Bill Thomas Service – Davy Crockett Promotion

During the recent holidays, there was a "Happy Honda Days" TV commercial airing that featured a mischievous little boy named Pete (at left).

In the commercial, Pete's wearing a Davy Crockett cap in the opening scene. I guess the commercial's art director was hoping to tap into some nostalgic goodwill for 1950s Dennis the Menace types.

Anyway, the commercial reminded me that I had this June 1955 ad for Bill Thomas Service with a Davy Crockett promotional tie-in. (By that time, Walt Disney had featured Davy Crockett in a multi-part miniseries on his Disneyland TV series, and Crockettmania was already sweeping the nation.)

Here's the ad (below), which ran in the Lorain Journal. The service station, which was located at the corner of East Erie Avenue and Iowa Avenue, was celebrating the anniversary of its first year in business. It offered a set of tumblers featuring the beloved coonskin-cap-wearing frontiersman for only 18 cents with the purchase of 8 gallons of gas.

Note the keylining error: DAVY TUMBLERS! CROCKETT. I can understand how it happened, because I started out as a paste-up artist – and those types of mistakes were easy to make when you have a bunch of little pieces of type to glue down on an artboard.

In case you're interested, here's one of the tumblers (below) featured in the ad. It was recently on Ebay.

I'll bet Walt Disney was upset that he didn't get a share of all of the generic Davy Crockett merchandise being produced to cash in on his TV series!