Buster Brown Vacation Days Carnival

Illustration of a person with yellow hair, a red hat and blue bow tie and a brown dog on a yellow background

Buster Brown was a comic strip that was created by Richard Felton Outcault in the early 1900s. The young boy, Buster, had page-boy style hair with a wide brim hat and he wore an oversized bow around his neck. His companion was a pit bull terrier by the name of Tige. In the comic strip, Buster Brown was portrayed as a practical joker and the comic strip usually ended with a moral unrelated to the antics within that specific tale.

The Buster Brown characters are more widely recognized for their use in advertising. Outcault proactively sold roughly 200 licenses to companies to allow them to use his characters to promote their products. The most well-known affiliation came in 1904 when John Bush purchased the advertising rights for use in the company he worked for, the Brown Shoe Company. From then on the company imprinted the image on its shoe boxes. It also hired little people to dress up as Buster Brown and perform in department stores, accompanied by dogs representing Tige. In 1946 Bob Stolz replaced Frank Cornwell as the new Advertising Director of the company.