Saturday, August 6, 2011

More Dealer Decal BS

More pissing away time looking for dealer decal stuff. First I found this site completely dedicated to vintage dealer decals. Some cool stuff there for sure but of course nothing Albuquerque related.

Then I found this employment classified ad in the "Help Wanted" section of the the "American Motorcyclist" October 1958:

Triumph motorcycle mechanic wanted. Tired of living in cold sloppy weather? Want to come to the great southwest? Albuquerque, N. M., one of the nation's fastest growing cities. Give age, experience and references. SIMONSON CYCLE CO. 401 2nd St SW., Albuquerque, N. M. Chapel 3-7647.

Cool. Near the right time period. I then went after anything Simonson Cycle Co. to see if I could get a better idea of their typical design style.

From Santa Fe New Mexican Pub. Corp., 1933. Unfortunately the ad is from a limited view publication and is partially chopped off.



Next, ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL April 16, 1967.



Some design elements remain consistent throughout.

I still don't really have any idea if Simonson actually handled Triumph in 1951 or not. The Google Books "American Motorcyclist" issues don't go back far enough to dig further. If anyone reading this has better ad resources I'd welcome any input.

It looks like Simonson had three locations over the 30 year span I found stuff for. I decided to use the October 1958 address and phone number given the lack of better information.

Here's my first stab at a decal layout. I'm not too terribly stoked about it. My wife is a pretty amazing professional graphic designer. When I'm more sure what I have is right I might have to beg for her help. She is absolutely incredible when it comes to emulating period graphic styles.





Huge waste of time but it was kinda fun.

So where is 401 2nd St SW Anyway? Corner of 2nd and Lead.


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UPDATE - I found a little more... a Albuquerque Journal , May 9, 1954 ad shows "1954 TRIUMPH TIGER PERFORMANCE PLUS 1930 953 TRIUMPH TIGER A VARIETY OP USED 1 PRICKS AND SIZES SIMONSON CYCLE CO 401 SECOND ST SW" This confirms Simonson carried Triumph in 1954 and was at the 401 Second SW location.

3 comments:

Flathead45 said...

Most of the time, when I have seen an alphanumeric telephone number, the relevant letters only are Capitalized:

ATlantic 7-6756

Seems like a project I would do. Pretty cool.

BitMonkey said...

I agree and fixed the Ph vs Tel. I tried the CHapel. I don't care for the way the mixed case looks. It doesn't match the style of Simonson's other print stuff very well IMO.

Flathead45 said...

I agree, but I tried creating one using all upper case, just smaller font for the lower case letters. I thought that worked pretty well.

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