Printed T-Shirts

Don Boelter may deserve the credit for that. Boelter, president of Don Boelter Lithography of Hollywood, Calif., said that his firm came up with the technique in 1969 or 1970 when a local advertising agency asked its help in putting a photo of a hot dog on the front of a T-shirt.

"It was four-color process and you can't screen print that," said Boelter. "What we had to do was figure a way to do a lithograph and still get it to go on a shirt."

The shirt was to be a promotional item for the Tastee fast-food chain. (History buffs, note: It was printed front and back and cost 79 cents.) Boelter found a way, but didn't give it much more thought.

"I really didn't think much of the process," he said recently. "There weren't any T-shirt shops then, so I didn't see any potential. I was certainly not very far-sighted."

For more than a year, nothing happened Then, Boelter's firm engineered another T-shirt advertising program. Soon after, the manufacturers of novelty transfers discovered the process.

Boelter himself dates "the T-shirt boom" to as late as 1975 when more than 200,000 T-shirts were printed to promote the film, "Jaws." The following year, of course, Factors came out with its Farrah Fawcett series, a line which sold "in the millions," according to Stacy Weidel, the company's director of marketing.

(According to Weidel, the company doesn't have a single Farrah transfer left."Farrah herself called me about three years ago," he said, "and wanted to know where to get one because, apparently, she'd never gotten around to buying one. I sent her our last two.")

Boelter added that, also about 1975, titanium oxide was added to plastisol for the first time, thus coloring it and making it opaque. (It had previously been clear.) This allowed transfers to be used on colored shirts for the first time.

Oh, yes, the colored shirt. According to Neal of Stedman and Moore of Union, the first colored T's were pale blue and came with pickets. The bigger variety of colored T-shirts, they said, did not come until the early 1970s and was a direct result of growing demand by shirt printers and T-shirt shops.

A less noticeable development, said Neal, was the introduction of cotton-polyester blends in T-shirts in the mid-1960s. T-shirts had previously been all cotton, he said, but the industry's touting of polyester's wrinkle-free characteristics was its way of acknowledging that the T was no longer just underwear.

Ironically, Neal said, the acceptance of the printed T-shirt has virtually killed the undershirt business. The current image of the T-shirt as an outwear item and a fashion item is now so firmly established, he said, that it almost cannot be sold as underwear.

"Stedman's business used to be 100 percent underwear," said Neal. "Now, we're 20 percent underwear and all the rest is colored T's, most of them for the screen printers and various T-shirt people."

Printed T-shirts bring you this week in history:

Atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima

On this day in 1945, at 8:16 a.m. Japanese time, an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, drops the world's first atom bomb, over the city of Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 people are killed as a direct result of the blast, and another 35,000 are injured. At least another 60,000 would be dead by the end of the year from the effects of the fallout.

U.S. President Harry S. Truman, discouraged by the Japanese response to the Potsdam Conference's demand for unconditional surrender, made the decision to use the atom bomb to end the war in order to prevent what he predicted would be a much greater loss of life were the United States to invade the Japanese mainland. And so on August 5, while a "conventional" bombing of Japan was underway, "Little Boy," (the nickname for one of two atom bombs available for use against Japan), was loaded onto Lt. Col. Paul W. Tibbets' plane on Tinian Island in the Marianas. Tibbets' B-29, named the Enola Gay after his mother, left the island at 2:45 a.m. on August 6. Five and a half hours later, "Little Boy" was dropped, exploding 1,900 feet over a hospital and unleashing the equivalent of 12,500 tons of TNT. The bomb had several inscriptions scribbled on its shell, one of which read "Greetings to the Emperor from the men of the Indianapolis" (the ship that transported the bomb to the Marianas).

There were 90,000 buildings in Hiroshima before the bomb was dropped; only 28,000 remained after the bombing. Of the city's 200 doctors before the explosion; only 20 were left alive or capable of working. There were 1,780 nurses before-only 150 remained who were able to tend to the sick and dying.

According to John Hersey's classic work Hiroshima, the Hiroshima city government had put hundreds of schoolgirls to work clearing fire lanes in the event of incendiary bomb attacks. They were out in the open when the Enola Gay dropped its load.

There were so many spontaneous fires set as a result of the bomb that a crewman of the Enola Gay stopped trying to count them. Another crewman remarked, "It's pretty terrific. What a relief it worked."

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