Atlanta Marketing Man Searches for Giant Ice Cream Cone Boy In Knoxville and Finds Him (original) (raw)

This may not mean much to anyone other than me but I am sharing it anyway. Anybody that knows me well, knows I have a thing for vintage advertising, especially circa 40's, 50's, and 60's. I amassed quite a collection of original poster prints, advertising figurals, and even full-size billboards over the years and many are still on display throughout the shelves and walls of our marketing agency. Every mascot from Speedy Alka-Seltzer and Mr. Peanut to the Coronet Brandy man and a dapper Johnny Walker is smiling at me every day around here. A 20 ft 1950's bathing beauty from Jantzen adorns one of our walls.

Having said all that, I will now share something else before moving on to what I really want to tell you.

Several years ago, I attended the first of several Social Media Marketing Conferences in Knoxville, Tennessee called "Social Slam". My good friend,Mark Schaefer was the originator of these events back at a time when almost every marketing professional on earth really needed to know more about social media marketing. Each event drew well-known speakers and representatives from national and local brands and it got bigger each year until Mark decided he either needed to quit everything else he was doing to keep it going and growing OR end it on a high note - which he did.

I really enjoyed those Social Slam events and each year a whole team from our agency would attend. We sponsored the cocktail party three years in a row because that's how we roll. But what I enjoyed most was returning to the city of my birth, Knoxville, Tennessee.

Even though I grew up in Atlanta, childhood memories of Knoxville are etched vividly in my mind. My father's father, William Mitchell (I'm named after both my grandfathers, William and Charley) was a city bus driver in Knoxville. His decades of service dated back to the days when most cities had cable-cars and he drove those too. In the early sixties, both my parents were working and going to college in Atlanta and they would send me and my siblings on a Greyhound bus to either of our grandparents' houses for several weeks each summer for some reason I can't imagine.

Work starts way before sunrise for a city bus driver. And sometimes Pa, (we called my father's parents Ma and Pa as a kind of a family joke because it was funny to us and still is to me) would take me with him on the bus. He picked up hundreds of people on their way to work each shift and I thought he must've been the most well-known and well-liked man in town. It was fun to ride the bus with him and see people from every walk of life getting on and off the bus.

But I digress.There's a reason I told you all about my interest in vintage advertising, marketing conferences, and riding the bus all around Knoxville.

When I went back to Knoxville for the first Social Slam Conference, I met a friendly guy from the Knoxville Historical Society and asked him about two things I remembered most from my childhood that were no longer around. In the early sixties, in Knoxville, you couldn't go far without passing a Kay's Ice Cream location. And you knew it when you saw it because every location had a GIANT ICE CREAM CONE out front. Even more memorable, each cone had a ladder beside it and a kid in a "Jug Head Hat" at the top of the ladder getting a lick of the ice cream. The Historical Society guy remembered the giant ice cream cones but not the ladder or the kid.

He even sent me some vintage black and white photos of the old signs but none with the kid in them. So I went on a google quest looking for anything I could find that would prove my memory wasn't a figment of my imagination and nowhere on earth did any evidence exist.

So I gave up. Until today.

I was talking to someone in my office this afternoon about cool old advertising stuff when Kay's Ice Cream signs popped back in my head. So I Googled it again thinking all I would be able to show him were the same images I had already seen - with no kid on a ladder.

I couldn't remember the brand name of Kay's and didn't even mention the boy or the ladder when I searched "famous Knoxville ice cream giant ice cream cone".

To my surprise and delight, there he was. On the ladder. Licking the cone. Wearing the Jug Head hat.

Mystery solved. Memory confirmed.

Now if I can only find a photo of that giant billboard Pa's bus would pass outside of Knoxville for JFG Coffee. It had a three-dimensional image of man's face with a hand holding a giant coffee cup to his lips. He would close his eyes and raise the cup as steam would rise out. There was an old Leave it to Beaver episode with a similar billboard in the story. Beaver bet a friend there was real coffee or soup (might of been a soup bowl in the show) in the cup and he got stuck up there trying to prove it. The fire department had to rescue him. The guy from the Knoxville Historic Society didn't recollect that JFG billboard either.

Oh, sweet mysteries of life.