The Cessna 172 advert from 1957 here is pretty amazing, but is typical of the era.
However, Cessna did the same with the very recent Cessna (Columbia) 400 adverts. And much of the SR22 campaign was along the lines of it being like a luxury car.
Obviously we all know that GA travel is not like that – in places with any “real” wx.
I guess there are two ways of looking at this. One is to have a laugh. The other is to feel that somebody is getting short-changed, by paying 10k for the PPL and even then the full significance of the wx factor may not be obvious.
You get this in business jets too but it doesn’t matter there because the pilots are hired pros 99% of the time so you can go way overboard with the models 
In the given context, it might not be as disingenuous as it seems now (as applied to a Columbia/SR22).
A Cessna 172 is pretty easy to fly, and if you lived in Wichita in 1957 you were probably a practical and hardy type of person who was a problem solver. If you gave a 172 to a farmer in the mid-west, I am pretty sure they could figure out how to fly it from their own field, and certainly they could fix it (‘the rules’ notwithstanding).
This is of course different than modern, rule following culture… and of course, it does not apply to the concept of ‘dispatch rate’ and fast IFR tourers crossing weather systems. But in 1957 would a purchaser of a 172 have been doing that? Or would they have been following the highway on a nice summer day in Kansas to the next town. Seems easy enough…
Ha ha. Expected that he would also be smoking at the same time. 
The only references I can find for Mr Bauman’s company are from Texas, and his product was a cement additive. So I imagine him flying around Texas in his nice, simple 172, visiting contractors and building sites. Sounds like a nice way to make a living, with a little extra money one year from Cessna. You could do it just the same today, landing anywhere along the way if the weather dictates, radio calls often optional. Flying in Texas is not anything like flying in Europe.
Later on he was bought out and successfully sued his new employer, so apparently he survived his life in selling cement additives
Can’t see why you shouldn’t be able to do this today. Take California (by itself the sixth-largest economy in the world) and say you have clients all over the – vast – state, you can easily do exactly what Mr. Bauman is seen doing here. In fact, there are plenty of people doing it. I know of one law firm that had a 182 just to ferry lawyers around the greater L.A. area!
What I thought so funny: this chap wears a HAT! Where does his headset go? Ok, no headsets in 1957, only a creaking cockpit speaker and a handheld microphone. If any radio at all of course. Semiconductors were a very new technology then. And yes, in 1957 everybody wore a hat. Still, I can’t imagine myself arriving at the field wearing a hat, far less keep it on for take-off – people think me queer enough already as things are now!
I think they should market aircraft this way today! In fact, if I owned an airplane manufacturer, I would market my planes right by the mile long lines outside of the TSA, customs and check-in desks and say things like:
“Tired of the endless lines? If you owned your own Cessna/Whatever, you’d already be there by now”.
I have a feeling that if airplanes were still marketed like that today as opposed to as toys for the rich upper classes, we’d have a lot less problems with the envy brigade.
I reckon however that one bit about it being like a good car might have been connected to the fact that prices were much lower than too.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
I reckon however that one bit about it being like a good car might have been connected to the fact that prices were much lower than too.
That’s unfortunately correct. The price (just under $ 9000) given in the ad equals about $ 76.000.- today. Cessna aren’t going to let you take a new 172 away for that money….. :-((
I am not convinced that dropping a C172 from 300k (?) to 76k would boost their sales very much. I think GA activity is limited by the population of potential customers, which is itself limited by social factors (much discussed previously).
