July 1950

Terramycin

Eight months after a spoonful of Indiana soil arrived in Brooklyn, it was at work saving human lives.

How to rediscover America in 30 minutes

Peaceful America is more battle-scarred than most Americans realize. If your family lives or vacations in the East, there may literally be a battlefield almost in your back yard. And the West is liberally sprinkled with places where Americans fought Mexicans and Indians to a bloody finish for what is now farmland and factories and places like Houston, Hot Springs, and Hollywood.

We bought privacy for less than $200

If your dreams of a terrace seem beyond the possibilities of your small city lot, stop dreaming and get to work on that terrace. It is possible, and we proved it.

Vertical fabric blinds

The soft effect of a curtaining treatment and the convenient light control of louvered blinds are combined in new vertical blinds of sunfast fabric. Blind slats of acetate rayon are available in colors to harmonize or contrast with other colors in the decorative scheme of a room.

HAVE YOU HEARD?

If you've had bad luck trying to grow pines, azaleas, rhododendrons, trailing arbutus, or certain other acid-soil plants from seed outside their native range, lack of fungi may be your trouble. Certain fungi live on the roots of many of these plants. They cause no disease, but on the contrary, seem to be necessary to the plant's growth. Scientists aren't quite agreed on what they do, but without the fungi, the plants fail.

Divide your iris for better blooms

Crowded iris clumps should be divided and transplanted to maintain beautiful masses of color in your home grounds. Now that the blooming season for the common bearded iris is over, you will know which clumps are too large and not doing well. Order new iris now; plant them about the same time that you divide and transplant the clumps.

We dared to be different

One day when our house was still in the making, a workman wandered over from a nearby job. He spoke to the architect, who happened to be standing within the bare outlines of what we now call our living room.

A colorful spot to eat in jour kitchen

Is yours a large, old-fashioned kitchen with table centered in the middle, or do you eat in a postage-stamp snack corner? Size doesn't matter; what really matters is that you make the most of what you've got. And there's nothing like color to help you do that.

Give your yard a BIG LOOK

It's easy enough to make a big yard look spacious. The real test comes when you have a small lot, and yet want to avoid the appearance of living on a postage stamp.

DECORATING Scrap book

Here's color and comfort you'll like

Do you want most to be able to sit, comfortable and cool, and look out on a carnival of flowers-- or to be able to get out among them quickly? Either way, here are some of the things you can do about it:

How to spoil the looks of your house

In today's homes, the emphasis is strongly on planning, And rightfully so. You can't be happy in a house that is not planned primarily for the convenience and comfortable living of you who must live in it.

You can own art masterpieces . . . at down-to-earth prices

Which picture do you like best? The Renoir, perhaps, or the Rouault? You can own it if you want to. A slim budget is no excuse for not having fine art.

What every husband should know about a woman's change of life

However near to or far from the change of life your wife is, there is one serious question you ought to ask yourself right now:

Three bedrooms on a narrow lot

When you think of a one-story house, you probably picture it either as a small rectangle or as a series of spreading wings that takes a broad lot for a setting.

Bring summer indoors

Easy dress-ups for outdoor meals

Confessions of good canners

For perfect pear halves, remove pear core with melon-ball cutter and remove stem by making groove with tip of a sharp knife.-- Annabelle Sims, Jacksonville, Florida.

The four poals of DISCIPLINE

No boy or girl can be happy or pleasant to live with in a home that has no discipline. But what are the goals of your discipline? What are you trying to accomplish?

How to stay friends with the sun

If you're like many American families, you live in a house that was built without much regard for control of the summer sun. Probably some of your rooms are hot, glary, uncomfortable-- for at least a part of the day.

How to preserve a paint job

Let your house be itself

With the old way of home building, we too often labored and brought forth a box, arbitrarily chopped up into "five rooms and bath." A big problem then was how best to disguise the home's materials-- inside with expensive paint, wallpaper, and moldings, outside with shutters, false gables, and scallops.

STOP! your child can't take it

Next time you whine, nag, pick, or scream at your boy or girl, you might think about these words from the head of the children's ward in a big city hospital: "At least 90 percent of the youngsters here, including those with malnutrition, stomach troubles, and chronic nervous disorders, are here because of nagging parents.

Will they make the grade as grownups?

It's not will your boy or girl live to grow up. It's will he or she grow up to be an adult, fully mature and well balanced?

Garden furniture you can make

How to pack more living into a small house

You say: My living room is so many feet square. But ask yourself, instead, how comfortable the room is to live in. It's the way you use the space you have that counts.

"The best side trip we ever took"

Your big change may be as simple as this

Your dog and mine

How can I teach my pup to shake hands?-- G. K., Texas. Set the pup down; insert his right paw in the loop end of his leash. Raise the leash to bring up the paw, at the same moment commanding "Shake hands!"

The diary of a plain dirt gardener

July 1 The beginning of this month of heat and weeds and whooshing of dust and what not is a good time to check up on the garden. So, while scraping my chin this early a. m., 1 looked out from the bathroom window for a peek over the barberry hedge and between the bushes.

Easy does it around the yard

Your lawn this month

Hot summer is the season when you want to enjoy your yard, not work in it. And so it's fortunate that your lawn needs less work now, especially if you gave it a good spring start.

Mulch before you vacation

It's no fun to leave town on your vacation and then worry about how things are getting along at home. It's no use going off to see the sights if the prettiest spots set you wondering whether the vegetables are drying up and how your expensive new evergreens are coming.

The MAN NEXT DOOR

Will the gentleman in our neighborhood who borrowed my mole trap last summer kindly return it now? And if you want your darned spray gun, you can have it.