I’ve never seen my career ambitions ending with a marriage or, as some of my friends call it, a “MRS degree.” In this economy, it almost seems impractical to give up working just because you’ve said “I do.” However, when I scanned a book, Life with Teena, published by Seventeen Magazine in 1945, I found that 66% of the over 1,000 girls surveyed did not believe they would work after they got married. That led me to a whole host of other questions about how women got to where they are today – with female CEOs and female secretaries of state. Were teenage girls in 1945 really happy to be a housewife and not have a career outside of the house? Was it their decision?

Life with Teena answered these questions in the way only a statistical study of thirteen to eighteen year old girls can – with facts. Yes, these teenage girls said overwhelmingly that they did not want to work after they got married, but they also said that they worked for their spending money (“pin money” the book called it) and their college tuition. College options, however, were still limited for women across the country and so the survey presents girls’ dreams more than the actual reality.

Life with Teena was the result of a market survey of white, middle-class teenage girls and what they bought in 1945. The booklet that turned the raw data into the charming character of Teena was used to persuade retailers, manufacturers, and advertisers to pay more attention to the spending power of teen girls.

Jobs for these girls were similar to those teenage girls have today; the number one job for girls Teena’s age was to babysit (53%) with another 25% clerking or selling goods. These jobs, Life with Teena shows, were for their own enjoyment money – 90% said they kept all of their income for their own uses, which varied from movies to novelties to saving. The fictional character Teena was a creation of what Ellis’ saw Seventeen’s readership as: white, middle-class with a white-collar father and a mother that stayed at home.

Life with Teena is part of a larger collection at the Archives Center of the National Museum of American History named after the first marketing director of Seventeen Magazine, Estelle Ellis. Seventeen Magazine hired Ellis four years after she had graduated from college to promote the teenage girl, an unexplored market up until then. This was what prompted her to undergo the study of teenage girls across the country (naturally though, only white-middle class girls). What the study and Teena showed was that teenage girls did spend money and, just as importantly, that they were a market unto themselves. Also in the Ellis Collection are the other magazines Ellis worked at, like Charm, Vogue and Glamour, in addition to her work at Kimberly-Clark on their feminine hygiene and family-planning materials. In all, the Ellis collection spans from 1942 to 2004 with over sixty-two boxes of materials.

After her success at Seventeen, Ellis helped to launch a new magazine, Charm, aimed at working women. This survey of working women’s shopping habits shows a diverse range of women who worked outside the home and had spending power.

Last spring, I was given the most unique assignment in my graduate school education:  visit the Hasbro board game factory in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts.  The factory, a maker of many beloved games, is a place of colorful aspiration. Gleaming red tiny houses, ready to mark your real estate, tumble out of sorting machines into plastic bags. Rolls of pink, green, blue and golden yellow paper wait to be cut into Monopoly money that will make your fortune. Bright glossy cards that will determine your career are methodically shaped by die-cutters. Game of Life boards are stacked up as high as my chest, a multi-color bonanza blazing a pathway of life’s possibilities. Yet amongst the color and glee, there is an unsettling feeling. It’s all too quiet in this factory– not a quiet due to low-noise machines, but a quiet that suggests this factory is not as busy as it once was, or even now, should be.

Brown graduate students pose with historic versions of The Game of Life at the Hasbro Archives. From left: Emily Bryant (author), Emily McCartan, and Anna Wada.

The past three years have marked a significant downward trend in the sales of board games. At Hasbro, the country’s biggest board game manufacturer, volume has declined considerably and the number of factory employees has decreased. The culprit (perhaps not hard to guess) is digital games, as people forgo folding cardboard games for foxy game apps on their phones, computers, and gaming systems. $15.9 billion of revenue in digital game software and content was generated in 2010, which includes downloads of full video games as well as social games. Compare this to the $1.17 billion in revenue for Hasbro’s Games & Puzzles category in 2011– a ten percent drop from their sales the year before. Yet board game companies adapt, and Hasbro is trying to stay relevant.  Hollywood is one way; did you see the movie Battleship?  Monopoly the movie is in script-writing phase.  Another way embraces the digital, and many board games now have “zAPPed” editions, an “app-enhanced” game that integrates the popularity of digital apps with traditional board game play.  Hasbro also has a new strategic partnership with Zynga, the maker of popular digital social games like Farmville and Words with Friends, and wants to create co-branded merchandise.

Hasbro’s new, “zAPPed” editions of Life and Monopoly integrate with Apple iOS devices like the iPad. Photo courtesy of Business Wire.

Board games and video games have a shared history. The Magnavox Odyssey Video Game Unit (1972), one of the first home video game systems, came pre-packaged with physical accessories such as dice, decks of cards, play money, and poker chips.

Still, the experience of a digital game is inherently at odds with one of a traditional board game. When given a choice, would you play an Angry Birds board game over the digital one? Board games require an amount of time set aside to play, and at least two people. They also take up physical space, and require that those two people be in the same space to play. On your phone or tablet however, the game is instantly accessible. It is portable and played independently, for as little or as long as you’d like. When you tire of it, there’s another multitude of games you can immediately switch to. For a modern age, the decision of board game or digital game seems like a no-brainer.

Before electronic devices, Americans found ways to play board games on the move. In this 1956 photo, two Bracero workers sit outside and play checkers at a camp in California.

But that’s what board game companies want to change. They want to remind us of the benefits of playing a bona-fide board game. It’s social interaction they are selling, not the plastic bits and pieces. Sprawled out on the rug or seated intently around a table, playing board games is where bonds are formed and a mutual experience is created. Hasbro in particular adheres to this message, and their website includes a section called “Host your Own Family Game Night,” where visitors can find game recommendations, tournament brackets, tips and recipes. “Laughter, family bonding, learning and life skills,” are gained from family gaming, the website states. In a project where we’ve been asked to look at board games that teach us about business, perhaps the game’s content is not the sole instructor. The critical learning comes from the interactions with those you are playing with.

Sources

Braden, Donna. “The Family that Plays Together Stays Together: Family Pastimes and Indoor Amusements, 1890-1930.” In American Home Life, 1880-1930. Foy, Jessica and Thomas Schlereth, ed. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992.

Digital game sales statistics from marketing research company The NPD Group and The Entertainment Software Association
http://www.theesa.com/facts/salesandgenre.asp

Hasbro Games and Puzzle sales statistics from Hasbro Corporate Information Financial Press Releases: http://investor.hasbro.com/releases.cfm?ReleasesType=Quarterly+Financials&Year=

Family Game Night
http://www.hasbro.com/games/en_US/familygamenight/

zAPPEd editions
http://investor.hasbro.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=647883

Hollywood
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/ridley-scotts-monopoly-movie-hires-229944

Partnership with Zynga
http://investor.hasbro.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=647693

It was the summer of 2008 and my partner Sissy Estes and I were working on new ideas for our client, GEICO. Very early into it we felt the most motivating factor in getting someone to switch his or her car insurance was cold hard cash. We thought if we could bring to life the savings incentive…we might be on to something. But how do we make that interesting?

We came up with Kash – the stack of money with the googly eyes. He was a stack of $5 bills ($500 being the average amount of savings) that appeared, usually out of nowhere, and stared at you, coaxing you to call GEICO.

As we prepared our presentation for GEICO, Sissy and I started to talk about other details of the campaign. Should he talk? No. Too cheesy. Should he sing? Nah. But what about music? The right song that played when he appeared could be great and make the idea a bit more dynamic. We decided to recommend a modern remake of Cameo’s “Somebody’s Watching me.”

We presented several campaigns, but Kash was the winner. Ted Ward, who runs the advertising department at GEICO, warmed up to the idea quickly and saw the simplicity as a success.

Here’s a script from that meeting.

An early prototype of Kash.

We had to get the character just right. So we hired Stan Winston, one of the finest model makers in the world to explore options for Kash and landed on the character you know today.

The final design for GEICO’s Kash.

As we entered into production that fall, the economy took a turn for the worse. Now, I wish we could say we saw it coming and that’s why we created this icon. And maybe Ted did, but I can tell you I sure didn’t. When the campaign broke, Kash had hit the sweet spot of simplicity and strategy in an uncertain economy. It seemed that money was on everyone’s mind, and Kash served as the perfect reminder for savings.

The music ended up being a major component of the work. We hired Mysto and Pizzi, through Agent Jackon – two up and coming producers, from Queens, New York. Their video for the track, featuring Kash has over 4.5 million views:

And the track is still offered free on Geico.com.

We’re also proud of how Kash became part of modern culture. People dressed up as Kash for Halloween and shaped their birthday cakes in his likeness.

A collection of Kash “culture”: (from top left) a Halloween costume, a boy scout’s derby car, a politician’s laptop, a cake, and a school campaign.

Kash appeared in skits on David Letterman, The Colbert Report and The Tonight Show and was even mentioned in an episode of 30 Rock along with all the stars of GEICO’s advertising.

GEICO continues to create advertising that people enjoy and want to be part of. Much of their latest work can be seen here.

Labor Day, in its origins a nineteenth-century celebration of the dignity of work, swiftly evolved into today’s pleasant pause at the end of summer before the coming of new, chillier seasons and life indoors. Arguably a response (in the United States, Canada, and an assortment of other countries) to the widespread socialistic celebration of Mayday, which coincides with the age-old rituals of spring, Labor Day sets off the New World, or at least North America, from the traditions of the Old.

Conflicting accounts trace the first American Labor Day to the inspiration of a local New Haven, Connecticut machinist, Matthew Maguire, or to that of the influential leader of the Carpenters’ union, Peter McGuire. In both accounts, 1882 became the key moment when the American Federation of Labor (AFL), a movement of craft unions and local central labor federations, solidified their young and fragile institutions. Largely German and Irish in most places, these unions and federations had traditions of summer holidays, and the institutional support to make the day’s events successful combinations of speech-making, beer drinking, and family fun.

In the era of bitter and often violent conflict between labor and capital, Republican and Democratic parties competed, especially at the local level, for workingmen’s votes. These votes had been especially crucial for Democrats, who claimed the loyalty of the lower classes since at least the presidency of Andrew Jackson, a loyalty later reaffirmed by the connections of craft unions with local political decisions on urban construction projects of all kinds. However, waves of strikes from the early 1880s to the middle 1890s found Democratic officials, at the behest of manufacturers and merchants, calling out the police against strikers, thus threatening political loyalties. The Pullman Strike of 1894, where the army was used for the first time against striking workers (including the highly organized railroad engineers), seemed to push the problem to the breaking point.

The strike, led by future Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, was crushed, Debs himself imprisoned. Within days after the strike’s end, Democratic president Grover Cleveland rushed a bill recognizing Labor Day through Congress. Not a single elected official in Congress voted against this measure – a fitting symbol for the claim, accurate or not, that American society was unique for its social compact between rich, poor, and middle classes. President Cleveland himself chose the September date in order to set the American holiday off from European Mayday. An AFL resolution of 1909 declared the first Sunday to be the proper Labor Day, perhaps because Sunday holidays had long been popular for workers enjoying beer in picnic areas outside cities where Sunday sales were banned. Eventually, all states and the District of Columbia affirmed the holiday status for their residents. Although Labor Day was originally celebrated on Sunday, in 1968 Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. The act moved several federal holidays, including Labor Day, to Mondays.

Like other labor and political cartoonists, Mike Konopacki draws to express the ideas of the movement. He writes that he created this cartoon to make the point that: “Over the last 30 years, Labor Day has lost its original meaning. It no longer celebrates the labor movement that created it. This cartoon intends to remind the viewer of Labor Day’s union roots. It also reminds us of the purpose of the labor movement in a capitalist society; protection of our Constitutional and democratic rights. The constitution does not guarantee the Bill of Rights in the workplace. Only a labor contract protects freedom of speech and press, the right of peaceable assembly, the right to petition for the redress of grievances, equal justice under law and due process. Unfortunately, with a return to corporate domination of government, much like the nineteenth century era of the Robber Barons, our democracy and workplace rights are in serious jeopardy.” Cartoon by Mike Konopacki

In the 1984 pilot episode of The Cosby Show, Bill Cosby’s Cliff Huxtable lectures his son Theo about his poor grades. Theo blithely tells him that it doesn’t matter, because he’s not going to college. He’s going to “get a job like regular people – work at a gas station, drive a bus, something like that.” Cliff spies a teachable moment in a Monopoly game open on Theo’s desk: taking a handful of paper money from the box, he gives Theo a $1200 monthly salary, and then starts deducting expenses for taxes, rent, clothes, and food, until Theo has nothing left. Theo continues to protest that “maybe I was born to be a regular person and have a regular life,” unlike his doctor-and-lawyer parents. Cliff immediately shuts down this idea as “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” He and Theo eventually hug it out as Theo agrees to try his best.

In games like District Messenger Boy, first published by McLoughlin Bros. in 1886, players raced one another to rise from a lowly messenger boy to become a banker or company president, trying to avoid setback spaces like “laziness” or “embezzlement” and land on “honesty” or “intelligence” instead. Before telephones and computers, messenger boys were the essential communication link between businessmen in the same city. A lucky few found connections and opportunities to move up in the business world, inspiring rags-to-riches stories of self-made success.

It hardly seems coincidental to me that, in the first episode of a ground-breaking show about an affluent, professional African-American family, the father uses a Monopoly game to teach his son about upholding the promise and responsibilities of the opportunities he’s been given in life. In researching the history of American business board games, I’ve been most intrigued by how the visions they portray resonate across the many dimensions of our society. Many of these games are at heart “American Dream” stories, expressing the same values that Cliff Huxtable expects his son to live by. 1886’s District Messenger Boy is about pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. The goal of 1955’s Careers is to find work that maximizes your wealth, fame, and happiness; in the Game of Life, released in 1960, you want a good salary so you can retire to Millionaire Acres. Dozens of games, from Grocery Store in the 1880s to Payday in 1970, are about budgeting your funds to buy the trappings of a comfortable life (“Figure $200” for clothes and shoes, Theo tells Cliff, handing him Monopoly bills, “I want to look good”). Even Monopoly follows this script, as players rise from a meager $1500 in starting capital to become the tycoon of a real estate emprire.

Shopping games have long been popular with Americans: they combine lessons about personal budgeting with fantasies of having plenty of money to buy things. As Americans’ consumer habits have changed over time, shopping games have stayed up-to-the-minute. Park and Shop, created by Parker Bros in 1955, involves finding a strategically-located parking spot at a shopping mall, during the era when for the first time most middle-class American families had cars and malls were emerging as a one-stop shopping destination.

The key expectation of the American Dream is that people can advance their fortunes by being hardworking, skillful, and lucky. Board games over the last hundred and fifty years have reinforced this notion so strongly that, as The Cosby Show demonstrates, they have become a shorthand for talking about success. On the flip side, however, these games can also illustrate how people have historically been left out of this “mainstream” vision. The games we studied in this project were, until the late 20th century, marketed almost exclusively to white, middle-class Americans, and the values, social rules, and sense of possibility they share reflect that population. While it’s hard to know exactly who actually played these games at any given period of history, circumstantial clues that suggest to me that business board games, especially in their early boom years between 1880 and 1940, often shut out many non-white and non-middle class people. Most transparently, the illustrations on board games before the 1970s show almost exclusively white people, and when people of color do appear it is as offensive caricatures and even targets of violence. But there were also more implicit systemic barriers: a color-lithographed board game cost more than a generic deck of cards or set of dominoes. Learning to play Monopoly means digesting a long rule booklet, while checkers takes skill and strategy but doesn’t require reading. And at its most basic level, the rules themselves, and their narratives of success achieved through a combination of strategy and luck, could ring hollow for Americans constrained by social prejudice and economic disadvantage.

Careers, like the Game of Life, features a variety of professions from which players can choose, trying to become the most “successful” by the end of the game (in Careers, players define their own success formula as a combination of wealth, fame, and happiness). When it was first published by Parker Bros. in 1955, Careers let players imagine themselves in new and glamorous professions like uranium prospecting, space exploration, and engineering, as well as politics and Hollywood. Later versions were updated with new kinds of jobs (ecology, sports, teaching) that matched changing ideals of a fabulously successful or virtuous career.

The injustices that limit people’s access to opportunity and success had by no means evaporated when the Huxtables appeared on American televisions in 1984, and they are certainly still with us today. I hear, in Theo’s comment about “regular people,” a clear critique of a society where black physicians and attorneys were still exceptional rather than “regular”. But what struck me most powerfully about the Monopoly scene was the casual way in which a successful African-American man used the classic board game of American business strategy to make a profound point about how success and opportunity need not, ultimately, be limited by race or class. Theo’s lesson, and ours, is that expanding access to the American Dream is an ongoing project that relies on luck, yes – but also on hard work and the belief that it can be in your grasp.

How do you become successful as a toy inventor? Reuben Klamer, who developed the 1960 Game of Life, suggests inspiration, perseverance, serendipity, and a good sense of humor. Serendipity refers to his chance encounter with the “Checkered Game of Life” in the archives of the Milton Bradley Company, one day after he was tasked to create a new game for the company’s centennial celebration. While he did not open the dusty contents of the box, he was “electrified – by the word ‘life.’ It occurred to me that the word ‘life’ would be a valuable name for a new game concept.” Thus was the Game of Life invented.

This was not the first time that someone had developed a game about life, however. As Jill Lepore points out in her New Yorker article, the “New Game of Human Life” was printed in England by the 1720s, a game based on the Christian notion that “life is a voyage in which travellers are buffeted between vice and virtue.” Milton Bradley then published The Checkered Game of Life in 1860. An instructional game based on Puritan ethics, the winners were players who reached a Happy Old Age through leading a virtuous life.

Checkered Game of Life Image © The Strong Museum.

Another publisher, Selchow & Righter, published a game titled “Stepping Stones: The Game of Life” in 1920. The rulebook points out, “Where is there a Real American Boy who does not wish to do big things – to make a success of his life – when he grows up so that his Mother and Father will be proud of him?” For this Game of Life, the goal was to climb the corporate ladder and earn a place in the President’s Office.

“Stepping Stones: The Game of Life.” Image courtesy of the Hasbro Archives.

The Checkered Game of Life was eventually removed from the market, its Puritan morals perhaps too “preachy” and outdated for a society centered on capitalistic values. Still, its title inspired Reuben Klamer to come up with the revamped 1960s version of the Game of Life. Its goal was closer to that of Monopoly: to bankrupt other players and emerge as a millionaire tycoon. Although tactical decisions and the revenge feature determine smaller successes and failures along the way, everything ultimately depends on luck with the spinner, the Wheel of Fate.

“The 1960 Game of Life.” Image © The Strong Museum.

At a time when television was an affordable and popular source of entertainment in the U.S., Klamer knew the game had to be visually appealing in television advertisements. Artist Bill Markham, who worked under Reuben Klamer at the time, helped create a prototype based on Klamer’s ideas for a three-dimensional, circuitous game track with a spinner. This became the first three-dimensional board game made in plastic, and the two filed a patent for it in 1960.

Klamer, with his background in engineering and marketing, further advised the company on working with plastic and reducing production costs, and came up with a promotional plan featuring the popular TV personality Art Linkletter. This helped pave the way for one of the first paid television commercials in the game industry (an early example from the 1960s is up on YouTube). Klamer still owns the rights to the Game of Life today, and must approve all revisions.

Today, there are 26 international language editions of Life produced in 59 different countries. The only localized version is the Japanese edition (Jinsei Ge-mu), which makes references to current events and customs unique to Japanese life, such as New Year’s celebrations, an imperial wedding, going on a hot-spring tour, holding a concert at the Tokyo Dome, even buying a nuclear bomb shelter on sale. The Takara Tomy Company, which distributes the game today, speculates that the original popularity of the game grew from its representation of the American Dream – in the 1960s, American life was idolized among the Japanese as symbolic of wealth and success.

Invention does not necessarily begin from a blank slate. Life has been re-invented many times, reshaped to fit cultural peculiarities and changing attitudes towards success. Drastic changes have been made to the Game of Life over the years, unlike Monopoly, whose iconography and overarching goal has remained consistent since 1935. Inventors may find inspiration from past games, innovate existing concepts, imagine new designs to help convey them, and devise new marketing strategies for the appropriate audience. As the playing field for the games business increasingly centers on digital games and the global marketplace, the next inventors of the Game of Life may be well on their way. What you need is to balance skill, strategy, and a good bit of luck.

Sources:

Andrews, Peter. “Games People Played.” American Heritage Vol 23-4, 1972

Couzin, Mary. “Reuben Klamer on Success, Careers and The Game of Life.” Global Toy  News. June 17, 2011.

Jensen, Jennifer. “Teaching Success Through Play: American Board And Table Games, 1840-1900.” Magazine Antiques, December 2001.

Klamer, Reuben. The Game of Life: An Inventor’s Chronicle. Hasbro/Milton Bradley Special Edition, 2010.

Lepore, Jill. “The Meaning of Life.” The New Yorker, 21 May 2007.
Walsh, Tim. Timeless Toys: Classic Toys And the Playmakers Who Created Them. Missouri: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2005.

Whitehill, Bruce. Games: American Boxed Games and their Makers 1822-1992. Pennsylvania: Wallace-Homestead Book Company, 1992.

“What’s Jinsei Game.” Takara Tomy.

The cartoons in question came to the museum in 1975, when Alfred Bloomingdale (grandson and heir to Lyman G Bloomingdale, co-founder of Bloomingdale’s department store) donated his collection of fifty-eight original cartoons to the National Numismatic Collection (NNC).  Between the 1950s and 1970s, these cartoons delighted a multitude of readers when reproduced in The New Yorker, Playboy, and syndicated newspapers around the country. In the 1960s, Bloomingdale was an entrepreneur for the newest form of currency, the credit card. He started the company “Dine and Sign” for convenience; one small piece of plastic eliminated the need for him and his friends to carry large sums of money while out on the town. Apparently there was a market for partiers because by 1967, “Dine and Sign” was acquired by Diner’s Club and eventually Bloomingdale became president and chairman of that company.

Although the names of these cartoonists are not the artists we recognize from history books, their characters and cartoon strips are so ingrained in popular culture that many of us will recognize their work. Among the more famous cartoonists in our collection are Mel Lazarus, recognized for his know-it-all students and their prim teacher in the cartoon, “Miss Peach,” Bil Keane and the whimsical antics of family life in “Family Circus,” Dic Browne and “Hi and Lois” (a spinoff from “Beetle Bailey”), George Lichty and his sometimes political strip “Grin and Bear it,” and Jack Cole and his painterly cartoons of busty ladies seen in “Playboy Magazine” (risqué for his day). People say they read Playboy for the articles, but really they read it for the cartoons.

Each artist found a unique form of expression with simple tools. In this “Grin and Bear It” cartoon by George Lichty, a character says “Foreigners draining away our gold is bad enough, Adele… but if they start gobbling up our credit cards we’re in real trouble!” Lichty’s ink and brush show expressive quick strokes. The lines of the plump women in their furs undulate with the motion of the brush while the stippled grey in the ground (cleverly produced with a dry brush over the texture of the paper) produced a grey tone from the black ink. The visual speed of the drawing emphasizes the skill and care used.

Speed of hand is also present in this drawing, created for the Wall Street Journal. “People are getting suspicious of cash. We’re gonna switch to credit cards.” The expressive element in this drawing does not come from the thick and thin line as before. In this cartoon the line is relatively even; it may have been done with a ruling pen. The visual charm in this drawing comes from patterns of lines: the grain in the wood, the checkers in the sports coat, the diamond in the waste paper basket, and of course the “faces” on the bills that read like money without offering a clue about the denomination.

In the next drawing, a customer proclaims that “In a democracy, a man has a right to ask for credit no matter how many times he’s been refused credit.” Notice the handwritten caption, the flamboyant washes, the forced perspective that gives the illusion that the bar to has great depth, and the scribble of lines coming together in a very painterly style. The artist used washes to define the business man, the bartender, the bar, and the bar stool.

When I look at these drawings, it is the sure hand of the artists that truly impresses me. The proficiency the artists show comes from constant practice.  The artists drew the same characters in different storylines over and over again; some created at least a cartoon a day for years in their work with syndicated newspapers.  The medium was black indelible ink and a brush or pen. Ink is an unforgiving medium; blobs, blotches, and drips cannot be erased, so the artists could not fix major problems (although they made some changes with a bottle of correction fluid). Since these cartoons were made for reproduction, the artists could cover minimal mistakes, and although we can see evidence of a problem in the original work it would not reproduce in the papers, journals, or magazine.Keep looking; the skilled artists who made these drawings grappled with changes in credit and debt in American social life with limited words, a spare pallet, and solid drawing skills. The cartoons illustrated prevalent American ideas, fears, excitement and disbelief pertaining to credit and its usage in the mid 20th century. The artists foresaw a “future” where average Americans no longer did their commerce with paper bills and coins and even the most mundane shopping of goods and services could be purchased with a slide of a plastic card.

An early self-portrait of inventor and businessman Robert Cornelius, taken in 1838. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Robert Cornelius struck a casual pose as he looked into the bright sunlight and took a picture of himself. In our digital age, self-portraits are literally taken a million times every day. But Robert Cornelius had to stare motionless for over five minutes when he took his own picture in October or November of 1838. It was possibly the first time anyone had ever done this. Cornelius soon opened one of the first photographic studios in the world and took portraits of wealthy customers and friends. Only a couple dozen or so of his pictures have survived, because Cornelius returned to his father’s lamp-making business after two years.

It was a time of great innovation in lighting. Whale oil was widely-used as fuel, but gaslights were starting to become popular and a recent invention in England called the “solar lamp” allowed cheap lard oil to be burned in fine lamps. In 1843, Cornelius applied for a U.S. patent on a version of a solar lamp. His application included two models to demonstrate his invention and he was granted a patent on April 6, 1843. At a time when whale oil was becoming more and more expensive, Cornelius lamps could burn not only refined lard oil, but also solid lard and even kitchen grease.

Dan Mattausch, author, with Robert Cornelius’s 1843 patent model for a solar lamp, part of the collections at the National Museum of American History.

Over the next two decades, Cornelius micro-managed the family business, Cornelius & Co. (later Cornelius & Baker) to become the largest lighting company in America. Cornelius solar lamps and gaslights were sold all over the world and were produced in two huge Philadelphia factories. At the same time, Cornelius continued inventing, receiving patents that included several for lighting gaslights with electric-sparks.

Details of Cornelius’ historic 1855 Kerosene lamp.

Commerce is dynamic and today’s sensation is always in danger of being tomorrow’s outdated buggy-whip. Cornelius must have known this, because on April 1, 1855, he risked much of his business on a new lamp that, if successful, would turn his lucrative solar lamps into relics. On this date Cornelius presented the first lamp designed to burn a brand new fuel recently named “Kerosene.” Kerosene was even cheaper than lard oil and more convenient to use. Four years later, when oil was discovered in Pennsylvania, Kerosene became the dominant lighting fuel almost overnight.

A portrait of Robert Cornelius as the retired “Grand Old Man” of American lighting.

Cornelius seemed to be perfectly positioned to take his company to new heights, but technical innovation is often unpredictable. An obscure Swiss-American immigrant named Johann Stuber invented an extremely cheap burner that could be used on existing lamps to burn Kerosene. The Cornelius lamps cost at least 14 times more and couldn’t compete. A few years later, Cornelius patented a similar cheap burner, but it was too late. Although Cornelius retired in the mid-1860s and lived many years as a wealthy man, his once dominant firm was rapidly overtaken by other companies, a dramatic example of the rise and fall of industries in an ever-changing marketplace.

Ten years ago GEICO wasn’t nearly the household name it is today. In fact, many consumers had a hard time even pronouncing GEICO — not exactly ideal for a challenger brand that needed all the brand awareness it could get.

In 1999, Ted Ward, who runs the advertising department at GEICO, and Ken Spera, who at the time was an art director at The Martin Agency, were talking over dinner on a business trip.

Ted, as he always does, stated the problem succinctly: “People can’t even pronounce our name! How can we expect them to call us for a rate quote?” Suddenly it was like an episode out of Mad Men. The creative guy takes out a pen, grabs a bar napkin, and starts manically sketching something. Here is what Ken drew:

An early sketch of the “Gecko” mascot, drawn on a napkin by Ted Ward. Image courtesy of GEICO Insurance Agency, Inc.

Gary the Gecko? Ted wasn’t crazy about the name “Gary.” But he was intrigued with the idea of a gecko because it sounded so much like GEICO. A visual/verbal mnemonic could go a long way in helping people recognize and remember the brand.

Then, as serendipity sometimes does, it unexpectedly adds momentum to a big idea. An actors’ strike in Hollywood was about to severely limit Ted’s casting options for an upcoming GEICO ad campaign. So, whom do you do cast when you can’t cast humans?

The first Gecko spot ran in the fall of 1999. In the TV ad, the Gecko is holding a press conference, and surprisingly, he is NOT a fan of GEICO.

Since 1999 the Gecko and GEICO have come a long way together. At this writing, GEICO is America’s third largest and fastest growing car insurance company. And the Gecko? He eventually joined the company and was named by Advertising Age as one of advertising’s most recognized and memorable icons.

Steve Bassett is the Group Creative Director at The Martin Agency

Marlon Gardley and his mother, Emma Gardley, pictured here holding a copy of his family posing at their dining room table for a 1963 Butter Krust bread advertisement.

Marlon Gardley remembers the photo shoot for Butter Krust Ad in 1963.

My older brothers Bubba and Carl kidded me incessantly for eating the slice of bread, which I was supposed to use as prop during the photo shoot while Ronnie (my other brother) dressed silently nearby in the room.  Their amusement began just minutes before in another part of the only home I ever knew for 20 years and six months.

One Sunday in 1963, my parents — who were as stern as they look in this photograph — warned us not to change out of our church clothes when we arrived home after morning worship. We attended New Mount Pleasant Baptist Church on the east side of San Antonio when Norman W. Bacon was its pastor. It was the same year of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. I remember watching the funeral procession on Mr. and Mrs. Hooks’ (the neighbors next door) television with my sister Cheryl and my mother, who wept as she looked on. (Later, when I was a tad older, I often ran errands to the local grocery store for Mrs. Hooks — with my mother’s permission of course.)

In 1963 my daddy, brothers and I had gotten our heads neatly cut and trimmed for just 50 cents each at Shaw’s Barber College, a place where young colored men went to learn the barber trade. The night before we had all endured a series of yelps, shrieks, and screams from my sister Cheryl as my mama pressed and styled her hair for church the next day. My sister protested every stroke of the hot comb while Mama tried to calm her down so she didn’t burn her.  At the time, actual burns and the fear of them of were the same to Cheryl. I would have to agree with her — the comb looked like a hot poker. I was always glad when it was over. I really felt bad for Cheryl. Just for that reason alone I was glad I was not a girl; a trip to the barbershop was torturous enough for a 4-year old boy.

As we drove up to our house after church, two white men waited at 235 Maryland Street, the address of our quaint two-bedroom house in which the seven of us lived. The house had been remodeled over the years since 1963, a nip here, a  tuck there.  Holding what I later learned was camera equipment, Daddy invited the men inside. After a brief greeting one of the men arranged us around the dining room table on which the loaf of Butter Krust bread lay.  He handed Cheryl and me a slice while the other man continued to position the camera equipment. I hadn’t a clue what I was supposed to do with that bread. So I started eating.  With a click and a flash, as they say, “the rest was history.” The photographer captured this image. After the photo shoot, my brothers commenced their teasing as we changed out of our church clothes (me still nursing  what remained of the slice).

Even though I didn’t know what the whole episode was about, I remember vividly taking this photo. A trip to the local store with Mama the next day to purchase a copy of the _San Antonio Register_ in which it appeared and reminiscing over the event each time I viewed the photo in subsequent years burned this image into my brain.

Not many years after it was taken this photograph was lost. It has been my interest to find it since about 1979, but numerous searches through the family photo archives were fruitless.  Now, after just under an hour of research on the internet, I located the photograph which has been archived at the Institute of Texan Cultures.  The experience of viewing it again, 49 years after the photographer captured the image, was surreal.

In this archival copy of the original Butter Krust photograph, Marlon can be seen seated next to his mother, biting into a slice of bread.

The Butter Krust ad with Marlon’s family, as it originally appeared in the San Antonio Register on February 14th, 1964.

Do you remember Butter Krust’s advertising? Did you participate in their campaigns or take a factory tour? Or did your home town have similar local advertising? Let us know and share your memories with us!