A legacy reborn

A couple days before the Winter Olympics began, I was putzing around, tinkering with this and that, with the television providing background noise, when the melodic notes of a nostalgic tune yanked me back into full alert mode.

“See the USA in your Chevrolet,” a woman sang out, ushering in a 2026 revival of an iconic commercial that had its heyday in the 1950s and ‘60s — in the days when television was king. After getting over the initial but pleasant shock of hearing the jingle again, my mind was instantly transported to an afternoon shared with colleagues in the editorial cubicle of the East County Times office.

In a self-deprecating manner, editor Devin Crum was joking about how he was the slacker among his siblings. One brother is a mechanical aerospace engineer and the other is a civil engineer. A half-brother is a nuclear engineer. Devin was “just” a writer. But, he said, he thought he got his creative gifts from his grandfather, who worked for a big ad agency back in the day. Think “Mad Men.”

“My grandfather was on the team that created a pretty big ad campaign for Chevrolet,” Devin told me.

“Are you telling me your grandfather worked on the ‘See the USA in your Chevrolet’ campaign?” I asked after picking my chin up off the floor.

“Yeah,” he said. “You’ve heard of it?”

Heard of it? Heard of it??? Anyone who was alive and aware in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s knew of that commercial! It was iconic. It was gold. It was on a par with “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz” and “Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don’t upset us.”

It was genius, pure and simple.

Internet research shows that the original “See the USA” campaign was created by Campbell-Ewald, a Detroit-based ad agency. Leo Corday and Leon Carr, members of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, were credited with the music and lyrics, and the jingle first shot to stardom thanks to Dinah Shore singing it on her television show.

While Howard Crum’s name is nowhere to be found in online information, we all know how things like this work. Anyone who has worked in an office environment knows all too well that many people work on a project and one or two people get the credit.

After I first saw the new commercial, I immediately sent Devin a text and asked if he had seen it. He hadn’t, and was surprised that I had remembered his grandfather’s story.

Devin said he was “pretty excited” to learn of the updated version.

“Unfortunately, I only learned about my grandfather’s involvement with the original after he died (I was pretty young at the time),” Devin wrote in a message. “But it was gratifying to learn that we had that kind of family history, and then the revival made me feel a renewed connection to that history and my grandfather.”

Howard Crum died at age 84 around 1998, according to Devin. He would have been about 34 when the original campaign was created. Online records show that the Chevrolet Division of General Motors owns both the song’s 1948 unpublished and 1950 published copyrights.

In the new version, country singer Brooke Lee strums a guitar while singing the familiar tune from the bed of a Chevy pickup truck, which is perched atop Castle Rock in Colorado. Filming from that location is another Chevy tradition, with previous shoots done in 1964 and ’73.

If you’re interested, there’s a great YouTube video that shows the process of getting the truck up on top of Castleton Tower. A narrator brags that there’s no artificial intelligence or other digital sleight of hand involved; that a very complex and potentially dangerous process led by the “very best” people made it possible.

With performances from artists like Dinah Shore and Pat Boone to Brooke Lee (with many pop culture takes between, including a production by the cast of “Glee”) a simple yet brilliant jingle serves as a bridge from one generation of a family to another while providing a good story to boot.