No, this isn’t an advertisement for lounge chairs, radios, or headphones. And it isn’t missing a caption. When it appeared in the Post in 1925, readers quickly recognized what was being promoted: tires.
It was part of an ad campaign that began in 1907 to promote the company whose logo can be seen on the newspaper. A yawning boy in pajamas, hugging a tire while holding a candle, accompanies the taglines, “Time to Re-Tire” and “Get a Fisk.”
In the 1920s, the Fisk Tire Company of Chicopee, Massachusetts, was producing five thousand tires a day. That would seem like a lot of tires at a time when America had only 6 percent of the automobiles it has today. But tires didn’t last long back then: The average driver changed tires every year.
During the mid-’20s, Fisk ran a series of full-page illustrations whose connection to tires or “re-tiring” was, at best, tenuous. Other ads showed a boy about to get spanked for picking someone else’s flowers, a man who’s just stepped on his dancing partner’s foot, and a boy in a kiddie car being chased by geese.
Today, Fisk tires are still being marketed, but that ad campaign was dumped long ago.
This article is featured in the March/April 2025 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.
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Comments
I’m glad you show the whole ad below where the open magazine on the carpet shows a Fisk ad. I looked Fisk tires up online, and they were bought out by Uniroyal in 1940, then remained dormant but was apparently revived by Discount Tire in 1996 under an agreement with Michelin which had purchased Uniroyal in 1990. Confused yet?!
All I know is that there IS a Fisk automotive repair shop in Fullerton, established in 1973. So the name’s still rolling at least a little.