You might be impressed if the organizers of a local benefit show pieced together five or 10 pages of program ads.
The program for a 1925 cabaret fundraiser by the Junior League of New Haven, a group of “young women” with “the leisure and the desire” to improve “the social, economic, educational and civic conditions” of the city, had close to a hundred. Nearly 170 ads, many full-page, were splashed throughout, supporting the League’s work with orphanages, churches, hospitals, food drives, childhood development organizations and medical aid groups.
The event, called the “Nautical Bal Cabaret”—don’t ask me what “Bal” means—featured 10 big numbers, the first one (and maybe the rest, too) drawn from the recent hit Vaudeville musical comedy Honeymoon Cruise. League members did the singing and dancing, and they did it for two nights, implying the demand for attendance at this maritime-themed revue was higher than the venue, “the S.S. New Haven Lawn Club,” could accommodate.
But let’s get back to the ads, because, like the rest of the League’s efforts organizing this benefit, there’s something really special about them: They feature rare detailed interior photos, now Roaring Twenties time capsules, of New Haven businesses. In a stroke of marketing genius, the League commissioned photos posing its members patronizing the cabaret’s lead sponsors—buying makeup at the Malley’s department store, trying out lenses with a Fritz & Hawley optician, checking the stock ticker at brokerage firm Winslow, Day & Stoddard.
The ads were designed to help a 1925 audience imagine themselves doing business about town the way the prominent women on stage did. And, wouldn’t you know it, they also help us imagine that today.
Written by Dan Mims. Photographed by Bachrach, a historic photo studio. For image captions identifying both the models and the businesses, check out the email edition.
