1960 NFL Enterprises Catalogue: Booze and Butts
This is the third and last in a series about the 1960 NFL Enterprises Catalogue. The first story covering Roy Rogers' role and Youth Apparel is here, while the story of Adult Apparel is here.
Booze, including beer, and butts, particularly cigars and cigarettes, have been associated with football from the early days, mainly because men tended to enjoy all three categories. Tobacco and alcohol advertising feature prominently in old game programs and other formats, including advertising premiums. Here are examples of covers from around 1960.
Hard liquor advertising left the airwaves in the late 1940s, and the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act of 1969 removed cigarette advertising from television and radio effective January 2, 1971. Beer ads remain, although the industry self-regulates the target programming and bans depictions of consumption in the ads.
Alcohol has long been sold in sports stadiums, especially for professional games, and consumed outside the stadiums in pre-game activities known as football picnics.
When station wagons and their tailgates entered the market in the 1950s, football picnicking was renamed tailgating, a tradition that most of us have imbibed in at some time or another.
NFL Enterprises and Thermos teamed up to support those with simple football picnic/tailgating needs via an NFL-themed tote with several bottles and plastic sandwich boxes, though it was up to the fan to determine which beverage entered and left those bottles
Fans with more sophisticated tailgate needs or those who enjoy combining football and alcohol could acquire stylish glassware products in various styles. Accompanying NFL ashtrays (products M and N) completed the set.
Those who smoke need a means of lighting up, so another iconic brand, Scripto, provided lighters for each team with their logos emblazoned on the see-through plastic reservoir.
Scripto took care of one type of butt, while Troy Blanket Mills addressed the needs of the other butt behind every NFL fan.
Last but not least were the bobble heads. Bobbleheads don't align with Booze and Butts, and you might think they should have been discussed in the context of kids' products, but the NFL's initial information suggested that bobbleheads were popular with women.
With that, we've now covered the entire 1960 NFL Enterprises Catalogue. The NFL's merchandising efforts have come a long way in the 65 intervening years, as have similar efforts for every sports franchise around. Still, someone writing about sports merchandising in 2090 - 65 years from now - will surely be amused by some of our products and the lifestyles in which they fit.
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