LS-MFT (Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco)

[Mike Salovesh]

Barry:

Before LSMFT, Lucky Strike's hyperpenetrating ad slogan was "Lucky Strike
green has gone to war", probably circa 1942. The ads were all over radio:
as an announcer read the slogan, each syllable was marked by a bong from a
kettledrum. The slogan marked a major change in the color of the Lucky
Strike package.

I remember asking parents, teachers, and a librarian how a change in the
color of a cigarette package had anything to do with the war effort.  I
never got an answer that satisfied me.  I tried to suppose that there was a
scarce ingredient in green ink that was needed as raw material for some
secret weapon -- but that sounded too ridiculous even for my wild 11 or 12
year old imagination.

It was perfectly natural for me to think of shortages of critical
materials.  My father's long experience with scrap rubber and such rubber
goods as tires and inner tubes led to his wartime appointment as the
Midwest Regional Director of the Office of the Rubber Director of the War
Production Board.  (No, the job had nothing to do with condoms. Condoms
were made of natural rubber, but if used properly their job was to prevent
production.  Recycling used condoms wouldn't have produced any usable
latex, anyhow, given available technology during WW II.)

Before WW II, most of the gum rubber used in the U.S. came from the
southwest Pacific.  That source was blocked by the Japanese push to
Indonesia and Malaya; such amounts of rubber as we were able to import from
Brazil and Venezuela were not enough to supply our war needs.  Early in the
war, German submarines in the Atlantic made it almost as hard to import
rubber from South America as it was to get any from Malaya. The U.S.
response was to reduce civilian use of rubber. That was largely
accomplished by very strict rationing applied to the sale of new tires.
Gasoline rationing was instituted at the same time, both to cut down on the
use of resources to move oil to refineries and to conserve rubber by
reducing the use of automobiles.    Used tires became a major source of
material for manufacturing such things as the shims between a tank or truck
body and its bolted-on superstructure.  The major job of the Office of the
Rubber Director was finding ways of getting used tires to the factories
that made tank parts and the like out of them.

In the end, we solved the rubber problem through chemistry. There's a wild
story connected with that.  The secret drive to get synthetic rubber into
production in the U.S. started out with the same level of security as the
Manhattan Project. I think part of the secrecy had to do with insuring that
information would flow mostly one way -- toward the U.S. We got our first
butyl rubber plants into production using German (!) production methods we
obtained through judicious juggling between U.S. corporations and their
subsidiaries in Germany.  Part of the price we paid was that U.S.
corporations provided major support for the German war machine all through
the war. After the war, the U.S. corporations whose activities in Germany
helped keep Hitler in power asked for and received compensation from the
U.S. for the damage their German factories suffered under Allied bombing
attacks.  (I don't know all the companies involved. I do know that the Ford
Motor Corporation provided the raw materials for an awful lot of tires used
by the Wehrmacht. . .  and Ford was one of the companies that received U.S.
government compensation for bombing losses to their German factories.)

-- mike salovesh   <m-salovesh-9 at alumni.uchicago.edu>   PEACE !!!

        IN MEMORIAM:     Peggy Salovesh
        25 January 1932 -- 3 March 2001



Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
>
>    When I went (years ago) to take my LSAT, my father called it the LSMFT.  Those ads are in every NYHT issue in 1946.
>    From the NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE, 14 September 1946, pg. 4, col. 5:
>
> _George Washington Hill Dies;_
> _Head of American Tobacco Co._
> -----------------------------
> _Pioneer in Advertising of_
>    _Cigarettes Pushed Lucky_
>    _Strike Sales With Slogans_
> (...)  Lucky Strike cigarettes set the style for cigarette advertising as it is today, and Mr. Hill was the indisputable creator of that advertising.
> (...)
>    His first major act, when he became associated with Lucy Strike, was to invent the slogan, "It's Toasted."
> (...)
>    "The Best Tunes of All Go to Carnegie Hall," "LS-MFT" (Lucky Stike means fine tobacco) and the gibberish of the tobacco auctioneer with its peculiarly clear refrain, "Sold, American," were more products of his fertile brain.

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