The fates of real-life advertising icons
Link4. Bob’s Big Boy
Founder Bob Wian’s inspiration for the Big Boy icon came from Richard Woodruff. “Woodruff was a rotund young boy who had a curious pompadour hairstyle and would help Wian out with chores in exchange for free food,” recalled an article in Nation’s Restaurant News. “The plump Woodruff, nicknamed ‘Fat Boy’ by the hourly gentry at Bob’s, often showed up for work in a pair of baggy jeans giving the little endomorph an almost cartoonish appearance. By chance a Hollywood artist and a regular at the restaurant happened to sketch the boy on a napkin. Since that afternoon the image of the chubby lad in checkered coveralls with a hamburger in one hand has become one of the most highly recognized and lasting trademarks in the foodservice industry.”
Woodruff, who grew to be a massive 6-foot-6, 300-pound local legend in Glendale, California, passed away in 1986. He was 54.
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Duh. Everybody knows that Humphrey Bogart was the Gerber baby!
/sarcasm
I always thought Richard Nixon was the Gerber baby.
Oh, come on! Look at that hair. The model for Bob's Big Boy just had to be a young Ronald Reagan!
Ah, Crazy Eddie! There was a "Christmas in August" CE commercial (sadly not included on the site with the group of his commercials) in which he's swinging his arms wildly in the proximity of a tacky Christmas tree, hitting it every so often. I think he knocks it over near the end. When the screen goes to black at the end, if the volume was turned up loud enough, you could hear him say, "I think I hurt myself..." We always found that hysterically funny, and we'd turn the volume up at the end just to hear it. We could never figure out if it was left in intentionally. For those who want to hunt it down, the year might have been 1984, 1985 or 1986.
This isn't the full story. It's a whitewashed fictionalization of the real story. Ben Washam was a wanna-be cartoonist and partner to Bob Wian in the hamburger stand. It was Ben's idea to create the Big Boy hamburger. The concept was, if you take the same amount of meat, and split it into two patties... and you take the same bun and cut it twice instead of once... people would think they were getting more for their money. Washam also sketched the mascot character, Big Boy. People loved it. But just as the stand was beginning to take off, Washam received an offer to work for Warner Bros cartoon studio. He quit the stand and turned over his interest in the business to Wian. Soon after, Wian started franchising the hamburger stands and became VERY wealthy. Washam was working at Warner Bros making a weekly salary. His co-workers used to razz him, saying "Gee Bennie... You coulda been a HAMBURGER BARON!"
See ya
Steve