1922 Zenith Television Calender
 

I didn't know Zenith was selling TV in 1922. If you believe this add they had Jenkins and Baird beat by a couple of years.

http://cgi.ebay.com/1922-ADVERTISING...QQcmdZViewItem

Commander Eugene F. McDonald, Jr., was a man before his time, that's for sure, but even HE couldn't pull off selling TVs before they were invented...

I really don't think so....IMO...

It's probably one of those old-timey calendars where 1922 corolates with a year like 1975 or something, so you can still use it. Of course years later, it would confound an ebayer.

"TEL-945-0891"

....a standard 7 digit phone number in 1922? Hmmmmmm.

Yeah, I agree; it's a "retro" fake-up, probably from the 70's or so. Aside from the 7-digit numeric phone number, I think one big clue is the "generic period advertising collage" in the background. There's no way a *real* 1922 advertising calendar is going to feature ads for other products like that. At least it's not a cheezy as most fakes though.

That's obviously a much later ad with a 1922 calendar stapled onto it. Look how much better shape the calendar is than the ad.

Charles

I suspect the "ad" is itself a collage made of other things pasted together. The colored picture of a flapper looks like something cut out of a magazine, while the rest looks like faded newsprint.

And why would any television store publish an ad showing obsolete non-TV products like that 1920s Chandler auto?

Early TV advertising was all about the whiz-bang world of the future, not the past. Those ads showed dishy babes wearing contemporary clothes, posing next to TVs, not mincing around in Aunt Gertie's old flapper costume with no TVs in sight.

I'm guessing that the piece with "Chatham Television Store" was cut out and pasted onto the background, which might also be a collage, or simply a newspaper advertising page from the 1920s.

Chatham is a tiny town on the far edge of Cape Cod. It's hard to imagine such a little village supporting a TV store earlier than the late 1940s, if not later. Chandler autos were made in Cleveland and the company croaked in 1929. I doubt that those two pieces ever appeared in the same newspaper.

The whole thing is a creation of someone sitting around bored in antique mall, with a pile of old magazines and newspapers, scissors, and a pot of Elmer's :-)

Phil Nelson

Lots of stuff like this cranked out around the time of the bicentennial. I don't think it was made to deceive, just made to be nostalgic back in the seventies by some calendar company. You can probably buy about the same thing today if you look hard enough. Did you know you can buy an old-fashioned Ramon's calendar with your name stamped on it?