Wendy the Good Little Witch invites you to be a Camp Fire Blue Bird

As a companion to a post back in February, here's another advertisement from the February 1979 issue (No. 27) of Ri¢hie Ri¢h Profit$, from Harvey Publications. In this one, Wendy the Good Little Witch issues an "invitation" to those readers who might like to learn more about the Blue Birds, a younger subdivision of the Camp Fire organization. A few years earlier, in 1975, the Camp Fire Girls of America had changed its named to simply Camp Fire and had changed its membership policy to become a co-ed youth organization.

Interestingly, though, there are only female Blue Birds — or Bluebirds, in some references — pictured in this advertisement. And there are a few references specifically to girls. Perhaps it took some time to change the marketing materials and to fully phase-in the co-ed aspect.

The Blue Birds designation, which was for those ages 6 to 8 in 1979, has since been phased out in favor of these age-level designations: Little Stars (ages 3 through 5), Starflight (kindergarten through second grade), Adventure (grades three through five), Discovery (grades six through eight), and Horizon (grades nine through 12). As an aside, it's interesting to note that the Blue Bird logo in this advertisement looks similar to the Twitter logo!

Wendy the Good Little Witch was heavily involved in promotions for Camp Fire and Blue Birds over the years, even to the point where some of her comics issues were full tie-ins with the organization. You can see a couple of those covers on Wikipedia and ComicVine. Wendy isn't the only fictional figure, though, that has been used over the years to promote Camp Fire. There was a series of Camp Fire Girls books and some other juvenile fiction that date back as far as the early 1900s. The organization also had tie-ins with Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, Archie, and Dennis the Menace, among others.