Saturday’s ad is for Rheingold, from 1940 and 1950. In the 1940s and 1950s, Rheingold recruited a number of prominent celebrities to do ads for them, all using the tagline: “My beer is Rheingold — the Dry beer!” In this 1940 ad, actress, expert swimmer and tennis star Jinx Falkenburg, spends a rigorous day modeling and is relieved when the day is finally over and she can enjoy a glass of Rheingold Extra Dry. Falkenburg was also the first Miss Rheingold, a very successful promotional contest Rheingold ran for twenty-five years in which a new model was chosen each year to me “Miss Rheingold” for the year and then Rheingold’s advertising for the subsequent year featured Miss Rheingold for that year, as well. Jinx Falkenburg was chosen as the first Miss Rheingold by the brewery, while every subsequent year she was picked by consumer voting. In one year as many as 23 million people voted to pick one Miss Rheingold.
Falkenburg also did another ad ten years later, in 1950. In this ad, she appears with her husband Tex McCrary, who “was an American journalist and public relations specialist who popularized the talk show genre for television and radio along with his wife, Jinx Falkenburg, with whom he hosted the first radio talk show, ‘Meet Tex and Jinx’ as well as the radio show “Hi Jinx” and the television talk shows ‘At Home’ and ‘The Swift Home Service Club.'”
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