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December 12, 2004
Mr. Bingle
Mr. Bingle
”Jingle Jangle Jingle,
Here Comes Mister Bingle.
With another message from Kris Kringle
As you shop this Christmas season,
Maison Blanche makes Christmas pleasin’.
Gifts galore for you and me,
Each of them from...MB.”
Anyone who grew up in New Orleans in the late 50s through the 1960s should remember that little song. Mr. Bingle would make regular appearances on morning kids’ programs like Romper Room and Captain Kangaroo to encourage kids to get their parents to bring them downtown to see Santa and shop at Maison Blanche. (Mister Bingle = MB = Maison Blanche).
Who is Mister Bingle? He’s a little guy, a snowman with holly angel-wings, blue eyes, a big red nose, candy-striped gloves, and an ice cream cone for a hat. To kids he was a puppet who appeared each Christmas season on TV commercials, and was in the big displays at the main MB store on Canal and Dauphine in the CBD.
As we show you here a couple of weeks ago, the Maison Blanche department store was a fixture on Canal Street for a century. The building that now houses the Ritz-Carlton Hotel is familiar to most New Orleanians over 30 as the store where you could see Mr. Bingle in the front window at Christmas time. MB was a classic department store, with big picture windows on the ground floor. The toy department was up on the fifth floor of the store. Mr. Bingle was up there as well, in a walk-through display that led right up to where Santa sat. In the late 1980s, the window displays on the ground floor were a bit outdated, and MB brought out the giant Mr. Bingle you see in the photo each Christmas.
Maison Blanche has vanished from the retail landscape, having been bought out by Dillard’s in the late 1990s. Mister Bingle lives on, however, as a spokesman for Dillard’s. It’s just not the same, though, even though Dillard’s used to hang up the big Mr. Bingle on the side of their store at Lakeside Mall. Gone are the days when MB and D. H. Holmes were the Macy’s and Gimbel’s of New Orleans. Still, the memory of that little guy lives on. There’s even a novel, Saving Mr. Bingle, by Sean Doles, where he’s one of the main characters.
So, while you’re running through Target, K-Mart, and Wal-Mart, sitting in front of your PC ordering from the almost-unlimited retail choices on the Internet, take a look back to when you rode the streetcar downtown to see Mister Bingle in the window...
Posted by Edward J. Branley at December 12, 2004 08:52 PM
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