Phoebe Snow's Gown of White

I was never a huge fan of the late singer Phoebe Snow, but it was impossible to reach maturity in the 1970s and not know about her. Her first two albums went Gold on the U.S. charts. In January, 1975 her single "Poetry Man" was #5 on the charts and #1 for adult contemporary. She made the cover of Rolling Stone in June of that year.

She didn't quite reach the level of Carole King, who recently was the subject of a Broadway musical. However, in 1999 she gave a performance for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Depending on one's outlook, that could be considered either a worthwhile or a dubious honor. It's nevertheless true that not every pop singer gets invited to Camp David.

She was born as Phoebe Ann Laub in New Jersey in 1950. Many people in the entertainment world have changed their names for various reasons (although many like Bruce Springsteen do fine with their real names.). However, she didn't make up her stage name by herself; she got it from another source.

It was based on a series of circumstances that went back to the early twentieth century and involve railroading and advertising, not music.

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At the beginning of that century passenger trains were hauled by coal-burning steam locomotives. Since there was no air-conditioning available, the windows on coaches were opened during warm weather. Of course a lot of the smoke would enter that way and soot would get on people's clothing.

There was a railroad in the Northeast called the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western that hauled a lot of anthracite coal from Pennsylvania and even owned some mines of its own. It was a cleaner-burning coal than the more abundant types in use then, so the company switched to using anthracite for its passenger trains. The results may not have been perfect but they were better than the competitors.

The company wanted an advertising campaign to promote this advantage and a New York ad executive named Earnest Elmo Calkins created one for them. He was a pioneer in the use of fictional characters as brand symbols and spokespersons. This became common in later decades with familiar figures such as Betty Crocker, Uncle Ben, Mister Clean and, most recently, the Geico lizard.

Calkins invented a person called Phoebe Snow, a New York socialite who liked to wear white clothing. Naturally she would prefer the Lackawanna and its cleaner locomotives. He had a model pose for some photographs and then color paintings were made from those. A jingle was written for the campaign:

Says Phoebe Snow

About to go

Upon a trip to Buffalo

"My gown stays white

From morn to night

Upon the Road of Anthracite."

The Lackawanna was a secondary player in the New York (actually Hoboken) to Buffalo market; the larger New York Central dominated the route. Like most advertising it exaggerated the promised benefits. Even with cleaner coal any passenger wearing white clothing was probably asking for trouble.

Nevertheless, the campaign was a hit and had national recognition far beyond the territory served by the Lackawanna. The campaign was expanded and more jingles added. A common theme was Phoebe talking to employees - engineers, conductors, switchmen, dining car chefs - who extolled the virtues of their company.

One of these print ads had a rare example of an African-American - a chef - used in what was a dignified or at least an everyday context. It wasn't explained how Phoebe got to meet all of these employees, but the ad showed her talking to him in his diner workplace.

During the 1920s the campaign started to dwindle and then was entirely dropped. By 1949 the railroad was switching to Diesel locomotives but decided to revive the Phoebe Snow name anyway. One of its passenger trains used the name and the company promoted itself as The Route of Phoebe Snow. On the freight side its boxcars were painted to carry that slogan.

After the 1960 merger with the Erie Railroad that was dropped again although the Phoebe Snow train continued until 1966. Yet during that decade a teenaged Phoebe Ann Laub saw the old boxcars passing through her hometown of Teaneck, NJ and she probably heard the name of the passenger train. She was inspired to take the name for herself as she started her musical career. Probably many of her fans did not know the origin of her name.

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Time take its toll on everything. The combined Erie-Lackwanna went bankrupt eventually and passed into Conrail which itself was sold off to other companies. Probably its most notable legacy is the beautiful 1907 terminal in Hoboken and the extensive commuter network that feeds into it. All of that is now owned by New Jersey Transit; however, the station still has the Lackawanna name and logo on various parts of the exterior.

There has been no passenger service of any kind in the Southern Tier of New York State since before the creation of Amtrak. In the five decades since then neither the state nor the Federal government has shown much interest in restoring service to places like Binghamton or Elmira.

After his early work for the Lackawanna account, Earnest Calkins went on to start his own firm and become an influential figure in American advertising. In 1967, a few years after his death, he was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame. He was one the first proponents of "consumer engineering," as he called it, which involved planned obsolescence, product trade-ins, and other methods of stimulating demand.

The singer Phoebe Snow passed in 2011. She may have been close to a household name at the peak of her career, but I'd guess that many in recent generations have not heard of her. It's possible that she may eventually become as obscure as her white-gowned namesake.