This sort of recycling was, in fact, pretty common. The prevailing conventional wisdom up to, oh, at least the '70s, was that comic book readership would completely turn over every 5 years or so.
It would have been considered highly unlikely that the same person would be reading both the 1954 and 1961 issues, so recycling a cover gag like this was pretty safe. (Parenthetically, I've never heard of a "Lover Boy" hairdo before, and am mildly surprise that *it* remained a current reference for 6 years....)
This happened a lot with the Superman books, too, with premises and scripts being reused fairly often. And in the "humor" titles, it was (and is to this day, I believe, at Archie) common to include liberal helpings of old reprinted material in with the "new" stuff. Perhaps (or perhaps not) with minor changes in an attempt to reflect more current slang/fashion.
I noticed a lot of this when acquiring old Marvel "Millie" books for repurposing as
It's Cookie! I have a couple books about 5 years apart that have virutally identical interiors. They did a lot of "cover gag recycling" too - for instance, the cover gag I repurposed for
It's Cookie! here was drawn twice, for different Marvel covers.
http://www.tgcomics.com/modified/modcomics/itscook ie02.php
