Flashback: 1940s

Sugar, butter, silk, typewriters, gas: In 1942, access to these things shrank away under a flutter of yellow rationing coupons. Unless you were a trucker, an ambulance driver, or a diplomat, you affixed a black "A" sticker to your car and pumped a measly 4 gallons of gas per week into it. "Victory speed" was 35 mph. Ladies swabbed the last bits of color from their lipstick tubes; conditioned their hair with Vaseline; made do with home beauty remedies brewed up with stuff like almond meal, bicarbonate of soda, Borax, and camphorated oil (every recipe ending, almost inevitably, with the directive "strain though a cheesecloth"). When the war evaporated under the shimmering aura of the A-bomb, Americans had itchy souls and just wanted to move, preferably much faster than at victory speed; this image, pulled from an envelope marked "Scenic," was a promotional shot from an antecessor of the Tourism Commission, designed to entice people out onto Missouri's roadways. This picture might've done it: It doesn't matter that this lady's socks are full of burrs. Or that she probably caught her skirt on the barbed wire or got slivers off the post. You can almost smell the sweetness of decomposing hay; the sky looks like a gulp of swimming-pool water in a milk glass, and most important, her lipstick not only matches her beret, but the leaves, too.