If you’re an old-school KQED viewer, you might remember Qued and Phred — the very strange mascots of the now-defunct annual KQED auction. Qued is a mischievous-looking giant red devil creature who walks on all fours and often carries a “sold” sign in his mouth. Phred, who can usually be seen leading Qued on a leash, is what would happen if the Monopoly man had a baby with the Babadook.
For reasons that are fairly unfathomable now, these two “Monster Mash”-looking weirdos were an integral part of mainstream KQED culture between 1960 and 1990. Qued and Phred’s images adorned T-shirts, belt buckles, advertisements and studio backdrops. Now and again, we as a TV channel even made volunteers climb into mascot costumes in Qued and Phred’s likenesses.
“I remember the first time I saw [the Qued costume],” says former auction worker Marianne Fu-Petroni. “It was a real big, human-sized costume. I was like ‘Somebody gets into there?!’ You know, you can’t really keep it clean after so many years…”
![A man and woman stand between a table and a lined board with a list of items on it. They are surrounded by random objects including a clock, painting of flowers, carving of an Indigenous person, and full-sized figures of a devil and a man in a top hat.](https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/Screen-Shot-2023-04-20-at-6.08.51-PM-800x1011.png)
The design for Qued and Phred arrived in 1960, five years after the first live auction was launched to keep KQED’s lights on. The characters came into being when a volunteer named Frannie Fleishhacker (wife of prominent Bay Area businessman Mortimer Fleishhacker) decided to seek out an eye-catching logo for the auction. Frannie reached out to Oakland advertising company Foster & Kleiser to see if anyone would be willing to create a design, gratis.