I've mentioned before that one of my grandfathers was a bread truck driver. I recently found a 1950 in-house newsletter from the company he worked for. It's a little piece of social history.
It's offset printed, rather than letterpress. It's a smallish booklet with 12 5.5x8.5" pages, so it's made up of three letter-size sheets of paper folded in half and saddle-stitched. Black ink only. There are halftone photos throughout, as well as small illustration "cuts." It wasn't cheap to make, though for the time it was probably relatively inexpensive. 
It's called "Sell," and its audience was the company's salesmen. (Though for some reason, there's a photo of three babies on the cover.*) I can't determine whether the company had separate salesmen or if the bread truck drivers were the salesmen.
The content breaks down into three areas:
- Product information (2 pages)
- General puffery about how to be a good salesman (3 pages)
- Information about being a good driver, taking care of the trucks, and recognition of specific safe drivers, including my grandfather… which accounts for why they kept this piece (4 pages).

There was also a page about the company's radio advertising and a page with a consumer letter praising their products, including a company response. Part of that page had the rest of the article about taking care of your truck.
I was surprised how much the content on driving safely and taking care of the trucks outweighed each of the other two areas. I don't think a present-day company's in-house sales newsletter (if such things still exist) would have that content mix.
___
* I found the reason tucked inside the newsletter: the babies were triplets born to the daughter of one of the drivers, who was based in Pennsylvania. Those children would be 76 years old now. It really was a family-oriented company.

No comments:
Post a Comment