Vintage 1990s Coca-Cola "Your Thirst Takes Wings" Promo Card 🥤 Commemorative

Remember Your Thirst Takes Wings? ✈️ "Your Thirst Takes Wings" Coca-Cola Aviatrix Promo, Early 1990s

Size: 5 1/4" x 3 1/4" ~ Little to no wear.

This is a vintage early-1990s Coca-Cola commemorative promotional piece reproducing one of Coke's great old billboards. A woman aviator in a white flight suit, leather helmet and goggles holds up a bottle of Coke beside a big wooden propeller, with the red Drink Coca-Cola, Delicious and Refreshing disc on one side and "Your thirst takes wings" on the other, all inside a green billboard frame over a slatted green fence. It shows the whole billboard, frame and stand and all, just the way you'd have seen it alongside the road. For a couple of years in the early 1990s, Coke pushed out many promotional items with Amelia, and these are some of the ones still around.

This item comes in four different styles: one is a sticker, one is on paper, one is on cardstock, and one is printed on a plastic sheet. Pick the one you want from the choices. The stickers, while not tested, appear to be in good condition, but adhesive is often the first thing to deteriorate on vintage items. If stored improperly for a while in heat and humidity, it won't be long before it's ruined. Thankfully, with me, they are safe for now, as I keep everything in the dark at 35% humidity and a maximum of 72 degrees.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• Drink Coca-Cola, Delicious and Refreshing
• "Your thirst takes wings"

✈️ The 1941 Ad

The picture goes back to a 1941 Coca-Cola ad, "Your thirst takes wings," which Coca-Cola's own archives describe as documenting the important role of women aviators as war became imminent. Collectors credit the illustration to Bradshaw Crandell, and one family's story is that their Aunt Sally was the model. The credit isn't a stretch. Crandell, born in Glens Falls, New York in 1896, was a top magazine cover artist known as the "artist of the stars," painting covers for Collier's, the Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan, and he had already painted a Coca-Cola serving tray in 1938. It's long been called the Amelia Earhart ad, and that's how these early-1990s pieces were sold, even though Earhart had disappeared four years before it ran.

🌍 Amelia Earhart

Amelia Mary Earhart was born July 24, 1897, in Atchison, Kansas. In 1928 she became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air, as a passenger, and in 1932 she was the first woman to fly it nonstop and solo. She set many other records, wrote best-selling books about her flying, was one of the first aviators to promote commercial air travel, and was the first president of the Ninety-Nines, the women pilots' organization she helped found. She did real endorsements too, for Lucky Strike cigarettes, for luggage, and for a line of clothes sold at Macy's. So a Coca-Cola ad with a woman flyer getting tagged as "the Amelia ad" is easy to understand, even though her name appears nowhere on it. On July 2, 1937, she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean while trying to become the first woman pilot to fly around the world, and she was declared dead on January 5, 1939. She's been an American icon ever since.

🏡 Display

It's a great piece for a Coca-Cola collection, a pilot, or anybody who loves Amelia, and it looks sharp framed in an office, a hangar or a kitchen. Vintage advertising like this ends up framed in collections and on museum walls, and the supply is finite. Once these last ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.