More Vintage St. Patrick's Day Ads

St. Patrick's Day is one of those holidays – not unlike Cinco de Mayo or Fat Tuesday (with its obligatory eating of paczkis whether you're Catholic or not) – that grew over the years, getting bigger and bigger in the public consciousness that it became easy to get swept up in the celebration.

But it wasn't always like that. 

Looking at vintage Lorain Journals, I came to the conclusion that in our area, St. Patrick's Day was often only acknowledged by holding a dance. Here's an ad from the Lorain Journal of March 16, 1944.

Morrie Alexander and his 13 piece orchestra provided the dance music. (We met Mr. Alexander before, back on this post.)

Here's another ad from a few years later, running in the paper on March 17, 1951.

Very slowly locally in the 1950s, St. Patrick's Day began to be used as a theme for sales, and perhaps promote St. Patrick's Day as a big event. Here's an ad for the well-known Faroh's Candies that ran in the Journal on March 11, 1955.

As the 1950s progressed, companies such as the Harry Volk Corporation began to make available various collections of illustrations and photographs that could be used for advertising purposes by whoever purchased it. These collections were issued on a regular basis with themes related to holidays and the time of year. Thus it became very easy to assemble an ad with a theme of St. Patrick's Day. However, some of the pieces of artwork were memorably odd, like the art in this ad for Crystal Clear Dry Cleaners that ran in the newspaper on March 14, 1958.

That smirking, bowler-hat-wearing guy just doesn't look very Irish to me. Maybe a clay pipe would have helped. And Begora, he turned up again in a weird ad (Operation "17"?) the following year, for Lorain's Downtown stores.

Going into the 1960s, you can see that the Journal's art department was fully onboard with clip art. This ad from March 16, 1964 uses a huge piece of banner art. Unfortunately, the art had to be cut back to fit – leaving the thumbs of the Irishman hanging out in space by the letters.

Finally, here's the equivalent Downtown Lorain ad with a St. Patrick's Day theme from two years later. Once again, a leprechaun presides over the proceedings. 

Hey, that leprechaun kind of looks like Barney Phillips, the actor! I wonder if he has an extra eye under that green, buckled hat?