New in the collection: Bull Durham watch charm

Watch charm featuring Bull Durham icon

“Send 5 cents and we will mail you pre-paid, anywhere in the U.S., a 5-cent sack of ‘Bull’ Durham, a Book of cigarette papers, and this 14K gold plated ‘Bull’ Watch Charm, Free….

“We will also send you an illustrated booklet showing how to ‘roll your own’ cigarettes….”

— From a full-page ad in Popular Mechanics magazine (May 1914)

The chain was probably added by an early owner.  

 

A Great Pyramid scheme — but did it happen?

“CAIRO — What’s this? Egypt’s new Islamist leaders want to raze the Great Pyramids, scratch away the images on the death masks of the pharaohs, maybe even wipe the grin off what is left of the face of the Sphinx?
“Someone who reads a lot of right-wing blogs in the United States these days might be forgiven for thinking so, though there is no sign here that any such Islamist clamor to destroy the monuments of ancient Egypt has actually arisen.”

— From “Contrary to Gossip, Pyramids Have No Date With the Wrecking Ball” in the New York Times (July 23)

In 1982, the Times dispatch reminded me, I had a pyramid rumor of my own to chase: In “The Story of Durham” (1927) W.K. Boyd wrote, without details, that “The Bull was once to be seen on the pyramids of Egypt.”
Could that possibly have been true, I wondered, even given the omnipresence of Julian Shakespeare Carr’s unprecedented advertising campaign for Bull Durham? Did Jules Koerner (painting Bulls under the name of Reuben Rink) actually mount a scaffold and apply one to the Pyramid of Khufu?
A 1946 tribute to Carr cited Mark Twain as claiming “that the most conspicuous thing about the Egyptian Pyramids was the Durham Bull.” And in 1978 Thad Stem Jr., writing in the State magazine, mentioned the Bull’s having been painted on — and removed from! — a pyramid.
Alas, on further review — with Nannie May Tilley, author of “The Bright-Tobacco Industry, 1860-1929,” and with experts at Archives & History and the New York Public Library’s tobacco collection — I had to conclude the Bull never found its way to Giza…. But who knows what was on Carr’s to-do list in 1898 when he sold out to American Tobacco?

A bull on a billboard, a billboard on a bull?

Sirs:

Reading your interesting account of Durham’s bull, I was reminded of a characteristic of the animal to which you did not point: On the bull’s side appears a map of the U. S.

The story as it reached me is that Durham & Co. imported this animal at a great cost from the Pampas, after search for a bull on whose side was a “perfect map of the United States.”

The bull, it is said, died on the Durham & Co. lot soon after importation. But not before artists had copied his “map” to paste on the nation’s billboards.

Could and would TIME verify this?

FRANK HUGHES

Des Moines, Iowa

American Tobacco Co. recalls no actual model for Bull Durham. The U. S. map on his side was purely accidental. When noticed it was touched up to be more apparent. —ED.

— Letter to the editor of Time magazine, July 18, 1932