Oak Rubber Company Oak-Hytex Balloons

Below is an except from the forthcoming book.

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The Oak Rubber Company was one of the largest manufacturers of balloons for nearly 80 years, and a Disney licensee for 33 of those years.

Oak Rubber Company was founded by Paul Colette and John Shira in Akron, OH in 1916, but moved to Ravenna, OH the following year, which was already a rubber manufacturing center in Ohio.  The company started out, as most companies do, with a handful of employees, but grew quickly; this forced the company to expand into new and larger buildings in Ravenna.  But, on March 15, 1920, a fire completely destroyed their factory  as well as several other properties and many feared the company was finished.

Happily, the company reopened in November 1920 with a full complement of 125 workers, and immediately began to produce up to 150,000 balloons per day.  By 1921 company sales were over $1 million dollars, and by 1923 was the second-largest producer of rubber balloons in the country.

Initially producing only pure rubber balloons, in the 1930s they launched the “Oak-Hytex” line, which employed a new process using liquid latex (rubber tree “milk”) for making balloons.  The Hytex line became the predominant brand for all but the most specialized balloons.  Incidentally, Oak-Hytex was also the sole supplier of balloon “bubbles” for Sally Rand’s infamous “Bubble Dance” made famous at the 1934 season of the Chicago World’s Fair.  

The company continued to make balloons and other rubber products until the company closed in 1993.

The Oak Rubber Company received their Disney license in 1934 and held it for 34 years with a small break during WWII.  The company made a wide range of “toy balloons” featuring many Disney characters from the shorts and feature films.  Perhaps their most iconic creation was the Mickey Mouse “head” balloon which they introduced in the mid-to-late 1930s, a balloon that, while no longer produced by Oak Rubber, is still sold in the Disney theme parks today.

The balloons were sold in a variety of styles and packages including counter-top boxes and illustrated card sets.  All the various types of packaging were imprinted with their distinctive yellow and black logo.

The Alice in Wonderland line of toy balloons was released at the time of the film’s original run in 1951 (along with those sold by the Eagle Rubber Company oddly enough).  Prices for individual balloons ranged from $0.05 to $0.25 each, corresponding to $0.52 to $2.61 in today’s dollars.

Balloons

While the balloons themselves are unlikely to exist in anything other than very poor shape, a wide variety of styles, sizes, and sets were sold.  Notice the advertising photos featuring several characters in the ‘head’ style like the famous Mickey balloon.

Display Packaging

Even though most, if not all, of the balloons have not survived, any display cards, boxes, or other packaging may still exist, but I have as yet been unable to locate any.

Tru-Vue

While stereographic (3-D) photography dates back nearly 200 years, it wasn’t until the introduction of Tru-Vue that the format became more streamlined and compact, as it utilized film rather than prints to create the stereo view.  Throughout the 1940s and 1950s subjects were primarily scenes of a travel-related or educational nature, although other scenes based on popular comic strips and comic books were available too such as Blondie, Buck Rogers, and Captain Marvel.  As  they continued to add more subjects geared towards children, titles expanded to include Disney, Howdy Doody, Red Ryder, and other western subjects.

In 1950 Tru-View began producing color films for the first time, partly in response to Sawyer’s competing View-Master product, which had been in color since its 1938 introduction.  The color process selected by Tru-Vue was Ansco, which at the time was more economical than Kodak and provided the needed color reproduction demanded by Ford Motor Company for its promotional film strips.  However Ansco color is not very stable and most films turned magenta over the years, the exception sometimes being cartoon subjects.

Tru-Vue acquired its Disney license in 1950 and held it through 1956.  At the time Tru-Vue was in the process of transitioning from black & white to color, so titles would sometimes appear in both formats. 

 

The Alice films were sold during the original release of the film in 1951, during not only the transition from black and white to color, but also from Tru-Vue’s Rock Island plant to Sawyer’s Beaverton plant.  When one compares the product information contained in the Character Merchandise Division catalog with the actual products themselves, you can see the transition as the company is list in Rock Island in promotional material but Beaverton on product packaging.  One can only imagine the the logistical nightmare of manufacturing, marketing, and selling Alice and all the other products during this time.

The black & white Film (B 51) was issued with the standard red and white box, the black and white film consists of ten scenes, down from the original 14 scenes in the pre-color days.  The films are a little difficult to look at these days, as the intervening 70+ years tightly wound in their little boxes makes them act like watch springs, recoiling violently with the slightest misstep in handling them.

The color film (X 51) was issued in the standard red, yellow, and blue box, the color film consists of the standard nine scenes.  

Both the black & white and color sets consist of the four sequentially numbered Disney films:  Alice in Wonderland (51), Bambi (52), Donald Duck (53), and Mickey Mouse (54) in an illustrated box featuring Donald Duck holding a Tru-Vue viewer.