1941 Hein Brothers Plumbing Advertising Washer Card 🔧 Manitowoc Wisconsin

Size: 6.5 x 3.5 inches ~ Original washers intact. They vary a little one to the next.

🚚 The Truck With Real Rubber Tires

I love a good gimmick, and this might be my favorite kind: useful. This mustard-yellow card belongs to Hein Brothers Plumbing of Manitowoc, Wisconsin - a grinning delivery driver at the wheel of his truck printed across the front, and instead of drawing the tires, three real rubber hose washers are mounted right onto the card in their place. Hang it by the hole at the top, by the sink or the back door, and you had a standing supply of spare hose washers, dressed up as a little truck so you'd actually keep it around instead of losing it in a drawer.

🔧 Save This Card, Remove a Tire

The card tells you exactly what to do, right across the bottom: "Save this card and remove a tire when you need a washer for your hose." A garden hose washer hardens and starts to weep at the coupling eventually, and instead of a trip to the hardware store, you pulled a "tire" off the truck and screwed it on. Meanwhile Hein Brothers' name, their services, and their phone number sat on your wall the whole time, waiting for the day something bigger than a hose needed a plumber. Plumbing fixtures and heating equipment sold, installed, and repaired; electric sewer cleaning; water softeners; automatic water heaters - it's all printed right there on the truck's panel, along with the shop's address at 1315 So. 10th St. and the line to call: "For Prompt Service Phone - 5866." Four digits was plenty for a town the size of Manitowoc.

🗂️ Not Just Hein Brothers' Idea

Here's the part I find genuinely interesting: Hein Brothers didn't dream this truck up themselves. The card is copyrighted 1941 by Ross Mfg. Co. of Kansas City, Missouri, an advertising-specialty house that sold this exact washer-truck design as a stock item and imprinted it with whatever local business ordered it. The same truck, the same washers, the same gag turns up today wearing a utility company's name out in Lodi, California, and a plumber's in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Ross was selling this idea to small shops all over the country, and Hein Brothers of Manitowoc is the imprint that happens to have landed in my hands.

⚓ Manitowoc's Own Big Year

1941 was a big year to be in Manitowoc for reasons that had nothing to do with plumbing. That June, the Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company laid the keel of USS Peto, the first submarine the yard would build for the Navy - the same year stamped on this card. Because the Manitowoc River was too narrow for a normal stern-first launch, Peto went into the water sideways the following April, with the whole town turned out to watch. By the time the war was over, the yard had built 28 submarines, each one floated down the rivers to New Orleans to reach open water. So while Hein Brothers was cleaning sewers and fixing water heaters on South 10th Street, across town Manitowoc was quietly becoming one of the more unlikely submarine-building towns in America.

🪧 Still a Manitowoc Name

There's a plumbing company carrying the Hein name working in Manitowoc today - same surname, same trade, same town. Small towns are like that.