Thus it was the perfect time for the promotional ad shown above for Oakwood Shopping Center announcing that “The World’s First Space Ship” had landed there that morning. The ad ran in the Journal on February 19, 1960.
Whoever designed the ad had a great sense of humor. The copy notes that the space ship had been to Mars – and then in tiny print it points out that it was Mars, Pennsylvania.
And about that space ship. What was the story behind it?
I suspect that it was the same space ship shown in the Columbus Dispatch item below from May 21, 1967. That one was at Northland Shopping Center in Columbus and was also 70 feet long. The photo caption points out the spacecraft “is really the fuselage of a pre-World War II C-46.”
And here’s a photo of a C-46. It’s not hard to imagine it being modified to look like a rocket.
Anyway, it was a very creative promotion and probably a lot of fun for the kiddies, since the country was space-happy at that time.
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Did you see Oakie the Squirrel in the Oakwood Shopping Center ad? For a few years, he appeared quite regularly in ads for the shopping center. But he never had his likeness painted on a building like Pearl the Squirrel.
3 comments:
I wish I could have seen that! I would have been four, so I may not have been into spaceships yet.
Awesome! I wonder where that thing ended up? Great Northern Shopping Center had something similar in the late 1960s. It was inside and had maybe 10 seats. It simulated a roller coaster ride and boy, it sure felt like one. There was a screen across the front with the coordinated movie and a bunch of hydraulics underneath. Basically a flight simulator. But it was just a box, not a rocket ship.
Americana at its finest.....Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best type clean old fun.....Archie Bunker said it best...."Those were the days!"
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