Category: Products

The Model A Ford

OK, if you want to get picky, the first Ford to be called a "Model A" was sold in 1903, but that car was not successful, and Ford sold less than 2,000 of those cars. The first successful car ever sold by Henry Ford was the Model T. When it went out of production in 1927, it was replaced by the car we all think of as the Model A Ford. Ford made 4,849,340 of these Model A cars, and sold them for as little as $385 brand new. And yes, they are all younger than Roscoe Bartlett.

Rice Krispies

Little Roscoe Bartlett was just a year old when Kellogg's introduced a new cereal it called Rice Krispies. The three elves, Snap!, Crackle! and Pop! began marketing the cereal in 1933 as a way of making the cereal more appealing to children. The relatively unknown Mildred Day, however, probably did more to popularize Rice Krispies among children than the three elves ever did. Sometime in the 30's, Day, a Kellogg's employee, was preparing for a bake sale benefiting the Camp Fire Girls when she first combined some Rice Krispies with margarine and melted marshmallows to create Rice Krispie Treats.

Toyota Motor Corporation

The Toyota Motor Corporation was founded when Roscoe Bartlett was ten years old by Kiichiro Toyoda, a spinoff of the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, which was itself only founded in 1926, the same year Roscoe was born. The fledgling car company bought a Chrysler Airflow (seen here in color), shipped it to Japan, and took it apart. Toyota's first car was the Model AA (seen here in black and white), and it looked exactly like the Chrysler. So much for Japanese creativity. Toyota sold 1,404 Model AA cars.

Roscoe likes to point out that he was the first person in Maryland to buy a Toyota Prius. Sounds pretty green, right? But while his wife is driving around Frederick in the Prius, Roscoe is seen in a gas-guzzling Cadillac being driven by his Chief of Staff Bud Otis. Oops.

The Singing Telegram

Yes, telegrams are older than Roscoe Bartlett, but singing telegrams, now that's a different story. The singing telegram had its origins in 1933 when a fan sent singing star Rudy Vallee a birthday telegram. Western Union's public relations director, one George Oslin, decided he was on to something. Until then, telegrams were associated with death notices, and he wanted something more upbeat. So, he asked an operator named Lucy Lipps, seriously, Lucy Lipps, to sing a message over the telephone, and the singing telegram was born. Now, Western Union stopped delivering singing telegrams 34 years ago, but you can still find small businesses that will deliver a singing telegram, often in person by someone dressed up in a weird costume.

The T-Shirt

The T-Shirt came about in 1932 when USC's head football coach, Howard Jones, asked the Jockey underwear company to come up with a shirt the team could wear that would absorb sweat on a hot Saturday afternoon. Jones was a remarkable player and coach who never lost a game in his three seasons playing for Yale, and coached six more undefeated teams in his career. One of his players at Southern Cal was John Wayne. The shirt became standard issue for American soldiers in World War II. The earliest report of a political T-shirt carrying a slogan was sixty years ago when the Presidential campaign of Republican Thomas Dewey produced a shirt saying "Dew It for Dewey".