Yet another former ASCO employee contacted me recently. David Kulas worked for Lars Granberg back in the early 1970s. He was Assistant Sales Manager for ASCO's Button House division; and National Sales Manager for Idea Promotions, another offshoot of the parent company.
We spoke for nearly an hour. I asked him for some good pennant stories, to "share with my readers." He gave me this gem....
In 1971 he was working at ASCO/Button House. The pirates were in the World Series. It was looking like the Pirates might win it all. Accordingly, some vendor contacted ASCO about pre-ordering 5,000 "World Champion" pennants. ASCO got right to work, made up a quick design, printed 5,000 of them, then overnighted them to the vendor in Pittsburgh.
The next day someone from ASCO telephoned the vendor to ensure the product had arrived safely. It had. There was only one problem, the vendor stated: "You spelled Pittsburgh wrong!" In their haste to make the pennant, someone in Winona left off the "h" in Pittsburgh. The parties agreed to talk in an hour or so about a plan forward, and the call ended.
When they spoke again an hour later, ASCO was prepared to eat the loss and re-make and re-ship a new order of pennants--this time, with the typo corrected. "Don't bother," said the vendor, "we sold'em already."
In such circumstances, these products would be destroyed. Mr. Kulas himself once made up a "Boston Red
Socks" pennant for a vendor outside Fenway Park. In that instance, the product was rejected and subsequently destroyed. But the Bucs were hot; and nobody seemed to mind the typo (or, more likely, nobody noticed!). So, 5,000 of these misspelled pennants made it to market.
Perhaps someone here owns one? No question about it: Mike Knapp (71buc) is the expert on 1971 Pirates pennants ... but even he isn't aware of such a pennant.