Jack Amuny, graphic designer: "McCann Erickson was one of my clients. He's the one who actually put pen to paper." There was a guy who had a local art studio, and on major projects we farmed a lot of the stuff out to him. So Jesse and his people, they came up with the idea for the horizontal stripes."Ĭaesar: "I wish I could take the credit for the stripes, but the idea came from someone else on my team. Rollins: "McCann wasn't just tasked with coming up with a new uniform, but a new kind of uniform. I think everybody was reassessing what they could do, except for the Yankees." But it was the era of the Athletics with their colorful uniforms, and other teams, like the White Sox. That company's gone, and so are all the principals, unfortunately."Ĭaesar: "I'd never worked on a uniform before. The team's previous uniforms had been designed by Gulf State Advertising. Rollins: "McCann hadn't done a uniform before. So we already had a relationship with the Astros." Jesse Caesar, former creative director at McCann Erickson: "We got that project because we did all the advertising for AstroWorld, which was an amusement park that later became part of Six Flags. The guy at McCann who worked with us on this project was Jesse Caesar." This would probably have been in late 1974. So I went to McCann Erickson, which was one of our ad agencies, and had them take a completely fresh look at developing a new on-field look for the team. He wanted something that would look uniquely special. Judge Hofheinz wanted to put a new face on everything.
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Gary Rollins, former VP of Astros TV and radio network: "We were in severe financial trouble and very close to being bankrupt. But we still have enough information to answer most of the important questions about the rainbow design, starting with this one: Why did the Astros want a new uniform in the first place, and how did the project get started? Unfortunately, some other key figures in the storyline are now deceased, most notably former Astros general manager Spec Richardson, who apparently had a significant impact on how the design turned out. Tal Smith is a former Astros general manager and team president.Don Henry is a graphic designer who worked for Amuny in his studio.Jack Amuny is a freelance graphic designer who was hired by McCann as a subcontractor on the uniform project.Jesse Caesar was a creative director at McCann Erickson and was in charge of the design team that created the uniform.He also worked for McCann Erickson earlier in his career, which is apparently why he became the team's point person on the uniform project. Gary Rollins ran the Astros' radio and TV networks, for which he was in charge of selling ad sponsorships.But they've provided enough information to piece together an oral history of how this revolutionary uniform was created.īefore we dive in, here's our cast of characters: Their memories of events from more than four decades ago are sometimes fuzzy, their recollections occasionally contradict each other and none of them saved any of their original paperwork or other materials. Most of the people interviewed for this piece are getting on in years. An interview with Rollins in turn led to contact with several people from McCann Erickson's design team, and soon the story began to fall into place. It seemed like the story behind the creation of this uniform - arguably the most radical design in MLB history - might go untold.įortunately, that column caught the eye of reader Derek Rollins, whose father, Gary Rollins, worked for the Astros in the mid-1970s and, as it turns out, was the team's point person on the rainbow-uniform project. Sportswriters didn't give much coverage to uniforms in those days, so newspaper archives didn't offer much help either.
Nobody even knew who had worked on the design, or if those people were still alive. In a recent Uni Watch column that listed 10 things you might not know about that uniform, we mentioned that the uni was designed by the Houston-based ad agency McCann Erickson but lamented that neither the Astros nor McCann had saved any of their original files from the project. Some stories are worth the wait - even if the wait takes more than 40 years.Ĭase in point: The Houston Astros' famous rainbow uniform debuted in 1975. The exclusive untold story behind the Astros' rainbow uniform
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