I know that when I suffer from leprosy, lunacy, gout, the shivers, the shuffles, and the loss of my immortal soul — among other almost daily afflictions — I really won’t feel comfortable being rushed to the hospital unless I am in the protection of an ARMORED ambulance. After all, you just don’t know what kind of hooligans and assassins may be lying in wait, just waiting to cause you harm when you are at your most helpless.
That, I think, seems to be the logic behind a series of ads that J.T. Hinton & Sons began to run in the mid-1920s. The interesting advertisement shown here, in fact, was published in the 1927 edition of The Lantern, the yearbook of The Hutchison School, which seems a rather strange place to put it. Not exactly the demographic for ambulances, is it?
Now first of all, J.T. Hinton & Sons was mainly a FUNERAL HOME, and I’ve complained before about what I consider a conflict of interest. Would it really be in their best interest, I have fretted, for the ambulance drivers to deliver you to the hospital safely — and therefore lose a perfectly good, perfectly DEAD funeral home customer?
But I digress. Hinton, competing with many other ambulance and funeral companies in Memphis, hit upon a rather unique marketing plan. As the ad says, they already operate “The World’s Finest and Safest Ambulances.” Not just in Memphis, mind you, but IN THE ENTIRE WORLD.
And now, they provide you with “the first and ONLY Armored Ambulance in the World.”
