Apparently, some time around the middle of the twentieth century this fellow was making FAT SACKS OF CASH selling America’s Greatest Family Newspaper GRIT. At least that was the potential promise to young entrepreneurs willing to sell this weekly publication to it’s rural target audience. A seller could rake in a nickel for each sold copy or choose prizes such as cameras, watches, sports equipment and other things boys like.
Advertisements such as the one above were common in comic books when they were printed on newsprint and could be bought at newsstands for pocket change. According to Grit’s entry in Wikipedia:
During the first three-quarters of the 20th century, Grit was sold across the country by children and teenagers, many recruited by ads in comic books from the 1940s to the 1970s. Approximately 30,000 children collected dimes from more than 700,000 American small town homes during the 1950s when the publication still carried the subtitle, “America’s Greatest Family Newspaper.”
Grit still continues to this day though not as a newspaper, and I guess they no longer offer the swell prizes. Their website can be found HERE.
I scanned this ad from a 1967 issue of Marvel’s Two-Gun Kid. My guess from the kid’s high-waisted trousers is that this ad or at least a lot of it’s artwork was bopping around comics for at least 10 years before that. The kid may have been pasted and repasted in ads since the end of World War II.
