Back to School Clothes, 1965

 

From this picture can you guess which movie influenced back to school clothes in 1965?

Another clue...

And this darling third clue?

Naturally, it is the movie that for five years made more money at the box office than even Gone with the Wind.......

The Sound of Music!

I remember seeing the movie when it premiered at Nashville's nicest movie theater in 1965. How I loved it! RH and I had only been married a few years and didn't have any children yet but if I'd had school age children I most likely would have been wanting to dress them this way for the first day of school.

And that first day of school back then was always the day after Labor Day, not some barbarous day in August when we would have still been at Pleasant Green swimming pool or Myrtle Beach.

I loved the songs from the movie, still do. You still hear These are a few of my favorite things on Instagram, don't you? I think one of the most memorable scenes from the movie was So Long, Farewell when the von Trapp children bid adieu to their house guests one evening and disappeared one by one up the staircase, cute little Greti  going last. And then of course when the song is repeated at their performance at the Salzburg Festival when they bid adieu to the audience and escape  through the Alps to Switzerland. 

But back to fashion! Here are two more fall fashion pictures from my August 1965 issue of Ladies' Home Journal.

 

 and...

 I see a slight influence of the movie in the second woman's dress, do you? 

Would school children today be caught dead in these clothes?

Do you think the style will ever come back?

Did you ever wear a dress similar to these, as a child or as an adult?  

 

"Time Enough for Dreaming"

There are certain times in the year when dreams seem possible,

even seem destined to come true.

June is one of them,

maybe because of the leftover emotions

from childhood--

School is out! Summer is here!

June seems like a new beginning.

Is that why so many weddings are in June?

Our dear Gladys Taber wrote:

"...in June one feels the security

that summer has just begun,

there is time enough for dreaming."

I do a lot of dreaming when I look through my vintage magazine collection

and the June issues are my second favorite.

Christmas issues claim first place with me.

I'm still a sucker for Bride covers and the above one from The Ladies' Home Journal

issue of June 1951 was my happy place this morning as I wait for the heavy rains and predicted strong weather to arrive.

We got up at 5:30 a.m. to get some things done before we lost the sunshine.

It's been a beautiful June morning and RH got a few plants in the ground before breakfast. 

I clipped some long legged herbs before the rains could beat them down.

Flowers on the tarragon were already weighing it down and they make a pretty bouquet 

in my kitchen window.

Did you know the flowers are edible too?

I can snip them for my salad dressings this week and maybe some for the pork chops RH plans on cooking for us because the sage needs to grow some more before harvesting.

I hope the model above,

bride Francine de Fere in her 

Christian Dior gown,

had her wedding dreams come true.

I didn't have a Christian Dior wedding gown but I did have a smaller version of her bridal bouquet.

Stephanotis was standard bridal bouquet flowers back then, and a decade later mine had it with gardenias--divine scent!

Looking out the window now, I see the rains have arrived. I hope people in the way of these storms are safe.

Tropical Storm Cindy has already claimed the life of a 10-year old boy, his and his parents' dreams ended.

Cherish your beautiful dreams.

I'm going to dream this summer

and I hope you do too.

Summer has just begun!

Dust Be Gone

Thank you so much to all who commented so sweetly last week about my small bathroom and its bouquet of glass! The bathroom refurbishment also gave us the opportunity to do something about my dressing room. Here is where I admit that about the only reason I can call it a dressing room is because it contains my closet, something that was missing in this 1920 farmhouse bedroom when we bought it.

Other than the closet, this tiny 8 x 10 room also held an ironing board that always seemed to be up and was a handy place to hold a multitude of things and even a surface to wrap Christmas presents. The main thing that used to be in this little room was a huge industrial shelving rack holding my collection of mostly women's magazines dating back to 1865. The collection has taken me over thirty years to amass and is all inventoried. They have given me hours of good reading but they were a dusting nightmare. I know I should have gotten before pictures but here is a shot of some of the magazines stacked all over our small dining room during the redo. We call it the small dining room but there is no large dining room.

After painting the bathroom and dressing room, in came a large piece of furniture, our old entertainment center. Nobody seems to want these old dinosaurs, even on Craigslist, but I knew it would look much better than the industrial shelving in my "dressing room."

I know bloggers won't understand why I didn't work some magic on this old cabinet with some Annie Sloan Chalk Paint. Sigh. No, I didn't, and R.H. made it perfectly clear that he was not going to either.

What he and our son Gurn did, however, was to make sturdy new shelves in it to hold all those magazines and a nice solid back to keep out all the dust.

A nice young friend spent five hours dusting each magazine and then arranging them not only by year but by month, January through December. I'm talking about 1865 through 1970. It was a dusty job.

Gurn made labels so that I can see the years at a glance.

Son Zack, who moved all the dusty magazines out before work began, had said, "Mom, we're giving all these magazines to Goodwill when you're gone."

"Heck no," big brother Gurn said. "I'll take them all and sell them on eBay!"

(Where buyers will tear them apart and sell all the old Coca-Cola adds on eBay themselves. Arrgh! Don't get me started on that destructive practice, except to say, "Once they're gone, they're gone for good, folks.")

My dusty dressing room is gone too. There is even a place for the ironing board to hide.

I'm never going to mess up this room again. I promise.