The ads featured U.S. college students, including Bates students and future U.S. President George Bush and the late Barbara Bush, lounging in dorm rooms fully appointed with furnishings by Bates Fabrics.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>In this detail of a Bates Fabrics ad from the Aug. 17, 1947, issue of Life<\/em> magazine, Bates College Board member Florence Furfey \u201947 reviews “Bates’ newest washable and colorfast prints.”<\/p><\/div>\n The college campaign was part of a marketing blitz begun a decade earlier when Bates Manufacturing created Bates Fabrics to market and distribute its consumer goods, especially bedspreads. By the late 1940s, Bates Fabrics was pouring ad dollars into every channel it could find, from print to the new medium of television.<\/p>\n Ads for Bates products were especially common in pop-culture magazines like Life<\/em>, Mademoiselle<\/em>, Vogue<\/em>, Seventeen<\/em>, and Harper\u2019s Bazaar<\/em>. (One curious ad, in 1944, featured coifed and elegant Hollywood star Barbara Stanwyck posing next to a Bates bedspread embroidered with log cabins.)<\/p>\n In 1949, the company branched out into television as the sole sponsor of a short-lived NBC show, Girl About Town<\/em>, featuring one of the medium’s now-forgotten stars, Kyle MacDonnell. Bates Fabrics also sponsored summertime fashion shows at Northeast resorts, where models displayed items made from Bates-made fabrics.<\/p>\n The back-to-college ad campaign is especially distinctive. It\u2019s one of the few times that the narratives of Bates College and Bates Manufacturing came together, albeit briefly.<\/p>\n The campaign was also a sign of the times: an attempt to pivot toward a powerful new demographic \u2014 young people \u2014 at a time when the company was positioned pretty far from youth: Its famed bedspreads carried the trademarked phrase, \u201cLoomed to Be Heirloomed.\u201d<\/p>\n A 1944 magazine ad featured coifed and elegant Hollywood star Barbara Stanwyck posing next to a Bates Fabrics bedspread embroidered with log cabins.<\/p><\/div>\n The campaign\u2019s hook was the \u201cBates College Board.\u201d Not to be confused in any way with Bates College trustees, the Bates College Board comprised college students selected by Bates Fabrics to bring a dose of credibility, if not authenticity, to the ad campaign.<\/p>\n In 1948, the Bates College Board took center stage in a 14-minute film produced by Bates Fabrics to convince local department stores and other buyers to stock Bates goods.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Bates College Board,\u201d intoned narrator Ed Thorgersen, well-known as the voice of newsreels, was only the best and brightest, \u201cthe smartest young men and women to serve as a board of advisers on taste and style.\u201d<\/p>\n While college surroundings are \u201clovely,\u201d Thorgersen said, \u201cin all too many cases the rooms they move into are pretty much like a barracks. That kind of a room, Mr. Merchant, is ready for a lot of home furnishings business.\u201d<\/p>\n This edited version of a Bates Fabrics Inc. promotional film, created in 1948, introduces the Bates College Board concept and its members, including Bates student Birgit Svane ’49 and future President George H.W. Bush and the late Barbara Bush. The film has been preserved by Museum L-A<\/a>, whose mission is to tell the story of work and community in Lewiston-Auburn.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/a>
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