Lowe & Campbell Athletic Goods, 1935 – 1936

I’ve been spending some time working in my paper collection, looking for interesting things to share here.  I bought the catalog above ages ago from Tina at What I Found, and I’m pretty sure that I posted about it at the time.  The problem is, I couldn’t find the post.

If you’ve been reading The Vintage Traveler since before December 2010, you might recall that the blog used to be on another site.  Due to crazy problems with that site, I moved to wordpress in December, 2010, and at that time I had to manually move over my old posts.  It was a bit of a job, and I’m afraid that in the shuffle, some old posts got misplaced.

But that’s good today, because I get to show this off now that I have more than the 20 readers I had on the old site!  And it’s a really good lesson on not judging a book by the cover.   The catalog is illustrated with sports goods and clothing of all types.  Most importantly, there are plenty of offerings for the girl athlete, which shows how much sports were gaining in popularity among girls in the 1930s.

All these pages can be enlarged by clicking.

I loved this page of football jerseys.  These are seriously collectible, especially if the school or athletic organization can be identified.

These hose are simply wonderful.  And I think I know where a pair is located.  Stay tuned.

I included the hooded pullovers mainly because of how this item of clothing is currently being super analyzed by the news media.  In 1935 a hoodie was worn by an athlete to keep them warm while practicing or while standing on the sidelines hoping Coach would send him in.

Note that the second shoe is a Converse All-Star.  Converse first made the All-Star in 1917.

Cute clothes for the pep squad.

Here is the company’s selection of girl’s basketball suits.  These are a very far cry from what girls had to wear just a few years prior, with bloomers to the knee and long sleeved middies.

They even offered a good selection of warm-up suits for girls.

Last week in the comments about the gymsuits, several readers mentioned that they wore tunics with bloomers for gym and field hockey.  Note the two tunic styles above.

This girls’ softball suit is probably my favorite thing in the catalog.

And of course there was a nice selection of swimsuits.

Lowe & Campbell was located in Kansas City, Missouri.  I didn’t find out a lot about the company until I found an application to make the building that was the company headquarters part of the National Register of Historic Places.  According to the application, the company was formed in Kansas City in 1912 by George Lowe and Keedy Campbell.  The partners merged their company with Wilson Sporting Goods in 1931, but they retained a separate identity.  Their headquarters, which also included some light manufacturing, was built in 1925, and the company remained there until 1961, when it appears that Lowe & Campbell was completely merged into Wilson.