This is it! The last campaign commercial you have to watch this year! Don't worry if you've already cast your ballot, though you missed your chance to weigh in on the Ohio Tax Increase for School Foundation Program Initiative, also known as Initiative 1, about 55 years go.
This campaign commercial was made for the Ohio Council of Education by Cinecraft, Inc in 1965. Founded in 1939, the Cleveland-based Cinecraft is the country's longest-surviving commercial producer of industrial and sponsored motion pictures, a sector that included thousands of companies at its high point during the mid 20th century.
The commercial urged voters to support Ohio State Issue 1 on the November 2, 1965 ballot. The issue would have increased the state sales tax by 1% to raise additional money for public schools. It was rejected. Just over 68% of voters apparently also didn't care if Paul Whitcomb stayed in school to learn all that history and poetry and stuff.
In 2018, Hagley acquired the Culley family collection of Cinecraft Productions audiovisual materials (Accession 2018.20), which offers an introduction to Cinecraft's history and samples of their productions from the company's first thirty years (you can explore that collection online by clicking here).
We've recently added to that acquisition by bringing Cinecraft's film archive into our collections. This new collection is the largest motion picture film collection ever acquired by Hagley and will make the Library a destination for researchers of visual culture and the history of industrial films for many years to come. As far as we can tell, it is one of the largest intact collections from an industrial film producer to survive from an era when thousands of businesses specialized in advertising, industrial, and sponsored films. The paper portion of the Cinecraft Productions collection is now fully processed and a finding aid is available online.
We will also be processing and digitizing a significant portion of this film collection over a ten-year period. For now, you can explore our Digital Archive of the collection in progress, which includes about 100 films as well as scripts and still images, by clicking here.