Hero Censored

Long and varied has been the career of the best known U. S. bull--"Bull Durham." He was born in Durham, N. C., at the close of the Civil War, sired by a British bull out of a jar of mustard. But not until last month had Bull Durham encountered Romance. Then suddenly 35,000 billboards throughout the land proclaimed the news. Advertisements showed a picture of him pasted on the side of a barn. Before the picture, big eyes ogling, tongue hanging out in an expression of lugubrious passion, stood a buxom Holstein cow. This whimsy was captioned "Her Hero." Motorists grinned. Advertising men, seeing in it a burlesque of sex-appealing tobacco advertisements, thought it smart. But to the churchwomen of Willow Glen, a suburb of San Jose, Calif., it was the epitome of bad taste, an affront to California womanhood. Last week they went before their town council, demanded that the objectionable picture, which greeted Willow Glen's children on their way to school, be removed. The Council summoned for the defense Educational Director Edward Lloyd Lomax of Foster & Kleiser Billboard Advertising Corp. Director Lomax was in a San Francisco court serving as juryman in the $1,800,000 suit of its onetime Board Chairman L. E. W. Pioda against Golden State Milk Products Co. Judge Walter Perry Johnston announced he would grant a recess while Juror Lomax traveled 50 mi. to Willow Glen on an important mission. Several hours later Juror Lomax returned, climbed wearily into the jury box, told interested colleagues that hereafter Willow Glen's schoolchildren could look at an innocuous poster of a youth and maiden in scanty one-piece bathing suits.

In 1865 John Ruffin Green was looking for a name for the tobacco he made in Durham, N. C. Over a dish of fried oysters a friend, John Y. Whitted, pointed to the mustard jar and said: "There is a condiment that is made in Durham, England. It bears the sign of a Durham bull's neck. Why not name your product Bull Durham Smoking Tobacco and adopt the whole bull as a trade-mark?" Tobaccoman Green immediately had a bull painted on sheet iron, mounted in front of his factory. The bull was heavy, clumsy, stolid and faced toward the east. After Founder Green died and Bull Durham tobacco was made by his more aggressive partner William T. Blackwell, the trade-mark bull became lighter, more graceful. A Liberty Bell was suspended from his neck by the U. S. flag and he faced west toward the land of unlimited resources. When Washington Duke began to make cigarets as well as smoking tobacco he gave as his reason: "My company is up against a stone wall. It can't compete with the Bull." Durham's bull was the object of a score of lawsuits before he became the property of American Tobacco Co. in 1898. As time passed the bull seemed to grow younger, more alert. He turned his head east again, became civilized, modest, stood behind a fence. Nine years ago he went into retirement, did not reappear until last summer, when he emerged, still proud & handsome, looking for a mate.

The passionate Holstein was the inspiration of Comic Artist John Held Jr. Whether Durham's bull would mate with Held's Holstein and produce a family of bullock Durhams no one knew last week.

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