Make All America Sparkle City! Put Litter In Its Place!

In the early 1970s, environmentalism was becoming a popular cause, particularly with young people, as pollution and an increasing amount of trash from a throwaway consumer society was creating problems. Corporate America was blamed for much of the situation so in the interest of their own public relations and image, they too jumped on the environmental bandwagon.

In the spring of 1971, around Earth Day, two public service announcements (PSAs) produced by the Keep America Beautiful organization and the Advertising Council (now Ad Council) hit the TV airwaves. One was the well-remembered "crying Indian" spot featuring a supposed Native American named Iron Eyes Cody (who claimed to be a Cherokee but was later revealed to be a Sicilian-American actor born Espera Oscar de Corti in 1904, died 1999) who walks around modern-day America seeing all the filth and pollution, finally driven to tears when someone in a passing car throws a bag of trash at his feet. "People start pollution. People can stop it," intones actor William Conrad in the voiceover.

The other, mostly seen during network children's programming on Saturday mornings was an animated spot featuring a character called Captain Cleanup, who looked like a combination of Dick Tracy and Superman, and his young sidekick, Kid Coolit. 

Captain Cleanup and Kid Coolit are seen flying over Sparkle City, the cleanest metropolis in America, when they spot Louie the Litterer and his Sewer Rat Gang about to make a mess of things. The superheroes confront them, Captain Cleanup rolls up his sleeve but never lays a hand on them (apparently to avoid depicting violence). Instead the villains beat themselves up and fall into garbage cans. "That's where you belong. In the waste can!" Captain Cleanup proclaims.

He then breaks the fourth wall and says, "Kids, you too can be a pollution fighter. Never throw trash into the street. Remember--you have to set an example for your parents." Then he says, "Make all America Sparkle City! Put litter in its place!" The spot ends with "Keep America Beautiful" on screen along with the Advertising Council "rotary-a" logo used at the time. 

The cartoon characters also appeared in print ads that ran in newspapers nationwide in the summer of 1971. "Don't throw empty cans, bottles or even apple cores out of car windows. Don't toss used tissues on the street, or cigarette butts in the gutter. Put litter in its place," the ad admonished.

Keep America Beautiful and the Ad Council wanted to make it a real children's crusade. The organizations teamed with shoe retailer Thom McAn and its 1,000 or so stores across the country to distribute Captain Cleanup membership kits to youngsters who were interested in starting their own Captain Cleanup anti-littering clubs in their communities. The kits included a membership card and "a series of instructions on what Captain Cleanup recommends to help keep America beautiful," according to an article in the Desert Sun of Palm Springs, CA from September 23, 1971. The article went on to report that over two million kits had been requested and received by kids nationwide, and that they had also been distributed to civic youth groups. 

The campaign received heaps of praise from seemingly everyone all the way up to President Richard Nixon but some serious environmentalists took issue with the whole Keep America Beautiful organization. The organization was founded in 1953 by American Can Company and Owens-Illinois Glass Company, both manufacturers of non-returnable beverage containers, at a time when states such as Vermont were looking at banning such containers. Soon big breweries and soft drink makers became part of the organization but didn't publicize it, so the corporate interests weren't widely known by the general public. 

The serious environmental activists accused Keep America Beautiful of being a shill for corporate polluters, shifting the blame for pollution and environmental hazards from manufacturers to the general public, making them believe they're the ones making the mess and they're the ones responsible for cleaning it up. Peter Harnik of Environmental Action, Inc. commented to United Press International in an article published in newspapers around the US on May 5, 1971, "Keep America Beautiful is sort of a front for keeping America quiet."

The Captain Cleanup campaign was just a small part of Keep America Beautiful and there was little criticism about it specifically, while the "crying Indian" campaign received much more criticism (as well as praise), but that's a whole other story.

While the Captain Cleanup spot continued to run off and on through the 1970s (NBC continued to play a ten-second edit of it well into the 1980s on Saturday mornings), organized Captain Cleanup clubs soon faded away. A search of newspapers finds few if any mentions beyond 1974.

 

Fresh-killed chicken.

Fifty years ago, Mobil Oil Corporation ran a series of rather graphic, sharply-worded advocacy ads in newspapers about unsafe driving and young people, with the slogan, "We want you to live." Many decades before anyone conceived of the current problem of texting while driving. Nonetheless, the ads are very much worth taking another look at.

This one, titled "Fresh-killed chicken," featured a depiction of a deceased young man, face-down on the pavement, wearing a "Jets" jacket. It ran in the Minneapolis Star and other newspapers across the United States on October 10, 1966.

Bravo.

Let's hear it for the winner.

That's him lying there--the dead one.

Or is he the loser?

You can't tell. Not that it matters very much. Because in the in the idiot game of "chicken," two cars speed straight for each other. Head on.

With luck, one car steers clear in the nick of time. Without luck, neither car steers clear. And the winner and the loser are equally dead.

Some "game."

It took God Almighty to stop Abraham from making a blood sacrifice on his son. What do you suppose it will take to make us stop sacrificing our children?

We who bear them in sterilized hospitals, stuff them with vitamins, educate them expensively, and then hand over the keys to the car and wait with our hearts in our mouths.

Too bad we educate them only to make a living and not to stay alive.

Because right now--this year--car accidents kill more young people than anything else. Including war. Including cancer. Including anything.

Yet we allow it.

Incredibly enough, fewer than half the young people who get drivers' licenses every year have passed a training course.

Which leaves well over 2 million (!) youngsters who get licenses every year without passing such a course.

And this is the price we pay: 13,200 young people between 15 and 24 died in automobile accidents in 1965. (The exact number for 1966 isn't in yet; it will probably be higher.) It's a gruesome answer to the population explosion. And if we all sit still about it, we ourselves are "chickening out."

Yet we mustn't frighten out youngsters; they're frightened enough. We must teach them.

Does your school system have a driver training course? Are there books in your school library or public library on driving? (did you know such books exist? Do they know?)

Are requirements for getting a driver's license in your state tough enough? Are your radio and TV stations paying any attention to the problem? Your newspapers?

Does anyone in your community give awards for good driving? The PTA? Or the Boy Scouts? The Chamber of Commerce? the churches or synagogues?

What kind of a driver are you yourself? Do you set a good example or a poor one?

Would your company insist on a driver training course before they'd hire someone?

Would your schools insist on a training course before they'd turn a youngster loose?

Would it help?

Yes it would. Education works. Drivers in large truck fleets are trained to drive safely. And some of them have dropped accident rates to only about half that of the general public.

It would cost little or nothing to get these things going. And we haven't a minute to spare. It's blood that we have on our hands, not time.

We at Mobil sell gasoline and oil for our living to the living. Naturally, we'd like young people to grow up into customers. But for now we'd be happy if they'd simply grow up.

Mobil. We want you to live.