There turned out to be a fantastic cache of interesting material in the Faculty Club papers and I’ll be returning to it often as we go through the new year. Back in the day it really operated as a club rather than just a place to eat lunch and they celebrated every holiday with an event of some sort.
This notice was sent to members just before Christmas in 1931. I know nothing about bridge so the first paragraph is a total mystery to me but the second one I immediately understood:
One afternoon some years ago my mom was hassling me about what I was doing on the computer and I told her I could find anything in the world with it. She scoffed and dared me to find the Old Gold cigarette dancers. Fifteen seconds later I had them gloriously tap dancing across the screen. (Google it. They’re awesome.) She immediately asked for a laptop of her own. Anyway, I wound up learning quite a bit about Old Gold advertising so I recognized Asa Chandler’s reference to the classic “Keep Kissable” campaign right away:
Bonus: It’s not really Christmas until we break out the Woodson’s festive Christmas Tree In-A-Box. It’s trickier to put together than you would think.
I had to go find that commercial. Absolutely amazing!
You can definitely see how my mother would have remembered it 50 years later.
Old Golds! I haven’t seen those since they appeared in vending machines in the early 1960s and sold for 35 cents a pack. They were considered extremely unhip at the time and I never knew one person who smoked them.
You are at Rice and know nothing about bridge? You need to spend more time with Doc C. I remember playing bridge in a corner table at Willy’s Pub. I even got to use the famous three no trump opening bid.
Auction bridge was an earlier version of the card game that we play today, contract bridge, which was developed in the 1920s and became more popular shortly thereafter. Duplicate is simply a way of running a tournament in which teams are scored according to how well they did compared to others who played the exact same hands. That emphasizes skill over chance.