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| Bottom front page of Jane Friendly's Food Section, July 1, 1954, San Francisco Chronicle. |
Found among my grandmother's papers: Aunt Jane Reilly was the first model for the Gallo wine girl commercial (it's a chalk rendering, she said the artist had to make her look Italian). Beginning in 1954, various permutations of this Vino Paisano di Gallo ad appeared in magazines and on billboards across the nation—including in Times Square.
This ad was an image I saw throughout my childhood. I thought everybody's aunt appeared on the back page of the Sunday funnies. Reading them after church was a family tradition. I loved
The Phantom, Little Orphan Annie, Prince Valiant, Blondie, and
Peanuts... The anti-Irish sentiment in
Bringing Up Father was over my head. But I remember my grandmother muttering over it. I used to save
Prince Valiant, and
The Phantom cartoon strips in a scrapbook—because of the horses, I guess.
During World War II, because of paper shortages, the size of Sunday strips began to shrink… to save the expense of printing color pages. —Wiki
Sometime after the Korean war, William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner and the de Young's San Francisco Chronicle, rival newspapers, merged and created a splashy fat Sunday Paper in living color.
During the week, my grandmother read San Francisco News Call Bulletin which had different funnies, and no ads featuring Aunt Jane. When the
Call Bulletin foundered in 1965, my grannie mourned. My grannie had no use for Hearst or The
Examiner, but she loved to clip
Kenneth Rexroth's columns. She had no use for the
Chronicle either. Called them all a bunch of
yellow journalists. Which was the equivalent of being a red commie. But the Sunday paper merger brought images of my aunt's likeness to the coffee table weekly.
I guess the likeness is close enough. When my Uncle John came home from Korea, and saw the ad blazoned in Times Square, he said, "Hey that's my sister! What's she doing up there?" to his army buddies. They said, "Yeah, right," not believing a word. But when they got home to San Francisco, she was an overnight sensation. Because of this ad, I imagine an entire generation of good Italian boys were looking for their Gallo Girl in all the wrong places.
I still haven't found the color version of the ad. I assume it was when Ernest and Julio Gallo changed the name of Vino Paisano di Gallo. I wonder if Gallo went to full color when it was on the back page of the Sunday Funnies.
Full color printing is a misnomer. The ad is red and green, the overlapping colors makes the brown bottle color. Color was a pricy prospect in the newspaper publishing business. Only front and back pages merited any color splashes. So when the Sunday Funnies were printed in full color (yellow, cyan, magenta), it was a very big deal.
This half-page ad on the front page in the Food section of the San Francisco Chronicle, is dated July 1, 1954. It took quite some time cleaning it up in Photoshop. Check out the price for a bottle of good dago red. I think the wine later morphed into Carlo Rossi. Gallo was up and running, turning suburbanites onto to cheap wine, buying out wineries from Sonoma to Stanislaus, and expanding their Modesto cooperative winery plant, including making the bottles. They helped build the industry. How many of you still have those old Gallo gallon jugs with the thumbhook, laying around?
I remember Grandma getting her Gallo wine jugs filled at the source. She favored Carlo Rossi. Her Italian neighbors, the Bianchis, the Schivos, Berinis, and the Tanzis made pilgrimages to the Italian-Swiss colony watering hole in Asti in Sonoma County for refills. Apparently, Tim Tanzi's grandmother bought it by the crateload, as getting to Asti was an arduous affair in those days. No Highway 101. I know the Gallo plant is in Modesto, so this must've been in the family. Younger brother Joseph Gallo had the Cheese Factory in the town of Sonoma. The Gallo brothers also bought wine from winery cooperatives in Sonoma and Napa too.
I found that the Vino Paisano di Gallo trademark of E & J Gallo Winery patent was filed June 8 1953, they opened for business in early 1954, so this is really the first ever Paisano ad; there were also television ads as well. I would dearly love to find the full color version of the ad from the late 50s. I've looked for it online. No joy. It was as if my mind were playing tricks on me, until I found the ads. This may be the first time that these Vino Paisano ads have appeared in print (on the internet), since the 1950s. Salud!
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Full page ad, page 5, Sunday Pictorial Review, San Francisco Examiner, 1955
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