Raleigh 1953 Advertisement — Howdy Doody and Clarabell, and a Beautiful New Raleigh

ADVERTISEMENT

HEY KIDS!

Here are your two TV favorites again — HOWDY DOODY and CLARABELL — with this year’s favorite Xmas bike — a beautiful new RALEIGH!

Remember the Blue Bonnet Margarine Coloring Contest?

Exclusively in Wash. & Suburbs
MT. VERNON CYCLE & SPORT SHOPS
933 G Street, N.W. • 424 Ninth Street, N.W.

Howdy Doody’s choice is this handsome RALEIGH Sports Light Roadster with Sturmey-Archer 3-speed gears — you’ll enjoy this wonderful bike for many Xmas’s to come — a honey of a buy for only $63.75!

F.O.B. Boston or see your local dealer. Dynohub lighting set extra.

Exclusively in Wash. & Suburbs
MT. VERNON CYCLE & SPORT SHOPS
5019 Wisconsin Ave. • 8223 Georgia Ave., Silver Spring, Md.

And Clarabell the Clown likes the RALEIGH Junior (he prefers a smaller bike, you see.) This British lightweight beauty has the Sturmey-Archer 3-speed gears — and Clarabell got it for only $58.50. So can you!

F.O.B. Boston or see your local dealer.

RALEIGH INDUSTRIES OF AMERICA • 669 BOYLSTON STREET • BOSTON 16, MASS.

© KAGRAN

[The advertisement runs the full width of the sheet and is ruled off top and bottom with the word ADVERTISEMENT set small at each upper corner. HEY KIDS! is hand-lettered in a loose brush script at the upper left, the headline set beside it in a light sans-serif with RALEIGH dropped in heavy capitals at its end. Two machines are drawn in outline facing left, the Sports Light Roadster at the left with a fork-crown headlamp, the smaller Junior at the right. Between them the heads of Howdy Doody and Clarabell the Clown are drawn inside a Christmas wreath hung with baubles, the copyright mark of Kagran set into its lower edge. Each machine carries a dealer panel and a paragraph of copy beneath it, and the maker’s line runs across the foot in spaced capitals.]

[One advertisement cropped out of page 258 of the Washington Sunday Star for 29 November 1953. It is the archive’s first document from Raleigh Industries of America, the marque’s own United States subsidiary, and it is the strongest of the four American lightweight sheets held.

What makes it worth holding is not the bicycles but who is selling them and to whom. The line across the foot is a Boston address, 669 Boylston Street, and the argument above it is made by Howdy Doody and Clarabell the Clown, the two most famous children on American television, licensed from the Kagran Corporation whose copyright mark sits in the wreath. A British manufacturer is selling British lightweights to American children through American television properties, in a Sunday paper, three weeks before Christmas. The opening line even reaches back to an earlier promotion: Remember the Blue Bonnet Margarine Coloring Contest?

Two machines are named and priced. Howdy Doody’s choice is the RALEIGH Sports Light Roadster with Sturmey-Archer 3-speed gears at $63.75, with the Dynohub lighting set extra. Clarabell takes the RALEIGH Junior, called a British lightweight beauty and also carrying the Sturmey-Archer 3-speed, at $58.50. Both are quoted F.O.B. Boston or see your local dealer, which is the import arrangement stated plainly in six words.

⚠ The dealer is the connection worth following. MT. VERNON CYCLE & SPORT SHOPS appears twice here, across four Washington addresses, as Raleigh’s exclusive outlet in Washington and suburbs. It is the same firm that placed document 70888 three years later, and two of the addresses on that sheet, 5019 Wisconsin Avenue and 8223 Georgia Avenue, are the same two printed here. In 1953 Mt. Vernon is selling Raleighs as the exclusive agent for a British marque. In 1956 the same shops are running an unprecedented clearance on Schwinns. The archive now holds both sheets and the same shopfronts are on each.

The three American sheets held make a price ladder across three years. The Raleigh Sports Light Roadster is $63.75 here in 1953. The Rudge Sports Light Roadster at 70892 is $59.50 in 1954, from another Raleigh Industries marque. The Schwinn Varsity at 70888, a 26-inch English type 3-speed, is $66.95 before discount in 1956. The American answer to the imports was the dearest of the three.

The placement repeats what document 70886 shows for Schwinn six years earlier: the advertisement fills the foot of a Sunday comics page, here beneath The Jackson Twins by Dick Brooks and Bo by Frank Beck, addressed to a child who is expected to ask a parent.

The sheet writes Xmas’s and it is transcribed uncorrected.

The whole newspaper page is never the document here. The advertisement was cropped from the Library of Congress IIIF master at native resolution and the page identifier is kept in the provenance pair. The body text was set from the Library of Congress machine text and then read against the image at native resolution, which is why this record is marked as machine text checked by eye rather than as transcription.]