Atomic Ranch – The Magazine About The House Where The Girl Next Door Lived
Somehow, Atomic Ranch, which may be the coolest name for a house magazine ever, has been published quarterly since Spring 2004 without coming to my notice until a week ago when an issue caught my eye at the local Borders.
Devoted to 40s-70’s ranch homes and modernist track houses, Atomic ranch is a design and nostalgia bonanza for those with a taste for what the more uppity rags label Midcentury Modern and Boomers who grew up in or aspired to such dwellings.
DrHGuy qualifies for both categories.
Yes, you read that correctly. DrHGuy’s parents, the folks who built, furnished, and decorated the log house featured in The Parental Home Curios Photo Safari, one wall of which is depicted below, also built, furnished, and decorated – precisely as DrHGuy was entering adolescence – a turquoise ranch home with the pathognomonic sunburst clock on the wall.
Go figure.
The furniture included saucer chairs (for adults), a sectional sofa, and a coffee table, the shape of which was held to resemble either an amoeba or an easel.
The curtains were of a pattern not unlike that displayed below.
Not that my parents didn’t have their limits. There was no car port, no Eames chair, and certainly no Tiki bar.
Nonetheless, we were Atomic Ranch folk – although we were the branch of the family that lived in the Ozarks hills where the Fifties didn’t arrive until the mid-Sixties.
Contents
Atomic Ranch has how-to stories, iterations of the obligatory house restoration saga (i.e., we thought it would be fun, it went 300% over budget, took two years instead of two month, it nearly broke up our marriage, and we love the results), and an occasional enraged editorial about Midcentury Modern gettin’ no respect, but mostly Atomic Ranch is a showcase for pictures of ranch houses, their furnishings, and their associated cultural artifacts.
An article in the most recent issue, for example, displays a batch of the first pocket-sized transistor radios.
Although DrHGuy’s five transistor rust colored Silvertone is not among those pictured, the ones shown evoke that plastic-encasede miracle that linked a twelve year old kid in rural southwestern Missouri with pre-Beatles Rock and Roll as practiced by AM stations in Chicago, Kansas City, Little Rock, and a couple of towns in Texas, the call letters of which have long since been forgotten. What hasn’t been forgotten are the music, the DJs, and the exotic and erotic excitement of the thing.
That kind of iconic content makes scanning Atomic Ranch an endearing memory-fest for those, like DrHGuy, of a certain age as well as an entrée to a visual feast of homes and furnishings that were integral parts of this nation’s most optimistic era – and the most fun you can have in an Eames chair with your clothes on.
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