One popular New Year’s resolution is to get organized, which is why retailers often feature lots of storage containers and organizational goods in January ads. It always works for me, and since I'm moving soon, my need this year for plastic tubs has increased beyond the usual January levels.

While packing one particular tub with torn-up magazines and old postcards, I noticed the following warning sticker inside the lid:

Not only did it strike me as sad that anyone needs to be warned against packing a baby inside an airtight plastic tub, but it triggered my natural instinct to assume that if something can go wrong, you better prepare for it, even if the possibility is remote. Why not, for example, poke a few holes in each container so the poor baby can breath?

When I grew up, thanks to my mother being a school nurse, every sharp object, hard surface, body of water, and invisible germ was a potential death threat that needed careful planning to avoid. On Saturdays my friend and I walked to Woolworths, and on the way we passed a State Farm Insurance office with photos in the window of horrific car accidents and other disasters that might strike anyone at any time. In those days lots of the accidents seemed to involve cars getting hit by trains, and busses falling into ravines.

Fearful thinking is a godsend to the insurance industry and others, as they market services and products to those who expect the worst. Statistically the odds of being hit by a speeding train, having our hands chopped off in a lawnmower accident, or getting electrocuted because some careless person put a penny in the fuse box are very low. But we can’t completely ignore the potential because, like winning the lottery, those things do happen to someone.

So my favorite fear ads show the consequences of poor planning. The orphan child, the widowed wife unable to provide for herself, the charred remains of an uninsured home. Here are a few examples from (in order) 1941, 1960, 1952, and 1938.

These show-the-worst ads may have been a little too negative, even for insurance companies, so many instead portrayed a potential disaster shortly before it happened, or even better, that was somehow avoided just in the nick of time. Here, from 1947, are two of my favorites, followed by a terrific almost-disaster ad for Eveready batteries in 1946. Seems the poor mother came just this close to giving her baby poison instead of cough syrup. (We can all understand how easy that would be, since storing cough medicine next to poison in the medicine cabinet is such a sensible thing to do. Like storing your baby in an air-tight plastic tub.)

Many ads play off the fears of unexpected injury or ill health: One day you go in for the usual checkup and next thing you know you have a catastrophic deadly disease that will break your family. At least in those days the doctors often made house calls so they could break the bad news to you at home.

Go to page 2 for more valuable insurance-sponsored life lessons, including "Don't leave your gun under your pillow," "Don't handle bull without stick," and "Don't smoke while playing Santa Claus." Thank goodness someone told me!