Hadacol Caravan Show advertisement, Times-Picayune
period advertisement · 1951
LINK
SUMMARY
A full-page newspaper advertisement for the Hadacol Caravan Show, its masthead identifying it as page twenty-eight of the New Orleans Times-Picayune of Wednesday, August 15, 1951, reproduced inside the LeBlanc Corporation's own promotional comic book Captain Hadacol No. 2 (circa 1951). The comic book is digitized and held at the Internet Archive (identifier Captain_Hadacol_2_circa_1951, usage Public Domain Mark 1.0; the item description gives Dudley 'Coozan Dud' Joseph LeBlanc, Sr., 16 August 1894 - 22 October 1971, as creator and the LeBlanc Corporation, Lafayette, Louisiana, as publisher). The Internet Archive item is used here as the holding record per the routine's preference for a direct holding record over a Commons-only file; the specific page image used as case media is hosted on Wikimedia Commons (File:Hadacol_Carvan_Show_Captain_Hadacol_2.jpg, uploaded by Infrogmation on June 17, 2019, tagged public domain on the basis that the work was published in the U.S. 1931-1963 with no copyright renewal found), which is noted here for the license/file-history record. Direct visual inspection of the downloaded, full-resolution image (via the Read/view-image tool) confirms the advertisement's own text: a headline inviting readers to see Senator LeBlanc's sensational new Hadacol Caravan Show runs directly beside/beneath a half-tone portrait of a balding, bespectacled man -- the ad's own layout and adjacent text is the basis for identifying the pictured figure as Sen. LeBlanc, since the archive record itself names him immediately next to the portrait. The ad advertises fourteen acts including named performers Cesar Romero, Jack Dempsey, Hank Williams, Rudy Vallee, Minnie Pearl, and Candy Candido, plus a Dorothy Dorben Adorables dance act, jugglers, magicians, fifty beauty queens, and a fireworks display; states that admission cannot be bought with money and requires complete Hadacol box tops alone; lists prizes (a Shetland pony, a Schwinn-built bicycle, a $25 U.S. Savings Bond) for children who turn in the most Hadacol box tops; and gives the New Orleans-area tour schedule (New Iberia Aug. 15, Thibodaux Aug. 16, City Park Stadium [New Orleans] Aug. 17, Hammond Aug. 18, Biloxi Aug. 19).
NOTES
This August 15, 1951 Times-Picayune advertisement is the case’s artifact-role media and its most direct documentary source for the Hadacol Caravan’s box-top admission mechanic, its touring performer roster, and its identification of Dudley LeBlanc as the show’s public face. Every fact drawn from it and reported in the case body (the performer list, the admission mechanic, the prize list, the tour schedule) was read directly from the full-resolution downloaded image, not from a search-tool summary or the Commons uploader’s paraphrase field. It is reported here and in the case body in indirect/paraphrased style rather than as quoted spans, since the source is a directly viewed image rather than a fetchable web page a verify-quotes block could mechanically confirm.