A Typewriter With Its Own Tale

From 1957-1960, my dad Robert was an advertising space salesman for the Syracuse Herald-Journal (his first job) and a very active member of the Syracuse Jaycees (Junior Chamber of Commerce) in western New York State. The Jaycees was a popular club with lots of active, enthusiastic members and an equally strong "Jayn"cees division (wives of Jaycee members).

For several reasons, many members of the group were very eager to go to the 1958 Jaycee national convention, to be held in St. Louis, MO. For one, the New York State Jaycee president was running for national president and the group wanted to show up en masse to support his bid. This local Jaycees chapter had also entered a number of national competitions for Jaycee clubs and figured they had a good chance to win a bunch of them (and ultimately did). My dad was also the New York State SPOKE Award winner that year, an honor given to the most outstanding new Jaycee in each state. He was, therefore, a contender for national recognition (which he achieved).

As it would have been prohibitively expensive for most in the group to make such a trip, they needed to develop a fundraiser. The idea they came up with was very creative in that it accomplished multiple goals and was very much in line with the raison d'etre of the Jaycees and its parent organization, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The group developed a pseudo "trade show" to showcase Syracuse area companies in the convention hall in front of 10,000 of the most promising young citizens in the country. This audience was a very desirable demographic: successful in their communities and their careers; young marrieds or incipient newlyweds; in or about to buy their first homes; all under 35 years of age. Who wouldn't want to advertise their products and services to these people, especially if you could do it in a unique venue?

Syracuse and the surrounding area had a diverse and thriving manufacturing base at the time. Some of the companies the Jaycees approached with its sales proposal included: General Electric (Syracuse was the home of the company's Consumer Electronics Division), Stickley furniture, Will & Baumer candles (they supplied candles to the Vatican), Oneida silverware, Syracuse china, Owens-Corning glass, Mohawk carpets, Nettleton shoes, Learbury men's suits, Porter-Cable power tools, Carrier air conditioners, Syroco Wood (they made elegant cast wood composite decorative sconces and related items from unique hand-carved molds) and Smith-Corona typewriters.

The Jaycees made a list of prospects and put together a selling package (using writers, designers, lawyers, salesmen and printers within the organization) to pitch these companies. Each young hotshot, like my dad, also took responsibility for bringing in one or more of the target companies.

Not only were they successful in getting these notable companies to sign on, the Jaycees even got a few business-to-business companies to come aboard, such as a conveyer belt company, Crouse-Hinds (the world's largest producer of traffic lights) and Syracuse University. More than 40 members of the local Jaycees group got to go to that convention, all expenses paid.

The promise to each company partner was to design and man a tasteful exhibit space for them. Imagine a Stickley dining table -- set with Syracuse china, Oneida silverware, Owens-Corning glassware, a casserole dish and Will & Baumer candles, all prominently identified -- sitting on a Mohawk carpet. A Stickley desk might be off to the side with the Smith-Corona typewriter (pictured above) on it, and the GE stereo console nearby, maybe beneath a Syroco Wood-framed mirror. There was also a full-size Crouse-Hinds traffic light on display, as well as a Carrier air conditioner. The exhibit space would always be staffed by at least two club members, a Jaycee and a Jayncee, and they would double or triple staff in peak periods. It was agreed that each staffer would learn the salient information about all of the companies and their products and that literature on everything would be handed out.

Every Jaycee and Jayncee who visited the exhibit was given a wallet-sized membership card in the Turnover Club, which authorized him or her to turn over the china in any restaurant to see if it was Syracuse china. It was a hoot for these card-carriers to go to any restaurant in the city during the convention and turn over their plates, an action that illicited howls of laughter when the brand revealed was Syracuse china, as it often was. (The company had a strong commercial crockery line.)

At the end of the convention, the company partners didn't want to pay to ship all that now-shopworn stuff back, so it was auctioned off. The boys (and girls) from Syracuse got first dibs, of course, on anything they wanted… which is how my dad came to have the first electric typewriter ever made!