Your mom was the “Mudflap Girl”
What might be fightin’ words to some is a source of pride for Ed Allen, who claims the model for the busty babe adorning many a highway vehicle is none other than his mom.
The story goes as follows:
Dad kept the photo in the cab of his truck, which always bore his wife's name on the hood. When a new corporate owner forbade Stewart from decorating a company-owned vehicle, Stewart put his wife's silhouette on his trailer's mudflaps so his boss couldn't see her when the truck was backed up to a loading dock.
In 1967, Ed Allen said that a local truck accessories manufacturer named Bill Zinda saw the design. He liked it and, with dad's permission, started selling it. No one ever trademarked the image, and Mudflap Girl got around a lot during the freewheeling '70s.
Allen has become the first to trademark the image and now uses it in a line of shirts bearing the image in his work as a fashion designer in Washington, DC.
Full story at Wired via Jalopnik.
Photo credit: Brandon Doran on Flickr
