Howard Chandler Christy:
Thoughts his Two Most Famous Posters

When the songwriter Irving Berlin sat down in 1915 to write his well-loved ditty I love the Girl on the Magazine Cover, we have no doubt that it was the Christy Girl who inspired him. The Christy-Girl, so-called, was the creation of the American commercial illustrator Howard Chandler Christy (1873 – 1952) who placed her famous mug on thousands of magazine covers, newspaper ads and billboards throughout the entire period of the Gilded Age.

The file attached herein consists of two articles from 1918, both pertaining to recruiting posters; one for the U.S. Navy and the other for the Marines. In the interest of national security, the Christy-Girl is depicted as a cross-dresser in both of them, and the sailors loved it; they preferred to call her “Honey Girl”, and that name fit her just fine.

It mattered little at the time what the icon was called, but you can be sure that the Kaiser and his staff must have grown weak in the knee when they learned that she, too, had received her orders to deploy.

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