![]() ![]() A century later, on the first of March 1775, the English spies Captain William Browne and Ensign Henry DeBerniere traveled to Marlborough as part of their mission to investigate activities hostile to the government in the countryside around Boston and the narrative of their harrowing adventure is as exciting and action-packed as any Western. I am also cognizant of the fact that, in the seventeenth century, Marlborough was the frontier of English settlement in New England, and that some of the most ferocious fighting in King Philip’s War took place in this town in March and April of 1676. I am not humming the Marlboro Country music solely because the town of Marlborough is the name of the cigarette. ![]() Fortunately I got a bad case of bronchitis as a child and my doctor told me I would die if I smoked cigarettes, which I believed until I got to an age where I realized he was probably trying to scare me, and by then I was old enough not to be interested. Hence I saw the Marlboro Man frequently as a kid. Although cigarette ads were banned from television in 1970 in the United States, they continued to appear for several more years in Bermuda, where I lived as a child. The original strategy was to try to sell them as healthier than unfiltered cigarettes, but the advertising agency, Leo Burnett Worldwide, ultimately went in another, more successful direction, by ignoring the health implications entirely and selling a lifestyle instead. 1 In brief, fearing a crackdown on unfiltered cigarettes as a result of the Surgeon General’s report, the idea was to try to convince men to smoke filtered cigarettes, previously sold primarily to women. The story behind the wildly successful Marlboro Man advertising campaign is a fascinating tale of how a brand of filtered cigarettes designed originally for women was rebranded by appealing to the rugged masculinity of the cowboy who, albeit reluctantly, tamed the wild west. A tough cowboy on horseback somewhere out “West” fills the frame, smoking while wrangling wild stallions, as a narrator laments that there aren’t many wild stallions anymore, a metaphor for the rugged individualist who chooses the path of freedom and smokes the right cigarette. The commercial for Marlboro cigarettes I recall dates to the early 1970s and is set to the iconic theme music lifted from the 1960 epic western The Magnificent Seven. I have never smoked a cigarette in my life and yet the familiar jingle of one ad from my childhood plays ceaselessly on the soundtrack in my mind as I wander through Marlborough, the next town along the route of my walk on the Upper Boston Post Road across Massachusetts, the theme from Marlboro Country. The most persistent ones often betray one’s age. The power of advertising is undeniable, especially the jingle from a memorable ad that stays in your head like the worst kind of earworm. (0.5 miles from Sudbury border to Wayside Country Store) Williams’s the night before, where there had gone a party of liberty people to meet us…”įrom the Narrative of Ensign Henry DeBerniere and Captain William Browne describing their interaction with Henry Barnes, a prominent citizen of Marlborough and a Tory, March 1, 1775. “We begged he would recommend some tavern where we should be safe, he told us we could be safe nowhere but in his house that the town was very violent, and that we had been expected at Col. ![]()
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