Tuesday’s ad is for “Rheingold Beer,” from 1952. This ad was made for the Rheingold Brewery, which was founded by the Liebmann family in 1883 in New York, New York. At its peak, it sold 35% of all the beer in New York state. In 1963, the family sold the brewery and in was shut down in 1976. In 1940, Philip Liebmann, great-grandson of the founder, Samuel Liebmann, started the “Miss Rheingold” pageant as the centerpiece of its marketing campaign. Beer drinkers voted each year on the young lady who would be featured as Miss Rheingold in advertisements. In the 1940s and 1950s in New York, “the selection of Miss Rheingold was as highly anticipated as the race for the White House.” The winning model was then featured in at least twelve monthly advertisements for the brewery, beginning in 1940 and ending in 1965. Beginning in 1941, the selection of next year’s Miss Rheingold was instituted and became wildly popular in the New York Area. After the over 700 aspiring models who registered for the contest, sixty were chosen in April to go to the next round. For that sixty, just six finalists are chosen and consumers are given an opportunity to cast their vote in the late summer and early fall. This is a small booklet, entitled “Election News For Rheingold Dealers,” that was created for Rheingold’s distributors and other retail partners. These are only some of the pages from it, but it’s enough to give a sense of it,. with at least a page for each of the six finalists. The pages I was able to find focused on finalist Helen Ryan but you can assume there was a similar page for each one of them.
