The raccoons who made computer magazine ads great

When I got my first job in technology journalism, my grandmother used to call the magazine where I worked “your catalog.” I winced. But in retrospect, she wasn’t that far off. Back then, if you wanted to buy a computer product—this was the early 1990s, before the web changed everything—the odds were pretty decent that you started by buying a computer magazine.

If you remember the computer magazines of this era at all, you recall how thick they were—hundreds and hundreds of pages an issue in the case of the most successful ones. The majority of those pages were ads, not editorial content. And a sizable chunk of those ads were catalog-y in the extreme. Pages and pages were devoted to lists of products and prices in teensy type, with 1-800 numbers you could call to place an order.

About a gazillion mail-order houses did business this way. The April 1991 PC World, for instance, includes advertisements for outfits such as Advanced Computer Products, Arlington Computer Products, Bulldog Computer Products, Computer Bazaar, Fast Micro, Kenosha Computer Center, NSI Computer Products, Paradise Computer Products, Telemart, and United Computer Express. Only the names and slightly varying levels of ad-design proficiency served to distinguish most of them.

But I regarded three of these companies as the industry’s giants. Whether they were the biggest, revenue-wise, I’m still not sure. It was their sustained prominence in major magazines, with multi-page spreads, that made them feel like behemoths.

One was The PC Zone, whose ads didn’t have that much of a distinct personality beyond a logo that vaguely evoked Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone.

Then there was Micro Warehouse, best known for plastering its ads with photos of a winsome, headset-wearing sales rep named Kerry. I think she was a real person who actually worked there—if not, please don’t tell me.

But the crème de la mail-order crème was a company called PC Connection.

In a field where it was hard for any one merchant to stand out, PC Connection’s ads were vastly more distinctive than the competition’s. They might even one of the most memorable elements of any given issue of a magazine—yes, including the editorial material.

It wasn’t because of the portion dedicated to the business at hand. As you can see from this sample page from the October 29, 1991 PC Magazine, that aspect of a PC Connection advertisement was not radically different from a PC Zone or Micro Warehouse ad.

No, what made PC Connection ads unique was the imagery of anthropomorphic raccoons, the work of an illustrator named Erick Ingraham. Here they are in that same 1991 PC Magazine ad.

If you inspect the art closely enough, you’ll spot some boxes of vintage 1991 software, including The Microsoft Office (which, like TheFacebook.com, eventually lost its “The”). But they’re Easter eggs in a scene that is mostly about raccoons making pies—assisted by a bunny rabbit and a beaver—and playing what I assume is folk music. The piece looks like an illustration from a classy children’s book. That made sense, since Ingraham’s work in that field helped him secure his PC Connection assignment.

What on Earth was this beautifully done, homey scene—part Beatrix Potter, part Norman Rockwell—doing in a mail-order ad for computer products? The text below, by copywriter David Blistein, acknowledged that people might find it puzzling. It went on to explain that PC Connection was based in tiny Marlow, New Hampshire (population 567) and prided itself on good customer service. The point of the characters, it said, was to add “a human touch to high tech.”

It worked. And the fact that Ingraham’s art and Blistein’s copy changed in each new ad gave magazine readers a reason to stop and pay attention. (Even Micro Warehouse’s Kerry didn’t do anything but sit there leaning on a monitor.)

The golden age of PC Connection raccoon ads began in 1983 and ended well over thirty years ago. After that, the characters retained a diminished presence in the company’s marketing into the early years of this century. Then they almost wholly vanished. They have, however, remained lodged somewhere in the back of my brain. That was true even though I caught only the tail end of their heyday. (I was an Amiga fanatic until 1991, and made a point of ignoring the Microsoft-centric magazines where PC Connection advertised.)

Recently, I was shocked to find that nobody has ever told the raccoons’ story. Hence this article.

Behind the scenes, PC Connection really was a small-town success story. The company was founded by Patricia Gallup and David Hall, who’d met by chance in 1975 when both were hiking the Appalachian Trail. Gallup ended up working at Hall’s family business, a mail-order purveyor of professional audio components in Marlow. When the IBM PC came along in 1981, the company bought one to computerize its business. So did lots of other folks, creating a thriving market for software, peripherals, and various accessories.

In 1982, that inspired Gallup and Hall to start a new company dedicated to selling everything relating to IBM PCs but the PC itself. Bootstrapping their brainchild with $8,000 Gallup had saved, they called it PC Connection and set up shop in a former mill, colocated with the Hall family business.

Then they placed a nondescript ninth-of-a-page ad in Byte magazine, buried near the back where the space was cheaper.

By July of the following year, PC Connection had grown prominent enough that PC Magazine devoted four pages to an interview with Hall. The Q&A covered the startup’s rural operation, generous shipping policy (a flat $2 per order except for “a heavy item such as a monitor, drive, or printer”), and the complications inherent in selling PC products in an era when many weren’t that easy to figure out and almost every customer was a newbie.

“If someone wants us to take him through every step of [Lotus] 1-2-3, that’s a lot to ask,” Hall told PC Mag‘s Corey Sandler. But “Let’s say someone buys a board, gets it home, and then realizes he doesn’t know what he’s doing. If he calls us on the phone, our technical man will step him right through the whole installation, tell him how to set the switches, and make sure he’s happy. That’s my idea of support.”

As PC Connection flourished, its marketing ambition and budget expanded. The November 1983 PC Magazine included a three-page ad, with two of those pages featuring the standard dense list of product names and prices. But the third showed a happy customer and emphasized the company’s toll-free support and speedy shipping, which it argued were more important than rock-bottom prices. By the standards of mail-order ads of the time, it was an ambitious branding effort.

In the next issue, PC Connection did even more to stand out. The company ran a three-page ad—wedged in the middle of an interview with software legend Grace Hopper—whose first page depicting a warmly-dressed raccoon, keyboard slung over his shoulder, huddling outside its headquarters, which at the time were in a rehabbed Marlow inn. I’m unsure if he’s seeking shelter from the snow or just wants to purchase some accoutrements for his computer. But it’s a striking image that plays up PC Connection’s remote location—“only a five day drive from Silicon Valley”—as a defining selling point.

That “PC Paradise” ad and the ones to follow were the work of Church and Main, a New Hampshire ad agency—named after the intersection where its office stood—that had gotten its big break doing work for a manufacturer of ball bearings. Its prominence in the state led PC Connection cofounder Hall to challenge it during a brainstorming meeting at the company: How do you get people to not only buy PC products but buy them from a faceless, far-off mail-order operation?

Hall was open to possibilities that were “weird” and “non-traditional,” remembers Church and Main art director Michael Havey. As copywriter Blistein puts it, “Computers were very scary to people—and David wanted to make them less scary.”

Church and Main’s answer was a raccoon.

”You’re probably wondering, ‘Why a raccoon?’” Havey told me once I’d tracked him down, guessing correctly. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know whether I ever knew why.” There is an official PC Connection boilerplate story. Raccoons, it declares, “symbolized adaptability, innovation, and tenacity—traits that underlie the company’s remarkable success.” But that rationale may have been conjured up only in retrospect.

This much we do know: Blistein and his wife happened to be reading Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 book The Wind in the Willows to their young daughter. Originally published without pictures, Grahame’s work got its most familiar art in a 1931 edition with drawings by Ernest Shepard, who was even better known as the illustrator of A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh books. Featuring the adventures of British motoring enthusiast Mr. Toad and his friends, the world Grahame and Shepard created was quaint, cozy, and charming. It had nothing to do with PCs, but it was the furthest thing from scary.

“I had this image—I think it was me—of a mole or an otter, whatever was in The Wind in the Willows, walking in with a computer over its shoulder,” says Blistein. The notion of animal characters led Havey to call in Ingraham, a local artist whose work included the award-winning illustrations for a children’s book called Porcupine Stew.

“There were other illustrators who could have done it,” Havey says. “But there was no illustrator right here in rural New Hampshire, where PC Connection started, who had the time, the interest, the incredible ability that Erick had.” Ingraham’s first task was to turn the spark of an idea into exploratory sketches depicting a variety of animals.

That still doesn’t explain why the one they picked was a raccoon. For years, I thought it was because the masked foragers were particularly numerous in New Hampshire. But that seems not to be the case. Instead, PC Connection’s ads cemented the association between the animals and the state in my mind, and possibly others. Ingraham does remember their remarkably dextrous paws—perfect for typing on a computer keyboard—playing a role. “Basically, we wanted something that could use its hands,” he says.

As unique as the “PC Paradise” ad was, it wasn’t immediately apparent it wasn’t just a one-off. Over the next few issues of PC Magazine, PC Connection reran it a couple of times and placed other ads that consisted solely of products and prices. But in the May 1984 issue, the lone traveling raccoon from “PC Paradise” begat a trio of picnickers who’d brought their PC and dial-up modem—and a telephone with a very long cord.

From then on, “they continued to capitalize on that format and come up with scenario after scenario,” says Ingraham, who remembers spitballing ideas over lunch to pitch to PC Connection. In each ad, his art was accompanied by a few paragraphs of text by Blistein, full of terrible puns and sideways cultural allusions, celebrations of Marlow’s tininess, and reminders of the benefits of doing business with PC Connection. “Mostly, it was just ’Hey, these are nice people in New Hampshire—you don’t have to be afraid of computers,’” Blistein says.

For years, painting raccoons for PC Connection ads was a commercial artist’s dream gig—enjoyable, steady, and well-paying. Ingraham took around 40 hours to complete each piece and settled on acrylic paints as his medium, in part because they dried more quickly than oils. “Everything was in crunch mode,” he remembers. “[Havey] would be coming at 8:00 in the morning to pick it up, and I’m working at 5:00”

Each of Ingraham’s illustrations—which got larger, lusher, and more lavishly detailed over time—showed raccoons (and, often, other animals) engaged in some activity, frequently in a visibly rural setting. Early examples did tend to give PCs and related products a prime spot. (Ingraham, not yet a computer user himself, worked off reference photos.) This one, showing a PC Connection customer on the phone with the company while unboxing a new computer—complete with Epson FX-100+ printer—may have been the most tech-centric of them all.

Over time, however, the PCs receded into the background of Ingraham’s tableaus, sometimes literally. Most of the ads just depicted the critters living their lives, which seemed to be rich and fulfilling. It wouldn’t even occur to me to wonder if the Keebler Elves ever did anything other than bake cookies. But the PC Connection raccoons did just about everything human beings do, especially in small New England towns. (The ads rarely referred to the characters as raccoons, instead calling them “our mascots.”)

For example, they went off to college.

They operated a French bakery.

They taught school.

They sought elected office.

They honored entrepreneurship (and apparently believed PC Connection’s founder to be neither Patricia Gallup nor David Hall, but one of their own).

They were visited by St. Nicholas.

They built homes.

They rang in the New Year.

They took themselves out to the ball game.

They farmed. (Someone should tell that fellow on the right with the wagon about these newfangled things called “laptop computers.”)

They cared about the environment.

They got married—and hired an owl to officiate and mice to entertain.

They went snowshoeing, and possibly got lost doing it.

As you’ve probably already noticed, all the raccoon ads above except the first one offered a premium of some sort to customers who spent at least $500 (later raised to $750 and, in at least one case, $1,000). Most of these products featured Ingraham raccoons, too. There were shirts, shopping bags, hats, mugs, puzzles, baseball bats, maple syrup, apples, stuffed animals, pillowcases, and more—enough to fill a catalog of their own had the company chosen to issue one. Each ad included an additional piece of Ingraham art related to the current freebie. (I particularly like the stoic dignity of the ball player.)

Scour eBay with enough devotion, and you may find vintage PC Connection swag for sale from time to time. Should an “Our Founder” statuette ever come up, please don’t bid against me.

Some of Ingraham’s most extravagant art appeared not in magazine ads but in PC Connection’s catalogs—an advertising medium I assumed the company would have considered instrumental from the beginning. But it waited until 1990 to issue one titled The First PC Connection Catalog—produced, like the ads, by Church and Main. Ingraham’s cover wasn’t another typical scene of life in Marlow. Instead, his painting featured … a raccoon sphinx and raccoon hieroglyphics.

Inside, a foldout, “The Origin of the PCs,” pronounced Marlow to be “the center of civilization” and chronicled the history of its raccoon population from cave days until, I guess, the 1990s. (One character is using a cordless phone.) It turns out Marlow gave us all technological progress from the wheel onward, and it was all invented by PC Connection’s mascots. Now we know.

This foldout is the Sistine Chapel ceiling of Ingraham raccoon art, and you can inspect it (and Blistein’s text) in more detail by clicking the image below.

On the reverse of the foldout, PC Connection cofounder Pat Gallup explained how all this was connected—loosely—to the mail-order computer business, and noted that the company really did conduct archeological digs in Marlow.

Another masterpiece: Ingraham’s “Raccoona Lisa,” from a catalog published later that year. (She’s clutching a foam peanut because PC Connection had recently eliminated them in favor of more sustainable packing materials.)

Here’s another catalog cover, provided for this article by Ingraham himself. (So far, the only editions I’ve laid hands on myself are the two shown above—as you can imagine, most people did not hang onto these 30+ years ago, making surviving examples quite rare.)

I can’t resist sharing a few examples of the material that made up the bulk of each catalog: product listings, some accompanied by evocative photos of 1990s people and 1990s computing equipment.

Getting back to the magazine ads: In the spring of 1992, PC Connection marked its tenth anniversary. It celebrated with an ad showing the raccoons of Marlow putting on a parade, complete with a band, marchers dressed as floppy disks, a beauty queen, and a raccoon balloon.

That ad turned out to be the final one in the familiar format. After more than eight years of raccoon ads, PC Connection began to tinker with the formula. It no longer played up its rural location or showed the raccoons in particularly homespun activities. The swag offers also went away.

It was subtle, but the pitches got more direct. By then, for example, PC Connection had branded its fast, cheap shipping as “Everything Overnight” and put it at the center of its brand identity. A flat $5 charge covered overnight delivery via Airborne Express regardless of how many items you ordered: You could even call until 3 a.m. and get same-day delivery. It was a triumph of logistical efficiency that presaged the Amazon age, and a major differentiator from the likes of PC Zone and Micro Warehouse.

And so PC Connection deployed its mascots in a memorable image devoted to promoting Everything Overnight.

Until I wrote this article, I’d forgotten another message that PC Connection really, really played up: It was a repeat winner of PC World’s World Class awards as the best mail-order company. (This fact had slipped my mind even though I worked at PC World from 1994-2008.) For most of their history, these awards were based on a reader poll; they reflected the popular sentiment of computer users, and PC Connection’s pride was understandable.

The accomplishment resulted in an image of a beaming raccoon wearing World Class medallions (which, as far as I know, we didn’t actually bestow), Olympics-style. The company used it frequently, with minor variations, for many years. (Havey, who marvels at the lush detail Ingraham was able to coax out of his brush, says it’s his favorite piece of raccoon art.)

The beastie in that ad might have looked less triumphant if it had known what was ahead. As the 1990s progressed, the raccoons slowly receded from the spotlight in PC Connection’s marketing. There was no tragic moment when they got the axe. They just appeared less consistently, less prominently, and less often in the form of new Ingraham artwork.

Maybe this was inevitable. Today, Havey and Blistein both recall the company losing interest in its quirky branding as the PC market grew more commoditized. ”It all became about price,” says Blistein. “Egghead Software was around then. And that’s when they pushed the raccoon to the back burner.”

In a June 1993 ad, the company seemed to address this shift more or less directly. “Some people think that just because we have the best-looking mascots in the business, our prices must be high,” read the copy. “No way!” The ad’s raccoon art remains delightful, but it’s been downsized to make room for giant-sized selling points that mattered a lot at the time: CUSTOM, COMPAQ, CHEAP, and OVERNIGHT. $5.

By the end of 1993, the mascots were deemphasized further. For instance, I had to look at this ad twice before I realized it had raccoons at all.

Eventually, the wry, low-key feel that had distinguished PC Connection’s ads was replaced by splashiness, bright colors, and copious use of exclamation points. If you were lucky, one raccoon might be crammed in somewhere, possibly confusing anyone who didn’t remember the mascot’s heyday.

Along with the price wars, PC Connection’s growing emphasis on burnishing its reputation among business clients may have contributed to the raccoons’ slow-roll retirement. Ingraham knew things were changing when the company asked for art depicting one wearing a necktie. “They tried to corporate ’em up a little bit,” he says. “I kind of went with the flow. But then, eventually, they were in a big building in Milford, and I’d call there to say, ‘Any raccoon sightings?’ ‘No, not really.’” (At some point along the way, the company parted ways with Church and Main, bringing its ads in-house.)

The fact that PC Connection had moved from Marlow to the comparatively bustling town of Milford (population approximately 12,000) in 1996 was a sign of its continued growth. Two years after that, it relocated to Merrimack, which was around twice Milford’s size. That was the same year the company went public, issuing stock certificates bearing an image of the medallion-wearing raccoon.

And then there was the internet—which, as it became PC Connection’s primary sales channel, greatly reduced its reliance on the magazine advertising that had given us the raccoons in the first place.

In the new century, PC Connection almost entirely scrubbed the raccoons from its public-facing image. But not quite. A largely anodyne 2010 catalog, for example, included one fingernail-sized picture of the mascot, alongside a mention that the company had been around since 1982.

By this point, the company had invested 100% of its energy on being a reliable supplier of technology products to corporate accounts. For reasons so obvious I’m not going to bother to explain them, it removed the “PC” from its name in 2016. David Hall died in 2020. But Patricia Gallup–remains Connection’s board chair, 43 years after betting her $8,000 in savings on the proposition that people would buy computer products through the mail. They still are, to the tune of $2.8 billion in sales in the company’s most recent fiscal year. (I’d hoped to speak to Gallup for this article, but was told she no longer grants interviews.)

Today, Connection’s home page looks like this. Fair warning: There’s nary a raccoon on it.

I was all ready to declare that the raccoons were entirely absent from the site until I stumbled upon a dinky, nearly unrecognizable one in the customer support section. He’s wearing a jetpack and bearing a delivery, somehow still doing his duty after all these years. Maybe he’s unaware he was canned years ago. Or simply doesn’t care.

Perhaps more important, a representative of the modern-day Connection pointed out to me that it does make a point of bringing its raccoons back for two annual traditions—though not with new art by Ingraham, I’m sorry to say. (He did his last work for the company in 1997.)

First, it still uses raccoons in its digital holiday cards. Here’s 2024’s edition.

Secondly, the Connection annual report continues to give the raccoons their due, if briefly. Each year, one appears on the bottom of the last page, like a lagniappe for long-time customers who remember them.

As for Erick Ingraham, David Blistein, and Michael Havey, I’m grateful for the fond memories they shared of the days when they helped PC Connection establish a brand that was at once off-beat and fabulously successful. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for a marketing person like me to participate in that and see that it actually worked,” says Havey. “That was the tremendously fun part of it.”

I’m also impressed by how much they’ve done in the years since raccoons provided them with meal tickets. Ingraham remains a busy artist whose work ranges from landscapes to fantasy to portraits of people and pets to logos and package design. Stylistically and thematically, it can be far afield of his PC Connection paintings, but it’s easy to spot similarities, too: the warmth, the wit, the love of Americana. Blistein has written documentaries (some in collaboration with Ken Burns) and books; currently, he’s serializing a novel via his Substack. Havey is still doing freelance art direction from his New Hampshire home and is also a filmmaker and photographer.

If someone were creating the 2025 equivalent of PC Connection today, would they promote it with rustic scenes of woodland creatures tilling the land, getting married, and throwing parades? Of course not. Lovingly handcrafted artwork doesn’t scale, which makes it a nonstarter on the web. Even if it did, sly charm has no place in online commerce, a medium that cares far more about shopping-cart workflows than branding. With rare exceptions such as Meh, almost every merchant has exactly the same personality, which is to say no personality at all.

I’m not saying I’d go back to the old days when PC Connection had to sell skittish computer users on the very idea of mail-order shopping. In a way, we now live in a world the company helped create. Or at least its old slogan—“Everything Overnight”—now applies to almost anything we might want delivered to our doors, in any product category. And sometimes, you don’t even have to wait overnight. 1990s me would be astounded. But damn it, I do miss those raccoons—and the whole era when tech marketing had some, well, character.

I could go on. But instead, I’ll leave you with three pieces of PC Connection-related miscellany.

Miscellaneous item #1:

Though early PC Connection ads stressed that the company sold only products for the IBM PC, it quickly embraced the Macintosh. Even before it was ready to start fulfilling orders, a division called MacConnection ran an ad in the second issue of Macworld, a few months after Apple unveiled its groundbreaking machine in January 1984. That was the start of a long-running campaign, originally with ads that were also produced by Church and Main and clever in their own right. But they featured human Mac users, not raccoons, so someone else will have to write about them.

Miscellaneous item #2:

Immersing myself in PC Connection lore for this article prompted me to check my archive of ancient Lotus Notes email to see if I’d ever received any correspondence from the company when I worked at PC World. I do still have one such message, from 1999, and it’s kind of—oh, read it for yourself:

Miscellaneous item #3:

Back in the day, PC Connection took customer service so seriously that it began bundling free videotapes on topics such as installing hard disks with orders. This effort led to the company installing a satellite uplink and operating PCTV, a full-blown tech news service featuring experts such as my friends Mike Elgan and Jim Heid. I have a fuzzy memory of a colleague telling me I could probably appear myself if I was willing to make the trek from Boston to the PCTV studio in New Hampshire. I didn’t seize the opportunity. And now it’s gone forever.

As far as I know, the raccoons never appeared on PCTV. I’d be thrilled to be proven wrong.