To honor Oscar Mayer’s passing yesterday at age 95, here’s an original 1952 Wienerwhistle, 1 and 3/4 inches long and plenty of toot left. In the 50’s these were given away at Wienermobile appearances and in ’58 were packaged with the wienies themselves. In ’64, Wienerwhistles were sold in vending machines at the New York World’s Fair for two cents each.
What’s really bizarre is that I’ve looked at this Weinerwhistle everyday on the window ledge in my kitchen for years. Since I’ve been doing Kitsch O’ The Day, 115 days now, there’s not a day that’s passed that I haven’t thought ‘I should do the Wienerwhistle.’ Yesterday, before I learned that Oscar Mayer had passed away and despite having already written my Fat Superman Kitsch O’ The Day post, I got the sudden urge to finally write about the whistle. After I finished it I decided to go with Fat Superman anyway as I realized I had just done a hot dog post last Saturday for July 4th. After I uploaded it I went to my Facebook home page to make sure Fat Superman actually posted – FB has been having TONS of tech malfunctions lately – and there was a post from a friend saying that Oscar Mayer had just passed away within the last hour. I don’t know if it’s me or my Wienerwhistle that has psychic powers but something was going on somewhere…
More Weinerwhistles: Later repro versions had a yellow paper label and a little car base for the dog to rest on.
Then there’s this one from 1988, a whole package of wienies and enough holes to play the Oscar Mayer theme song:
2004 spotting of the updated Wienermobile on the 101N. freeway in LA:
1965 commercial for the dogs:
RIP Oscar Mayer. Long live your wieners.
Steve Portigal
Wow, during one of my encounters with the Weinermobile (in unincorporated San Mateo County, a few weeks after I moved to the Bay Area, back in 1995), they were giving out whistles, which I kept for a while. I had no idea that it had a historical trinket connection.
Did you know that this recent Oscar Mayer passing is actually the third Oscar Mayer who ran that company? Started his grandfather and two partners in the 1800s.
Ludovicah
And there I was thinking that “playing the pork flute” was some sort of a euphemism! š
Hilarious!
Allee
@Steve – Yes, I knew he was #3. I went to college in Madison, Wisconsin where all three lived and the main plant was/is so I’m always up on my Oscar Mayer history. I was going to write a chunk about this being OM#3 but thought I should keep the post more focused on the Wienerwhistle. But I’m most impressed you know your stuff!
Rupert Collova
I’m not able subscribing to your RSS feed. Can you assist or do you know why? thanks for the help.
Allee
Will check it out on Monday for sure.
Allee
Here’s the word from my tech: It works, all they have to do is click on the āSubscribe to Feedā icon in the āfollow alleeā section and there are numerous options to follow.
If all else fails, hereās a direct link to the feed:
https://www.alleewillis.com/blog/feed/