Pete Hawley: Betsy Bell Ushers In the 60's

Scroll back through this week's posts and look closely at Pete Hawley's many Jantzen ads. Once you regain your composure from the sight of all those gorgeous gals in their unmentionables you'll notice those ads often featured cute little kids and critters - not exactly co-starring - but certainly acting in a supporting role.


As Hawley's Jantzen girls began to bow out at the end of the 50's it was his affinity for drawing cute characters that increasingly took centre stage with his clients.

Around 1958 Pete Hawley began working on a new, long series of ads for a major national account: he created a little cutie named 'Betsy Bell' for the Bell Telephone System.


She must have been extremely popular, because for the next several years Bell regularly called on Hawley to create more Betsy ads.


As mentioned often on this blog, the 60's was a time of tremendous change in the illustration business. Television was increasingly grabbing available ad dollars and the diminished surviving magazines increasingly turned to photography for visual content.

Illustrators with contemporary styles could still grab the attention of art directors, but the market for traditional illustration simply no longer existed.


Many illustrators who had been wildly successful during the 40's and 50's doing art for magazines and print advertising found themselves out in the cold. As one of those veteran artists with twenty-plus years of professional experience under his belt, one might expect that Pete Hawley would be one of those illustrators struggling to compete in the new order of things.


In fact he continued to be consistently busy.

Frustratingly, the 60's decade is the one of which we have the least specific detail about Hawley's business arrangements. I don't know if he was still working with his old rep, Betty Irely, or with someone he'd met at Stephan Lion Inc., or with another completely unknown salesperson...


After all those years in the business, he may have simply been so well established that he could rely on his network of clients to keep coming back with new assignments...


Whatever the case, Hawley managed to continue to do high profile advertising art.


Beginning in the early 50's, he'd connected with the film industry and begun doing movie posters, like this one from 1953...


... and this from 1954.


That relationship continued into the 1960's. Here's a poster Pete Hawley did in 1963. How many posters he did over the years is unclear, but once again, it was a long (and no doubt enviably lucrative) relationship with a major account.


In 1964 Pete and Micky Hawley packed up their clan and moved across the country to a beautiful home on the outskirts of Sedona, Arizona. Pete had visited Sedona with a buddy on an earlier occasion and had fallen in love with the arid climate and wide open spaces.


Pete's granddaughter, Shelley, provided this photo of the Hawley family home. That's Pete's studio just beyond the patio railing. Shelley remembers, "My grandpa had a studio off the kitchen with it's own bathroom. It had windows all the way around it. When you'd open the door, you'd have to step down 2 steps. It always smelled like Old Spice and paint."


Despite the remote location (and remember, this was long before fax machines and FedEx!) Hawley maintained a busy schedule with his many clients, including RCA Records.


Shelley recalls, "When I was a kid we used to get in his Jeep and go with him to the post office..."


"Everybody knew him so well at the post office!"


"At the time I thought it was just that sort of 'small town' thing... now I realize it was because he was constantly mailing away finished jobs."


She concludes, "I guess I wish we'd talked more about his work, but as my Grandpa it was going for walks, collecting rocks & flowers, riding around town in his red Jeep -- you know, kid/grandpa stuff. As a teenager you get selfish and want to talk about yourself and boys... We walked a lot and talked about life in general, but I never asked for details about his work. He was either in the studio working or he was with us, out of the work mode."

* Many thanks to Shelley Nugent for all her invaluable assistance with this week's series on her grandpa, Pete Hawley.

* Thanks as well to Shane Glines of Cartoon Retro for generously allowing me to use several of his Pete Hawley scans today.

* My Pete Hawley Flickr set.