True News USA - Commercial Flashback - 1980's Bartles & Jaymes Wine Cooler TV Ad featuring the late David Rufkahr and Dick Maugg

The product line is well remembered for its folksy television commercials, created by Hal Riney, which ran from 1984 to 1991. Two older gentlemen characters, Frank Bartles and Ed Jaymes, sat on a front porch and related their new discoveries or projects on which they were working. The characters were patterned after two men who started a little winery which eventually became the Ernest & Julio Gallo Winery. Occasionally ads would be a twist on the idea of senior citizens or folksiness, such as having the pair fly an old-fashioned biplane over a beach, then airdrop crates of their product which were received by grateful young party animals. Bartles did all the talking, and ended each commercial with the tagline, "... and thank you for your support."^[1]

David Rufkahr played Frank Bartles and Dick Maugg played the silent stone faced Ed Jaymes. Prior to their work on the ads, neither Rufkahr nor Maugg had been an actor: Rufkahr, a career Air Force veteran and cattle rancher from Redmond, Oregon, won the job in a talent search. Dick Maugg, was a Santa Rosa general contractor. David Rufkahr died of a heart attack in April 1996, in Bend, Oregon, at the age of 61. Dick Maugg, of Santa Rosa, CA, died of cancer on July 28, 2015; he was 83. His death was reported to news outlets by his family October 27, 2015.^[2]