The heart-leaf is both rich to the taste and kind to the throat.
This ad reads like a newspaper article entitled “I reckon there ain’t a Cough in a Field-ful of these!” This title is a play on the popular Old Gold slogan, “not a cough in a carload.” Half of the page is dedicated to a photograph of an American Southern tobacco planter examining the center leaves of his tobacco plants. The ad explains that the center leaves, the “heart-leaves,” are as smooth as ”the heart of a Virginia ham!” and that the “throat bite” comes from the top “gummy” leaves. Lucky Strike took a similar approach at the time, claiming they used “only the center leaves.” This ad also attacks a common Lucky Strike campaign, “Reach for a Lucky instead of a Sweet.” The copy text offers an alternative: “Eat a chocolate, light an Old Gold…and enjoy both.” In this case, the ad insists, you can have your cake and eat it, too. This particular advertisement is the third of a series of Old Gold ads which seeks first-hand stories from “Tobacco Planters of the Sunny South.”
Cough, Health, Throat
