Many people assume the Nike Swoosh, created in 1971 for $35, was responsible for turning consumers into walking billboards by placing corporate logos on popular fashion choices. 

The real credit goes to an Iowan. And it had nothing to do with farmers wearing John Deere or Pioneer Hi-Bred caps, because that didn’t happen until even later in the 1970s. 

The man who launched the practice of placing corporate logos on everyday apparel was George Foerstner who, as the head of Amana Appliances, handed out golf caps emblazoned with the word “Amana” to professional golfers at the first Amana VIP Tournament in 1967. 

Foerstner, who died in 2000 at the age of 91, was a marketing genius. He came up with the first side-by-side refrigerator-freezer in 1949 and the first countertop microwave oven in 1967.

He grew up in Iowa’s Amana Colonies and dropped out of school at age 13 to work in his father’s auto parts business, before taking a sales job at Amana Woolen Mills. In 1934, local businessmen asked Foerstner to build a reliable beverage cooler; two years later, the Amana Society purchased his startup and things grew from there.

During the 1940s, Foerstner recruited Gary Cooper, Dorothy Lamour, Cecil B. DeMille and Groucho Marx, to pitch products, making Amana the first to pay Hollywood celebrities for endorsements.  

In 1973, when the safety of Amana microwave ovens was challenged, Foerstner got an endorsement from the University of Iowa’s famed scientist, Dr. James Van Allen, discoverer of the radiation belts that surround the earth. “I am prepared to sit on top of my Amana Radarange for a solid year while it is in full operation with no apprehension as to my safety,” Van Allen declared. 

Foerstner was always looking for new ways to promote Amana products, and he was super competitive, said Lou King, a former Amana marketing chief who went on to lead the Professional Golf Association (PGA). 

“If I wanted to get something done,” King told me in 2000, “all I did was tell him that GE or Whirlpool was beating us.” 

During the 1960s, King said, Amana appliances weren’t sold in big-name department stores. “We couldn’t even talk to them,” he said. “But we found out that a lot of appliance retailers were really involved in golf.” 

King suggested sponsoring a golf tournament. To make sure big-name retailers showed up, professional golfers and celebrities were invited to play alongside the executives in an event that would later earn the title of “the Masters of the Pro-Ams.”

The first Amana VIP Golf Tournament was at the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., in 1967. “We made up some crude caps” to help shield the sun from golfers’ eyes, King said. 

Nobody thought anything about the caps, until the following year when the PGA Championship was being played in San Antonio.

That’s when “something magical happened,” King said. Julius Boros, one of the pros who had played the Amana event was contending for the lead in the Texas heat. 

“He dug around in his bag and pulled out our cap,” which said Amana in big letters.   

“It was on CBS television,” King continued. “As soon as I saw it, I picked up the phone and called George (Foerstner) and said, ‘Did you see what I saw?’ 

“He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Want to do it?’ He said, ‘Go ahead.’

“We didn’t even identify what I was going to do,” King said. 

What he did was pay PGA golfers $50 a tournament to wear Amana caps. 

The golf pros loved it, King said. The $50 payment covered the entry fee for most PGA tournaments. Plus, Amana put participating golfers on the same health care plan as Amana employees.  

At the time, the only item of logoed consumer clothing on the market was the Lacoste Crocodile, which had appeared on the breast of Izod tennis shirts since the 1950s. 

It would be decades before clothing with corporate logos became ubiquitous, but the first broadcast of what was to come was CBS’s telecast of the 1968 PGA tournament, when Julius Boros pulled a year-old Amana hat out of his golf bag and set a trend for the ages.