1950s Uncatalogued PC issue - Cleveland Indians Baseball Jeans
 

I was thrilled to pick up this PC of Rocky Colavito with a special advertising mark in the bottom left corner. The mark reads, "Official Cleveland Indians Baseball Jeans." I know very little about this issue, but I have seen one other example from this set in the 1990 reference book, Tuff Stuff's Baseball Postcard Collection, by Ron Menchine (pg 111). The example PC in his book is Ray Narleski, and the description reads, "This real-photo postcard of Narleski is unique. It's an advertising card to promote Cleveland Indians Jeans, which were available only in a Cleveland department store in 1954 and '55."

The uniform worn by both Colavito and Narleski would date from 1958-62, and of those years they were teammates for only 1958, so I am inclined to think the issue would date from that year rather than the referenced years in Menchine's book. Both the Narleski and my Colavito are also autographed.

Does anyone have any other information about this issue? Other cards in the set? The department store that created this promotion? Has anyone seen a pair of "Cleveland Indians Baseball Jeans" before?

GenealogyBank to the rescue!

Ads for the Indians Baseball Jeans can be found in issues of the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1958 & 1959. In the April 6th, 1958 issue, there is a Higbee's Basement Store advertiseent for them. Looks like they came with a plastic belt, and an Indians patch on a seat pocket.

The only ads I find for them are from 58-59. I don't see any ads for them in any other years from 1952-1962.

1958 Plain Dealer ads
 

Wow, that was quick! I suspected Higbees but had no proof. This ad seems to narrow it down to late 1950s, which makes sense. Thanks for the help!

Research
 

Wow, Jason, that's impressive. Not only having quick access to 60-year-old Plain Dealer archives, but scanning ten years of dailies for ads - how do you do that?

That's what the search box is for! Genealogy Bank doesn't have as good a system for browsing papers as the Google Newspaper Archive, but it has a very good index of the contents of the paper, which includes a lot of the text in the ads. I saw they had the Plain Dealer in the Historical Newspapers section, put "Indians Baseball Jeans" in the Include Keywords box and clicked search. I got 4 results. Took me all of 5 minutes.

Once I got somewhat burned out on my family history research, I let most of my subscriptions lapse, but I found Genealogy Bank particularly helpful in baseball research, so I figured it was worth the price to keep it at around $50 a year (especially since a year subscription to NewspaperArchive runs around $200 a year).

very cool PC! Now I'll be on the lookout for another...