazine is chock full of text. On page 3, and ad for Land's End Corduroy pants had probably 200 words of text. I know 1982 was also hard-assed recession time, but was stagflation really so bad that people were sitting around taking 2 hard-earned minutes to read about cords, even ones with lovely elastic wastebands? I guess so.