Mettez-y le tigre!
The photo was taken on an October morning, as my visiting German pal and fellow photog Hans-Gerd and I were walking past some trucking terminal buildings in Brooklyn’s Red Hook on our way to shooting the old derelict grain terminal that sits at the mouth of the Gowanus Canal
I’m always amazed at all the trivia one’s brain can amass among all those little nooks and crannies of gray matter. But I’m never too surprised while out shooting, or editing images afterwards, when those silly little synapses start firing off and bringing back travel memories decades old (as I try to remember what I was doing ten minutes ago).
Back in the ’60s, Humble Oil Company, parent of Esso and Enco gasoline brands (prior to their becoming Exxon), had a very successful and long running advertising campaign. I think it was just for the high-octane blends (to distinguish the “power” fuel from others), but perhaps it extended across the range. No matter…
Humble/Esso/Enco’s mascot was a happy and very athletic looking tiger, and the slogan was “Put a Tiger in your Tank.” That tiger was…everywhere…in the brands’ print, radio, and television advertising. And he was emblazoned on the company’s gas stations and on the fronts of their Gilbarco pumps (told you I was big on trivia!) with their rotating mechanical dials for gallons dispensed and dollars you’d dispense before driving away.
Of plush tiger tails…
Part of the advertising was a promotional item — a plush orange and black tiger tail that some would affix to their fuel tank door, evoking some of the ads showing a car speeding off with tiger-power. There were probably promotional plush full-tigers as well!
If you’re wondering, no, I never attached a “tail” to the tail of my luscious black Ford Galaxie 500 convertible.
But a kind of Cheshire cat grin does often appear when I remember my first visit to French Canada as a sprout, in 1965. There, in Québec City, one was very much aware of the insistence on the use of French in advertising of products heretofore known by their Anglo names (or, at very least, the addition of a proper French article!). I remember turning on the radio in my hotel room and hearing fast-paced ads, most of which were beyond my high school grasp of the language, but the product they were hawking did get my bouche to watering — “le Smoked Meat.”
And what brings the biggest grin (and which I wish I had photographed!) was the plush orange and black tiger tail I saw “sticking out” of the fuel tank of a (probably Canadian-built) sleek Pontiac Bonneville (well, actually it would have been a “Parisienne”) …and a sticker above it proclaiming Mettez-y le tigre — literally, “Put the tiger in here,” a variant on the main advertising thrust in French areas of Canada “Mettez un tigre dans votre moteur.”
Perhaps it lost a bit in the transmission — oops, I mean translation, don’t I? — as I could better envision the tiger fortifying the essence dans le tank than his getting minced up into tigre en brochette by hot pistons at 2,000 rpm and getting his whiskers singed by the sparking Autolites.
Adieu, M le Tigre, et merci pour les souvenirs.
©2019 Steve Ember
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