T-Shirt Printing

In 1942, the U.S. Navy delivered specifications for the T-shirt to each of its
underwear suppliers, thus insuring that each of the hundreds of thousands of men who
served aboard ship in World War II would become intimately familiar with this garment
before they again saw civilian life.

"I'm not sure why the Navy specified the T-shirt," said Clarence Abernathy, vice
president of marketing for Russell Corp.'s knit apparel division. "Maybe it was just
the fact that it was a snow-white garment and it looked crisp and clean."

Abernathy noted that the T-shirt was subsequently picked up by other branches of the
service and that men in each developed the habit of using T's as work garments.

In addition, some evidence exists that military personnel, even at this early date,
were receptive to the idea of printed undershirts.

John H. Neal, for instance, acquired his first printed T-shirt in about 1944 while
stationed in New Guinea with the 511th parachute Infantry Regiment, 11th Airborne
Division. Neal, now executive vice president of marketing for Stedman Corp., brought
the shirt from a comrade who had established his own T-shirt printing business in the
jungle.

"A member of my company created a design and printed the shirt, probably using a
stencil, and sold them to fellow troopers," said Neal. The Stedman executive did not
recall the shirt's price, but noted it was more popular than the trinkets which
Australian soldiers were making out of spent cartridge casings.

"He definitely had a lock on the printed T-shirt market in that area of the South
Pacific," said Neal, who wore his shirt through the rest of the war and again during
the Korean War. He still has it in his collection of memorabilia.

More organized were the marketing efforts of Champion which, according to Lipson,
found a market for T-shirts imprinted with the names of the various military camps.
The shirts were, he explained, stocked at the camps' post exchanges (PX). Lipson
theorized that the printed T-shirt may have been carried into the armed forces by men
who picked up the custom on college campuses.

After the war, men kept wearing T-shirts, although most were blank. Moreover,
according to Mendelsohn, civilian society wasn't as receptive to the garment as
outerwear as the military had been. The T-shirt went out of sight -- back under dress
shirts -- until 1951, when Marlon Brando helped spruce up its image.

During this period, kids apparently had all the fun. Davy Crockett and Roy Rogers
were the heroes in the late 1940s and child-size T-shirts were printed with the
likenesses of both. Champion was an early licensee for the Roy Rogers theme and
Allison Manufacturing bought the rights to produce a pint-size Joe Dimaggio shirt in
1947.

Because people at this time did not view T-shirts worn alone as appropriate adult
garb, they even used their children as political billboards. According to Mendelsohn,
the earliest T-shirt in the Smithsonian collection is a "Dew It With Dewey" shirt
printed for the 1948 Truman-Dewey presidential race. Later shirts supported Dwight
Eisenhower (1952), John F. Kennedy (1960) and Lyndon Johnson (1964). All, Mendelsohn
said, are in child's sizes.

Brando helped carry the craze to adults when he played the role of Stanley Kowalski
-- in his undershirt -- in the 1951 film, "A Streetcar Named Desire." Essentially, he
started a craze among young people and trend-followers, not among older, more
established types. According to one industry observer, these early T-shirt wearers
may have been the same sort who today wear ripped sweat shirts and dye their hair
purple.

No matter: The T-shirt was on the loose.

T-Shirt Printing brings you these weekly Bible verses:

Revelation 1

Greetings and doxology
 4 John,
      To the seven churches in the province of Asia:
   Grace and peace to you from him who is, and who was, and who is to come, and from the seven spirits before his throne,

5 and from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.
   To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood,

6 and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father - to him be glory and power for ever and ever! Amen.
 
7 Look, he is coming with the clouds,
      and every eye will see him,
   even those who pierced him;
      and all the peoples of the earth will mourn because of him. So shall it be! Amen.

     8 "I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, "who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty."