For Your Personal Protection


Even as a kid, I must have developed a sense that advertisements are not-seen. I probably had not yet become allergic to propaganda, so this stuff slid into and off of my consciousness, leaving relatively little residue.

 

Every flight has only one purpose – your personal protection!

The next time jets thunder overhead, remember that the pilots who fly them are not willful disturbers of your peace; they are patriotic young Americans affirming your New Sound of Freedom!

[Clarification: this ad was in National Geographic from the 1950s. I found it while I was looking for some of the articles on deep mixed-gas diving; I hadn’t remembered that National Geographic was chock-full of propaganda but, wow, it’s got a lot of howlers in it!]

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Meanwhile, the milk man is delivering fallout-irradiated midwestern milk(tm)[stderr]

Comments

  1. Sean Boyd says

    Re: personal protection. That would be a great reason to have busted the Navy pilots who recently drew a penis in the skies over Wenatchee, as it was not wearing a condom. (ducks deserved rotten tomatoes)

    I live near JBLM, so am “privileged” to see all manner of military aircraft overhead pretty much every day. I don’t feel safer, somehow, having that giant bullseye that close.

  2. coragyps says

    That milkman appears to be wearing a turban!! What’s up with that? Ay-rab terrists in 1960??

  3. says

    Lofty@#5:
    You have the freedom to pray to Dog for your hearing to be restored when the noise from freedom planes ruins it.

    When I was a kid I used to love the sonic booms when the French Air Force mysteres would go supersonic over the empty region where we spent our summers. BOOM rattle rattle rattle. It sure takes a lot of energy to get through the sound barrier!

  4. says

    Reginald Selkirk@#7:
    That’s not a turban, that is an old-fashioned item called a “hat”.

    I’m afraid the milkman is this guy:

    I still love Cream of Wheat. But, uh…

  5. says

    I probably don’t need to mention this but the US did no meaningful air defense at all during the cold war. There was no need for an interceptor capability because the period of long-range bombing nuclear standoff was very brief. At the time this piece of propaganda was produced, the US would have been spending its way out of the nonexistent “bomber gap” – those jets would have been defending everyone against nothing at all.

  6. jrkrideau says

    Nothing like a few attack aircraft attacking the barn to increase one’s affection for the RCAF. We lived at a what was a convenient distance from an RCAF base and had some interesting terrain.

    RCAF fighters (I think) often would spend a half hour or so attacking the barn on sunny days. One got used to them and the aluminium ‘chaff’ all over the pastures.

    We never got nice ads.

  7. jazzlet says

    A significant change in moving west across the tail end of the Pennines has been the almost complete absence of jets from various RAF bases playing on the edge of Sheffild and up the Hope Valley. The only time I have heard them since the move was when there was a terrorist alert on a jet coming into Manchester airport that caused it to be accompanied in by two fighter jets, by that point the plane was already over urban areas so quite what the jets would have done I’ve no idea. I mostly don’t notice the commercial planes, a combination of double glazing and that they are usually coming into land – they are far more audible when they switch direction so we get ascending planes.