May 1941

Marriage a Gamble?

SPRING is the season of marriage. Birds sing, flowers bloom, and lovers clasp hands as they plight their troth. The bride, looking her best, is led radiant from the altar to live happily ever after with the bridegroom on whose arm she leans.

How to Keep on Speaking Terms With Your Wife

WHEN Archie and Angela Ditherton got married, they vowed they'd be different from other husbands and wives. They wouldn't have arguments.

IF YOU WANT TO SAVE, Better Build Now

WHEN we hand out financial advice, we like to be on the sure side. That's why-- when we told you last May to "Build, buy, or remodel now-- prices are going up!"-- we went to one of the nation's best sources of building counsel-- Real Estate Analysts, Inc.

What Price Orchids?

SOMEBODY'S face ought to be begonia red, but for the life of us we don't know if it's ours or somebody else's. Since we published H. Britton Logan's "Grow Orchids in Your Own Living-Room," some of the orchid growers have worn their teeth all down to nubs from gritting at us; others think we're pretty fine people.

The House They Built, The Garden They Grew

IT ALL dates back to the time when Terese first saw the light of day. I'm sure she had a posy in each hand. Seems to me it would take a beginning something like that to make one go as batty as she does over a pile of seed catalogs in the middle of an Iowa blizzard and dream of the day when, "come green-up time," she can begin to dig.

Phlox

PHLOX are as All-American as pumpkin pie, johnnycake, and bank night. But by a curious twist they go under the ancient Greek word for flame.

Six Low-Cost Homes

IN A quiet suburb of Atlanta, with the rolling green of a golf course at their backs, sit six little homes all in a row. They're an outstanding part of a sprouting young community full of newlyweds in their first homes. And you shouldn't be at all surprised if soon their tree-lined streets are no longer called Redland Road and Dellwood Drive, but just the "Bridal Path."

POTS VINES ANNUALS

I WASHED my hands of our last landlady yesterday morning. By mid-afternoon Regina and I and Mark-- he's our two-year-old-- were in our own home.

From England to the Alps Without a Passport

VISIT the Alps this summer without a passport! Take a thousand-mile sea voyage thru fjords! Camp out under the stars with your pony! Enjoy tea and crumpets in an English garden!-- all on a three weeks' vacation! The answer? It's western Canada.

3 HOMES OF YESTERDAY Catch Up WITH TOMORROW

AT A glance you'd have said, "Hopeless! No use trying to rejuvenate, those old fogies-- they're too sound asleep in the past to come back to this modern world." But the Wildmans, the Kelleys, and the Irwins hadn't just glanced. They had lived in these houses, and they knew there was life in the old walls yet. So each family set out in its own way to mend the tatters, straighten the kinks, and dress up the still sturdy frames of their homes that had lived for decades-- and looked it.

MAY Indoor Gardening Guide

It's Here--the Gayest Show of All

IT WAS FOR MAY that bulbs and perennials were really made. For six months we've dreamed of and planned for this month. But no dream can equal this May parade of iris, peonies, doronicum, columbine, coralbells, and tulips.

That's My Color!

Then on the opposite page is a blue room for you that's red and white, too-- not just to be flagwaving (tho these are pretty good times for it), but because it's a tried and true harmony, sure to be lovely if handled with care. And besides, it's the color scheme that's as good in your little boy's nursery as it is in your own big bedroom...

"We Furnished For Fun and Sons"

YOU'D never guess this comfy-as-an-old-shoe, small white house to be the home-port of the engaging family of Andy Devine, now appearing in Universal's new movie, "The Flame of New Orleans." But that's the straight of it. The outsides are so completely unpretentious, the insides furnished so charmingly and livably that it's just the sort of home you or I would adore for ourselves.

Curtains! Of course you can make

POSITIVELY the handsomest, most engagingly original curtains and draperies I've seen to date have been made at home. And plenty of them by folks who'd have sworn, before their curtaining adventure, that they "couldn't sew a stitch"!

PLYWOOD AND NOW IT'S BUILDING'S BOUNCING BABY

OUT of the vast flood of new materials and methods pouring into the home-building industry, there's one that has only recently begun to get its due attention. It's plywood. Architects and designers are hailing plywood as a perfect basic building material. They're predicting its widespread use in future construction.

Good Furniture Is Adaptable

YOU certainly can have Eighteenth Century mahogany in that bedroom of yours, whether your heart's set on "Modern" or "Traditional" for a background. And don't let anyone talk you out of it!

Article

Smarty Pans

Extra Sparkle for Your SUMMER MEALS

The Party's on You?

MY PHILOSOPHY on party foods got its start back in college days, where, to pad out a shaky budget, I assisted swamped hostesses in private homes. Some of the parties were such flops, others such bang-up successes, that even a verdant coed was bound to draw a few worthwhile conclusions.

EXCLUSIVELY YOURS SAYS A MONOGRAM

GIVE a thought, little bride, to this bit of truth: there's more distinction per square inch in a goodlooking monogram than in yards and yards of the most expensive materials that could go into making your trousseau linens and bedding. Even the simplest of towels gains a certain fillip of specialness when dressed up with your personal "O.K." in a well-designed monogram.

GROW YOUR OWN ROSES TULIPS AND DAFFODILS From Seed

IT ISN'T hard to grow your own bulbs-- and even your roses-- from seed. Any gardener who hasn't tried it has missed a lot of exciting fun.

"Blondie"

Furniture Styles And How to Recognise Them

TO THE genius of Thomas Sheraton we owe many of the finest furniture designs that have come down to us from the Eighteenth Century English Period. Some authorities rank Sheraton second only to Chippendale.

New Spring Trends

YOU'LL see larger patterns and bolder stripes in washable wallpapers this year, with the new ensemble papers making decorating a delight. These, sometimes called "twin" or "sister" papers, are planned for adjoining rooms, with the patterns different but the colors closely related. There are even ensembles in threes for such rooms as the hall, living-room, and dining-room.

Good at Heart

The Question Before the House

In June

Housekeeping With Poise

BETSEY the Bulletin Board, we call her, and she rules our little household with a firm hand wrapped in a glove of softest velvet.

Salute to Canada's Foods

Working Like a Dog

TO MOST Americans a dog is intended for companionship or for sport, yet the world over, millions of dogs work for a living. War dispatches from the late Finnish front reminded us that even in the grim business of war the dog has his place. Finns employed the shaggy Lapland reindeer dog on patrol just as most other armies do.

Garnish and Serve With Love

We Built Drawers in Our Catch-all Cubby

INSTEAD of a duddie little catchall closet in our downstairs bathroom, we now boast the slickest built-in chest of drawers-- and all for less than $10 and a spot of home carpentering by yours truly!

We're Building a Dream With Our Own Hands

THERE'S a picture in my mind of the eight of us five years ago, when we made the great decision to tear down the little home we'd been living in and build anew. It's a picture that fades in and out-- first, the memory of moments of fright at the magnitude of our undertaking, then returning visions of the hard work our eight pairs of hands did and the deep pleasure we all got from it.

Our Mailing Dates Change

Double Your Garden's Bloom

A Whale of a Difference

What Surface far My Walls?

ALL FROM THREE CHAIRS

CHANGING her mind is woman's pet privilege-- has been ever since Eve blithely shifted the leopard skins and stone sofas on Adam just when he'd learned where to step after dark.

Here's a Home to Start With

YOU'RE a lucky bride-- and a proud one-- if your wedding gifts include a trim white home so new it sparkles. So it's no wonder that Seattle Fireman Jim Fleming's bride is inordinately proud and happy in this five-room beauty that was Jim's gift to her.

Give Your GARAGE DOORS Glamour

I Fattened Up My Living-Room

I Made My Living-Room Twenty Years Younger for $20

Got a Date Young Fellow?

Dear Curtiss: You've asked me to write something for boys, something like that letter to Judy, "Of Course You Want to Be Popular," we published in January, 1940. You said, "We fellow need advice, too sometimes," and you went on:

Capture That Red-Letter Setting

PICTURES indoors? You bet we like to take them. They become a tangible memory record of your home. The tot at Easter breakfast with her bunnies about her and Dad in that funny lounging robe-- it's a record of good times in 1941, but it will be a precious jewel in the family setting by 1951.

Article

That Gifted Child of Yours

Baby Clinic

How to Have for...

BUDGETS aren't dragons to terrify the family and rule it with a fiery breath. They're the means that enables a family to purchase so wisely that its income will cover its most longed-for necessities and luxuries.

Zucchini Grow This New Vegetable

A VEGETABLE deserving a good press agent and some rousing publicity is ZUCCHINI, or Italian Squash. Easy to grow, fantastically prolific, vitamin-rich, flavored to thrill a gourmet, it's yet practically an unknown.

Who Wants a Liar-Husband?

"DO GOOD by stealth and blush to find it fame," runs an ancient adage. Old, also, is the observation, "If every wife knew what every widow knows there'd be much more life insurance." Sometimes the two sayings meet in one human experience, as they did a while ago in Portland, Oregon.

Work Garden Magic With PANSIES

GIVE me three dozen plants and in 15 minutes I'll show you that pansies rank with tall hats and white rabbits when it comes to working magic and sleight of hand in the spring garden.

Ask Me Another!

Q Is there any way that I could use Venetian blinds on my sleeping-porch windows? They're the casement type and open outward.

Make Your Own Weather Vane

THE MAN NEXT DOOR

A careful study of wedding jokes reveals that no antic inflicted on bride and bridegroom seems quite funny, because none is quite so humorous as the pranks that matrimony itself plays on you.

There's a Lamp for That Job

THE world is so full of a number of lamps-- high ones, low ones, fat ones, thin ones-- that you'd think the old bogy of eyestrain from poor lighting would be dead as the dodo. That it's alive and still kicking up trouble, according to the eye doctors, means either we're putting up here and there with inefficient, old-style lamps or we're unwittingly misusing the good lamps we do have.

DAD'S Practical Pointers

The Diary OF A PLAIN DUCT GARDENER

What a dour, dismal day this has been. Spits of rain. Dark clouds. Weather grown so chill that furnace had to be roused up to winter strength. Thermometer down almost to freezing.

Hobby Gardens

Indoor Gardening Guide

EVERY ONE HAS A GREEN THUMB

PERHAPS all you know about seeds is that caraway wanders thru the bread and poppy seeds decorate the baker's rolls. Your only experience with plants may be that you once had one and it died. But don't let such trifles cause you to hesitate.

IT'S NEWS TO ME!