October 1953

Can husband and wife be FRIENDS?

One of the most important elements in any marriage is simply that husbands and wives be good friends. Yet, there is a prevalent notion that married couples can be anything else but. Mates. Parents. Business partners. Sweethearts. Or even the bitterest enemies. But friends?

Get color today with chrysanthemums

Danger! Ice dams ahead

FAMILY PROBLEM: What's your solution?

Jane Kessel is right in saying that having a husband in the Navy is no reason for Dinah to be a stay-at-home all the time. While social life apart from each other presents problems for married couples like the Wiltons, it is not wholesome for either of them to avoid all social outlets in the mistaken idea that to do otherwise would be disloyal.

Little details make a big difference

Have you heard the Latest Garden News?

Should you prune your grapes this fall, during the winter, or next spring? Wait until spring, advises the New York State Experiment Station.

How you dress your tables

are the schools neglecting the 3-R's?

If you want to start a heated discussion any time, any place, with anyone, just ask this question: "What's your impression of the job the schools are doing in teaching the 3 R's?" It's seldom you'll find someone who is neutral on the subject.

Can you make money in real estate?

For ages the traditional method of protecting savings or wealth has been to buy and hoard precious metals and jewels, or to buy and protect land.

How does your bedroom rate?

MAYBE you're the lucky owner of a perfect bedroom. But, more likely, a check-up with this quiz will make you realize you're missing comforts and conveniences you really deserve. On the next six pages, we show the newest ideas, even re-do an old room to prove no bedroom is hopeless

It's a second living room, too

We re-do an old bedroom

How did your bedroom rate in the quiz on page 57? Let's hope your bedrooms aren't as inconvenient and unattractive as the "before" photographs shown here. That's the way this 11½x13-foot bedroom looked the first time we saw it. When we checked it against the list of questions, "no" answers were definitely in the majority. The "after" photographs prove that no bedroom is hopeless.

Lung cancer among men

By 1970, at the present rapidly increasing rate, one of every five cancers in men will be of the lung, and the yearly toll will be 47,000 lives In recent years, the deadliness of lung cancer has multiplied at a rate far outdistancing all other cancers. Between 1938 and 1948, deaths from all cancers mounted by 31 percent. But. in the same period there was a 144-percent increase in the death rate from lung cancer-- more than four times as much as from cancer in general.

It's easier to live with a good small house

In planning Five Star Home No. 2310, there was single-purpose dedication. It was planned for people-- not for spectacular design or impersonal falderal.

Next spring can be wonderful!

You have a big opportunity ahead of you if you own even a few square feet of soil. You have time to plan and plant for some gorgeous garden color next spring. And more than that, you'll have weather to do it in comfortably.

Workbench for a real handyman

How do you rate yourself as a handyman? A little above average? Most readers of Better Homes & Gardens do, as a recent survey proved. And as such, don't you think you're entitled to an above-average workbench?

Vermont and New Hampshire

How about a vacation where you can throw away the schedule? If on past vacations you've had to sacrifice your best hours to driving, then all of you-- and particularly the driver-- deserve something different. Take the word of thousands of families who have tried it. Different is just about the best way of summing up a Vermont-New Hampshire vacation.

Passers-by say, "That's for me!"

Any house that has combined beauty and practicality is a successful house. In that respect, this home has outdone itself-- because it has an additional quality: imagination!

Fall tables worth talking about

GIVE THE simplest meal a distinctive setting, and it becomes a lasting memory! For your next party, plan a table decoration so lovely and interesting that it will be an "icebreaker," start your guests chatting.

CONTEST FOR COOKS

YOU HAVE 21 chances to win a prize in this month's contest. We have $70 waiting for the good cooks who send us the winning recipes for broiler specials or coconut desserts. Cook-of-the-Month will be mailed $10. The 20 other winners will receive $3 each. Eight of the best recipes will be pictured in Better Homes & Gardens Prize Tested Recipes pages next May.

Silver for casual use

Family dining-kitchen

Clever decorating for a problem room

Discover your hidden sewing space

Make small space pay off

You don't need a fancy barbecue

Put the fizz on dirt

DOLLARS AVERS Do-it-yourself ideas

Personal help in home building, remodeling, and decorating

When you're looking for ways to make your home more comfortable and attractive, look for this seal. It identifies the Better Homes & Gardens Home Planning Center, where you can get personal counsel on your own special home-planning problems.

How to shape and sharpen a cutting edge

Gain storage in waste space

Your pet and mine

Is grass a necessary food for cats? --Mrs. F. K. M., Pennsylvania. Grass is not a food at all, but a corrective for digestion troubles. If your cat eats grass, feed a recognized cat or dog food for balanced diet, plus bulk and roughage.

Decorate to enjoy your hobby more

This small house looks big lives big

Cramped for space? Put your basement to work

Three ways to use a slab door

Moving...

Make your bathroom complete

Do you still put arbitrary restrictions on your bathroom planning-- restrictions in storage, materials, placement of fixtures, and color? All too often, it's the most neglected room in the house, the black sheep of the floor plan.

Answers to your decorating questions

We have to do our decorating on a very limited budget. How should we distribute our money most sensibly?

It's built traditionally on a triangle

Fitting a Traditional house onto an odd-shaped site can be a knotty problem. Such homes just do not have the plan flexibility of a contemporary design.

Choose gifts you'd love to get

Go away and let them play!

Dick and Ted Mason were two fine boys. They were sturdy. They ate well. They slept soundly. They grew normally. They did the customary amount of fighting, survived the usual assortment of diseases, mastered their schoolwork after a fashion. In short, they were wholesomely dirty and disgustingly healthy-- there was nothing wrong with them.

Plant a wildflower garden now

THE FAMILY CAR

You may have the oil in the crankcase of your car changed regularly; have the transmission and differential and cooling system drained and refilled when you make regular spring and fall change-overs; have frequent chassis lubrications-- yet you may be neglecting your car.

When you buy bedding

Sleep equipment has changed much in the last decade... so don't overlook the new things just because a bed still looks like a bed! There's more emphasis on sleep-inducing, healthful bedding, new techniques in coiling springs, new developments in foam latex, more-roomy bed sizes, new sheets which simplify bedmaking, new ideas in bedcoverings. Here are the answers to your most-frequently asked questions.

News in bedroom furniture

Decorating "stretches" a small room

Give the baby room to roam

When your baby creeps on all fours across the floor, it may seem more amusing than important. You think of his crawling as a mere stopgap between sitting up and that momentous day when he rises to his feet. And you're right. He's getting around the best way he can at the moment.

How to use a radial-arm saw

The widespread interest among handymen in power tools that will do a variety of jobs has given recent rise to the popularity of an old-time industrial stand-by-- the radial-arm saw. Scaled down to size for the handyman's billfold, and adapted as the power center for a whole shop full of tools, the radial-arm type of saw is being shown by more and more power-tool dealers.

Give it a shellacking!

For spots that take wear: Try stone paving

Stone paving for your garden is durable, good-looking, and easy to keep clean. And you have a wide choice among its warm earthen colors-- buffs, dusty yellows, warm browns, and grays.

How to plant an evergreen

The diary of a Plain dirt gardener

Oct. 1 There are blooms as big as peonies on some of the roses today; though total number is less than normal, due to summer heat.

OCTOBER GARDEN REMINDERS: Now's the time to...

Feed your established lawn, if you haven't done ... this fall. Water immediately afterward. Continue mowing lawn as long as it grows.

THE MAN NEXT DOOR

You can almost see Mother Nature mixing her autumn paints, and a little imagination brings out the fall colors. That's how our Rosie's high-school quarterback hero got that gorgeous black eye: he imagined he could sneak a football past that big left tackle.