Columnist David Allen roots around the history of the well-dressed mascot, who debuted in 1948 as Porky and in the 1980s was briefly redesigned as a female and then a barnyard male.
He’s the cheerful cartoon pig in suit and tie who has been a mascot of the L.A. County Fair, off and on, since 1948.Along the way he’s changed his name, his fashion sense and even his gender, and also disappeared for long stretches.. In advance of the opening, he was the star of many of the fair’s social media posts. A costumed version of Thummer made public appearances, including at a Pomona Art Walk, to invite people to the fair.
1948 was the first fair after the grounds closed for wartime uses. A crush of visitors was expected and they were encouraged to share vehicles, a message the ride-thumbing pig helped promote.Didn’t the world already have a cartoon pig in a suit named Porky? It did.debuted on the big screen in 1935 and had appeared in dozens of Warner Bros. cartoons by the time the county fair came up with its own pig named Porky. We’ll come back to that.
“He created wooden signs that were 6 feet high and were stationed along the road to the fair to point people to the parking lots,” Andrew Kopp, the Cal Poly archivist, tells me.Some 100,000 decals with the character were distributed. According to a Pomona Progress-Bulletin story dug up for me by the Public Library’s Allan Lagumbay, so were “500,000 attractive, four-color cocktail napkins,” distributed throughout Southern California.
It wasn’t a clean break. A Progress-Bulletin story about the 1952 fair reported that “a million napkins bearing the familiar ‘Porkey’” were given out, with the next paragraph stating that “some 90,000 ‘Thummer’ buttons were distributed to children.” The Porky name showed up in a few Prog stories as late as 1958.
In 1988, the character’s 40th anniversary, he was lured from retirement. The fair had surveyed its employees over which Thummer they preferred: Country Pig or City Pig?
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