Antique 1920s BF Goodrich Sport Shoes Advertising Ink Blotter 👟 Grand Gorge NY

Size: 5 3/4" x 3 1/2" ~ Little to no wear. They vary a little one to the next.

🖋️ "Play in Goodrich Sport Shoes"

This is an advertising ink blotter for B.F. Goodrich's line of canvas sport shoes, and it still carries all the punch of its original print run. Across a midnight-blue ground it reads "Play in 'Goodrich SPORT SHOES," Goodrich set in gold script, with the pitch underneath: "Unequalled for perfect fit and real comfort. Try on a pair today." Down on the orange band at the foot is the local merchant's name who handed these out to his customers: "R. B. DRAFFEN, Grand Gorge, New York." Flip it over and the whole back is soft pink blotting paper - that was the actual job of the thing, a giveaway that sat on a desk and picked up ink before the ballpoint pen came along.

The artwork shows two children dressed up in fringed play costumes and feathered headdresses next to a painted tipi - the older one has a hand up shading his eyes like he's watching for something out on the horizon, and the younger one, in a long feathered bonnet, is crouched up front holding a little toy hatchet. Playground make-believe, in bold poster colours.

👟 B.F. Goodrich and the Road to the Sneaker

Benjamin Franklin Goodrich (1841-1888) founded the company in Akron, Ohio, in 1870 as Goodrich, Tew & Co., after the citizens there made him an offer he took them up on - the start of what grew into The B.F. Goodrich Company and one of the great American rubber names. Rubber was the whole business, and it wasn't long before that expertise ended up on people's feet: rubber-soled canvas sport shoes became a real Goodrich line, and by the 1920s the company was working on children's shoes too - exactly the audience this blotter's artwork was aimed at.

Goodrich kept building on the idea. In 1933 the company, with Hyman L. Witman, patented the "Posture Foundation" arch insole, and by 1937 the shoes built around it were being sold as "P.F." - the direct ancestor of the PF Flyer, a name that outlived Goodrich's own shoe business by decades. Nice to hold a little piece of that family tree.

🪶 How Goodrich Sold "Indian" to Kids

The costume-and-tipi artwork belongs to a specific marketing moment. Through 1929 and 1930, Goodrich ran magazine ads for its Sport Shoes starring "Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance" under the line "Train the Indian way" - a shoe supposedly designed by a Blackfoot chief. Long Lance was a genuine celebrity of his time: a bestselling author whose memoir Long Lance came out in 1928, and a film star in The Silent Enemy. He was also Sylvester Clark Long of Winston-Salem, North Carolina - not a Blackfoot chief's son at all - and he was exposed as an impostor during the making of that film. The story that came to me with these ties them to Jim Thorpe, the Sac and Fox athlete who won the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics and was the most famous Native American sportsman alive in the years Goodrich was selling its sport shoes "the Indian way."

Nothing on this card names him - it's two kids playing dress-up by a tipi - but it's the same "Indian" theme Goodrich was selling these shoes on.

🗺️ Grand Gorge, New York

Grand Gorge is a hamlet in the town of Roxbury, Delaware County, up in the northern Catskills. It started out as Moresville, named for the Scottish More family who settled there, and the Ulster & Delaware Railroad reached it in 1872. My favorite part of the story: in 1874 the town voted to rename itself Grand Gorge, because its mail kept getting mixed up with Morrisville, Mohrsville, and Moorestown. I can't blame them - four look-alike names is asking for trouble at the post office.

🏪 R. B. Draffen

The Draffen name was a fixture in Grand Gorge. Draffen's General Store turns up on old postcards of the town, and Samuel John Draffen Sr. (1852-1935) was one of the Grand Gorge Draffens. A blotter like this one was how a small-town merchant kept his name in front of customers - hand it across the counter, and it sat on somebody's desk doing its job every time they reached for it. That's the whole story printed on it: a shoe ad, two kids playing pretend, and one Catskills merchant's name, still bright orange and blue after a hundred years.