THE BAMBEANO

Babe Ruth went by many names: the Sultan of Swat, the King of Swing, the King of Crash, the Big Fellow, the Caliph of Clout, the Colossus of Clout, the Big Bam, the Behemoth of Bust, the Titan of Terror, the Bambino, the Great Bambino.

But here’s a new one: “the Bambeano.” We invented it after coming across an old gunny sack for beans in our basement that we’d forgotten about which we bought a few years earlier in Iowa.

The sack sported an image of the Yankee great and was labeled “Bambino Pinto Beans.”

It held 100 pounds of beans and was one of about a thousand sacks made around 1960 by the Bambino Bean Company of Mingo, Kansas.

Mingo is a tiny unincorporated community in the northwest part of the state where homesteaders once lived in sod houses. It had a post office until 1940, and other than the weather — hot summers and cold winters — there’s not much to say about Mingo.

That the Babe’s image should appear on a bean sack was probably not surprising. Long before publicity agents and modern marketing techniques, Ruth was his own marketing machine. He was “the first marketing superstar” as one advertising executive described him.

He understood the importance of the media, knew how to merchandise himself and didn’t need agents or publicists to make himself a household name.

It also didn’t hurt that he loved kids.

Said one sports writer, “Ruth did it all by himself, always with a keen and underestimated eye.”

How else to explain the avalanche of endorsements that came his way. They run the gamut from cereals and candy bars to soft drinks and underwear.

Among the endorsements were those for at least four or five different kinds of tobacco. (The Babe died of throat cancer.)

Absent from all the endorsements, however, are Bambino Pinto Beans which brings us to the point of this article. Whether Ruth would have been impressed by having his image emblazoned on a gunny sack is unknown.

He died in 1948, long before the Bambino Bean Company began manufacturing Bambino Pinto Bean sacks in 1960.

What is clear is that Ruth’s descendants were definitely not impressed and went to court to put a stop to it. In a lawsuit, the estate demanded that the company cease and desist, charging that it had never been authorized to use their ancestor’s image for advertising.

The court agreed and it wasn’t long afterwards that the Bambino Bean Company folded and went out of business. A few sacks are still around, however. If you are lucky like we were, you might come across one in an antique store. Or you can go on-line where a few sell from $39.95 to $125, pinto beans not included.

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