TShirt Printing

Fortunately, destiny found other means of starting the T-shirt revolution.

Several industry old-timers, among them Spider and Ed Roth (creator of the "Rat Fink" character), trace the beginning of on-demand, individualized printing to the drag-racing culture which was widespread in the 1950s.

"Everybody was really into their cars in those days," said Roth, now the head of a California amusement park's in-house printing division.  "A lot of people were
painting dragons and flames and pinstripes on their dragsters and, eventually, they carried that over to their shirts."

Spider agreed, noting that he painted his first shirt in high school in 1956, using the same brush and oil-based enamel which he was then using to decorate auto bodies."In retrospect, it was terrible," he said.  " A tshirt printer project. The paint soaked through and pulled and sagged.  Fortunately, I came across the airbrush."

Roth's beginnings were similar.  He was pin striping cars for a Southgate, Calif., body shop when a fellow came in one day in 1961 and asked him to draw a picture of his car on his shirt.  Roth obliged, with a felt tip marker.

Other customers followed and, after a couple of months, he was so bogged down that he got out of auto work completely, bought an airbrush and converted a stall in the shop for his work.  From then on, Roth's business was shirts.

Because he was tall (6 feet, 4 inches) and heavy (more than 300 pounds), Roth took the nickname Big Daddy. In the early '60s, Ed Big Daddy Roth's caricatures of monsters and rats were so popular that one company even reproduced several in plastic models.  And, still in the business, Roth today sells shirts by mail order, as well as videotaped lectures on screen printing and airbrushing.

Neither Roth nor Spider claim to have invented the airbrushed shirt, however.

"Several people were really big for awhile," said Spider.  "There was a guy called 'King George' in Detroit and another who just called himself 'Mouse.'

"I think the demand and the technology just came together in several places at about the same time."

According to both men, airbrushing was wildly popular for a brief period and then faded away, supplanted by the plastisol transfer.  The demise of the process,
according to Spider, was hastened by hostile fire marshals, who objected to the fumes and flammability of the thinners and oil-based paints.  (Now, he added, water-based paints have replaced those and airbrushing is making a comeback.)

Plastisol ink was apparently the element which made the printed garment a commercially viable product.  According to Gene Krupinski, Florida branch manager for Advance Process Supply and a 49-year veteran of the screen printing industry, plastisols were introduced about 1954, probably the product of several companies working simultaneously.

"Plastisol is a lazy man's ink," said Krupinski.  "It doesn't dry up in the screens, it's easy to work with and almost mistake-proof.

"What its introduction did was take screen printing out of the hands of the professionals and turn if over to the little people."

Although the technology for screen printing T-shirts was now in place, it took the appearance of the plastisol transfer to create the demand.  That happened in the early 1960s.

Tshirt printing changed the t-shirt industry

According to Herb Wells, president of InstaGraphics, technicians for his company and International Coatings, a Cerritos, Calif., ink maker, came up with the first transfer made from plastisol inks in February 1963.  There was no specific job for which the process was developed, he said, but Insta wanted a process which could be used for small runs.

Whether or not Wells is right, it was in this general period that many manufacturers of transfers went into the business.  All of their products, however, were
cartoon-type art; the process of incorporating a photograph with plastisol had still not been developed. This development changed the tshirt printing industry.

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History facts from TShirt Printing

History of Columbus Day

The first recorded celebration honoring the discovery of America by Europeans took place on October 12, 1792 in New York City. The event, which celebrated the 300th anniversary of Columbus' landing in the New World, was organized by The Society of St. Tammany (also known as the Columbian Order).

San Francisco's Italian community held their first Columbus Day celebration in 1869. In 1892, President Benjamin Harrison urged citizens to participate in the the 400th anniversary celebration of Columbus' first voyage. It was during this event that the Pledge of Allegiance, written by Francis Bellamy, was recited publically for the first time.

Colorado was the first state to observe the holiday in 1905.

In 1937, President Roosevelt proclaimed October 12 as "Columbus Day" and in 1971, President Nixon declared the second Monday of October a national holiday.