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Lorain Telephone Company’s ad mascot
as seen in a December 1951 newspaper ad |
Remember back in November when I did a
post about the
Lorain Telephone Company’s advertising mascot – the round-headed, pointy-nosed character with a rotary phone for a body? He was featured in company newspaper ads throughout the 1950s, sometimes with arms and legs, sometimes not.
Well, it turns out that unless he’s a, uh,
phone-y, he had a much bigger and longer career than I thought.
The
Bell Telephone System had run magazine ads (in publications such as
Popular Science) dating back to at least the late 1930s featuring wonderful illustrations of a similar mascot. He’s delightfully rendered in these ads as a fully dimensional, realistically shadowed character.
By the end of the 1940s, he had been simplified, and had evolved into the one seen in the Lorain ads.
Here’s a gallery of the mascot’s appearances over the years. As you can see, he was used frequently convey important message to telephone customers during and after World War II.
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| 1939 |
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| 1941 |
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| 1942 |
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| 1943 |
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| 1943 |
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| 1943 |
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| 1945 |
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1945
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1946
(Note the similarity of the building in the ad and Lorain’s facility on Ninth Street.) |
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| 1946 |
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1946
1946 |
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| 1946 |
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| 1948 |
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| 1948 |
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| 1950 |
As noted before, he appeared in Lorain Telephone newspaper ads during the 1950s.
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| 1951 |
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| 1952 |
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| 1956 |
In one of his last appearances locally, the phone mascot had been modernized slightly. The ad below ran in the November 1962 and 1967 Lorain Telephone Company directories.
After this appearance, apparently “time” was up for this longtime mascot who served the Bell System for just about thirty years.
Interesting, especially the WWII ads relating to telephone usage. It's a bit of a surprise to me that during the war the public and the government were apparently competing for the same telephone lines! Perhaps the demise of the telephone mascot in the 1960s was related to the advent of touch-tone telephones, which made the dial style mascot look dated.
ReplyDeleteWhen I moved to Toledo in June of 1965, They had just started installing touch-tone phones in the city, and my apartment was one of the early installs. Pretty cool at the time. I believe that touch-tone phones began to be installed in Lorain County in late 1965.