To honor Oscar Mayer’s passing yesterday at age 95, here’s an original 1952 Wienerwhistle, 1 and 3/4 inches long and plenty of toot left. In the 50’s these were given away at Wienermobile appearances and in ’58 were packaged with the wienies themselves. In ’64, Wienerwhistles were sold in vending machines at the New York World’s Fair for two cents each.

What’s really bizarre is that I’ve looked at this Weinerwhistle everyday on the window ledge in my kitchen for years. Since I’ve been doing Kitsch O’ The Day, 115 days now, there’s not a day that’s passed that I haven’t thought ‘I should do the Wienerwhistle.’ Yesterday, before I learned that Oscar Mayer had passed away and despite having already written my Fat Superman Kitsch O’ The Day post, I got the sudden urge to finally write about the whistle. After I finished it I decided to go with Fat Superman anyway as I realized I had just done a hot dog post last Saturday for July 4th. After I uploaded it I went to my Facebook home page to make sure Fat Superman actually posted – FB has been having TONS of tech malfunctions lately – and there was a post from a friend saying that Oscar Mayer had just passed away within the last hour. I don’t know if it’s me or my Wienerwhistle that has psychic powers but something was going on somewhere…

More Weinerwhistles: Later repro versions had a yellow paper label and a little car base for the dog to rest on.

Then there’s this one from 1988, a whole package of wienies and enough holes to play the Oscar Mayer theme song:

2004 spotting of the updated Wienermobile on the 101N. freeway in LA:

1965 commercial for the dogs:

RIP Oscar Mayer. Long live your wieners.