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Bill  On The Road

 by: Bill Oetinger  12/1/2021

Bikes and Cars…a Different Spin

In 1957, Vance Packard wrote a book called The Hidden Persuaders. It was about the world of advertising and how it plays such a huge role in influencing and orchestrating our lives. It was a best-seller at the time and pretty much required reading for any thinking person who wanted to be au courant in the modern world.Hidden P

Today it’s safe to say that most thinking people would take it for granted that advertising not only works overtime to persuade us to buy stuff or vote for the right candidate but is also an arbiter of cutting-edge style and even cultural mores. Just consider what we see over any given day on television. While conservative politicians are still wringing their hands over same-sex marriage and dog whistling about creeping tides of racial infiltration, the TV ads are showing us happy gay couples with kids, interracial couples, mixed-race families. Men kissing…Egad! Just a few years ago, such images would have been shocking on network TV. Now they’re only remarkable for having become so commonplace. The advertising execs didn’t wait around for the approval of some red-state curmudgeons to get on board. They simply gave us the world as it is. One ad campaign at a time, they not only reflected the world as it is, they validated it and made it mainstream.

In that same vein, think how many times you see ads that feature some sort of cycling. Not ads for bikes but ads for something else but featuring bikes. Could be some racers out training behind the car the agency is marketing. Could be folks unloading mountain bikes from the roof of some SUV. Could be a middle-aged couple riding cruiser bikes along a path while the voice-over promotes some unpronounceable pharmaceutical we’ve never heard of. It may be that we still get buzzed by retrograde knuckle-draggers now and then while out riding, but overall, bikes are considered cool. I would say cycling is trending except it’s been trending—staying trendy—for about a hundred years. It has never really gone out of style. When the marketing mavens want to add a little style or sporting cachet to the product they’re promoting, some cycling iconography is an easy way to do it.

I was reminded of this while browsing through old car ads (something I like to do now and then). The images are always trying to tell us a little story; to concoct a narrative we, the prospective buyers, will believe in and buy into. The ad people want to place their cars in some larger context they think will appeal to us. That sometimes leads them to include bikes in their illustrations because bikes are popular and accessible and speak of play and freedom and robust good health…virtues and values they hope will adhere to their cars. The bikes are invariably portrayed in a subsidiary role in the illustrations. That makes sense. They aren’t selling the bikes, after all. They just want to gussy up their cars by association with the carefree sportiness of bikes. 

To be sure, bikes are not the only sporting icons to lend their luster to the marketing of cars. Down the years, most other recreational activities have had their moments in that role, especially the sports that were deemed to be the most fashionable in any given era: skiing, tennis, golf, any sort of boating, anything to do with horses. But bikes have always been in the mix, as they are in the real world. The account executives on Madison Avenue get it, even if some of the drivers we encounter on the back roads may not. Cycling sells.

So, in this last month of the year, with holiday color and glitter on all fronts, I decided to depart from my more conventional biking topics to entertain you with some “shiny-brite” images showing bikes in car ads down the years. (Click on the thumbnails for larger images.) My collection here—just a small sampling—ends in the mid-‘60s because that’s about the time most of the ad agencies were switching from hand-painted illustrations to photography. As an illustrator myself, I have a special fondness for the old paintings. It’s true that photography and television (or video, generally) can do things the old illustrations couldn’t. But they cannot match the charm of the old paintings created by some of the best artists of the day. Big, full-page illustrations in magazines like Time and Life and Look, printed in lush colors on glossy paper, were where you were going to get the biggest bang for your advertising buck.

And you have to remember that, up until maybe the end of the ‘50s, TV ads and even photography in general were still fairly unsophisticated and crude. No amount of Photoshopping could make a grainy photo as attractive and evocative as a well-done painting. And anyway, they didn’t have Photoshop back then. Any touch-up was done with airbrush or paint brushes. (This is a clumsy segué on my part to take this slightly off-topic for one paragraph.) When I was an aspiring graphic artist in high school, I was given a personal tour of the art department at one of the largest ad agencies in Portland, where I watched guys a few years older than I beavering away with their airbrushes to tidy up ad photos. My guide—a friend of my father—was the head of the agency, Homer Groening. Homer is the father of Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons. And yes, Homer’s wife is named Marge. Homer was not the clueless doofus that is Homer Simpson, but rather a very savvy and successful advertising executive. 

PackardAnyway…back to bikes in car ads. The oldest illustration in this batch is for a Packard ad from 1920. It’s worth recalling that in 1920, bike racing—in particular velodrome racing—was pretty much the most popular sport in America. The events outdrew baseball games and the stars were paid better (until Babe Ruth came along). Football was confined to college games and not many of those. Basketball hardly existed. Hockey? Please! That was for Canadians. It was cycling that ruled the roost. And for every pro racer there were dozens of young lads like the one in the illustration, pedaling their mustache-barred bikes down country lanes.
The black-and-white Dodge ad from 1923 is one of several dozen they ran through the mid-‘20s, typically using the same illustrator, Willard Prince. They were almost always humorous set-ups, often with feisty kids pitted against the adult establishment, with the kids usually getting the better of the situations. Here we have a young bike messenger running a stop sign while engrossed in reading The Redskin’s Revenge. I don’t quite see how this campaign added any glamor to the Dodge brand but humor is always a good ploy for winning over your audience.
The Depression years were lean times for automobile sales and then World War II shut down the auto industry entirely from 1942 to 1945, as all the assembly lines were repurposed for building tanks and planes. So we fast-forward to the immediate post-war years for another Dodge ad. This is again one of a set of dozens that ran for a couple of years, all in the same style. This one shows a gaggle of high school kids gathered around a snazzy club coupe, while someone’s little sister looks on from atop her “girl’s” bike—the original sloping top tube—complete with chain guard and wicker handlebar basket. I learned to ride on a bike like that.
Now we dive deep into the baby boom years of the mid-‘50s for this Chevy ad…a red Bel Air convertible at the beach, with a gal keeping pace on her golden bike. Check out that bike: white wall tires, a “gas tank,” a chain guard, a wire basket, and a luggage rack. All the bells and whistles. Can you remember the fashion for girl’s pants called pedal-pushers? Here they are in their element, pushing pedals. There are a total of three bikes in this picture. Can you find the others? This is just about the time Chevrolet’s ad men really got cranked up with lavish scenes of the good life in the boom years of the ’50s. This would have been a two-page spread, laying it on thick.
Talk about laying in on thick! Pontiac put together perhaps the greatest run of automobile illustrations ever between 1959 and 1971, sticking with it long after most of the other car companies and ad agencies had gone to photos. These were all the products of a wonderful partnership between two legendary illustrators, Art Fitzpatrick and Van Kaufman. Art painted the cars and Van painted the settings. They cranked out a new illustration every two weeks for 13 years for a total of over 300 images. They somehow collaborated, passing each painting back and forth until the car and the background were one lush image. I don’t quite see how they did it, especially not on a tight schedule. Beginning in ’59, Pontiac’s marketing hook was the “wide-track Pontiac.” So Fitzpatrick stretched the width of the cars way beyond reality…this sumptuous illustration shows that to great effect. This isn’t the only time they used a pretty lady on a bike to add sauce to their illustrations. They did another in 1963 that is set on the French Riviera. Oddly enough, I struck almost the same pose—minus the big Pontiac—when cycling along that same waterfront in 2009. Taken altogether, their archive of extravagant images is one of the great chronicles of life during those years. It’s something of a fantasy life, for sure, but that’s what ads do for us: create that aspirational fantasy of how wonderful things could be…including flirting with a cutie on a bike.
Even more outlandish than the ’59 wide-track Pontiacs were the Buicks of the same year. 1959 represents the pinnacle of over-the-top fins-and-chrome insanity that swept through Detroit in those crazy daze. I mean, what were those stylists smoking? Geez! But what do we have here? Is that a club ride? Well, no, not exactly, at least not as we would know it today. But it is some sort of group ride…an assembly of friends all out for a happy ramble. Riders in street clothes—Bermuda shorts!—on sturdy Schwinn-style bikes, And look up in the left-hand corner: is that a tandem back there? I believe it is. One other curious thing about this image: all of the cyclists are women. Presumably the artist and art director had a reason for that, but what?
The ‘60s were the last gasp for most painted illustrations in the car world. And at the same time the ad agencies were moving to photography, the car stylists were moving to blandness. That late-’50s fever dream of tailfins and glitz had peaked by 1960 and, year by year after that, the designs became increasingly anodyne…that is to say, boring. But the art directors at the ad agencies still had to ply their craft, doing the best they could with what they had. Chrysler’s ad men still liked bikes and these two examples—ads for a ’64 Dodge Polara and a ’65 Plymouth Fury—make use of bikes to give their rather mediocre cars a little pizzazz. By now the bikes and the bike scene look almost contemporary. We see racing bikes with drop bars and skinny saddles, “hairnet” helmets and wool jerseys and number bibs. I can almost see myself in these pictures. I had my first adult road bikes at that time…a Raleigh, two Gitanes, a Bianchi, a Peugeot. I wasn’t racing but I was rolling it up the road and figuring out how cool this bike thing could be. I was a new convert to the Church of the Spinning Crank.

That’s where I have to leave this fantasy world and ride on into the present moment, a time where we see bikes in TV ads and print ads all the time. We may not even notice them all that often…that is, not consciously take note of them. But they’re out there in ad-land, the same as interracial and gay families, subliminally reminding the world that bikes are a part of our lives; that they’re fun and green and good for us. The road bikes and mountain bikes and cruiser bikes in ads for cars and drugs and munchies may not be what’s being sold, not directly. But they’re selling themselves as they roll past us on the TV screens or on our monitors or in our magazines.

I suppose a politically-correct scold might point out that all these images are somehow bad because they represent the horrid old auto industry and all it has done to pollute our little planet and, further, that the illustrations promote or celebrate an upper-crust snobbery. The ads almost always invoke some image of the good life…the hoity-toity, high-end swank of wealth and privilege. (Who would market their product with images of down-market scruff and squalor?) But I think of the lives of those many talented and hard-working illustrators and hark back to the painters and other artists of past times who got paid by some corrupt pope or decadent duke or fat cat burgher to create everything from a Sistine chapel to a Pieta. In this sense, the car companies and their marketing budgets are just another take on the art patron paradigm. They paid the bills for a lot of good artists so they could do their lovely images…so they could live and survive creating fun and interesting art. Thank goodness such artists exist in every generation and thank goodness someone has the money to pay them so they can keep doing what they do.

And thank goodness there were art directors and illustrators whose world views embraced cycling and incorporated it into their hidden persuasion. Art imitating life.

Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net



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