Behind the jerseys: How the iconic Astros rainbow jerseys came to be
HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- Clear Lake resident Jack Amuny remembers it like it was yesterday.
"It was just like getting a job to do a brochure, or an ad, or a logo," he told Eyewitness News.
It was 1969 when the Astros' ad agency asked him to design a new uniform.
"Well, they wanted something different," he remembered.
They sure got it with the classic, iconic, "rainbow" uniform the Astros wore in various iterations for more than a decade.
"They already had orange as one of their colors," he explained. "And so we just sat down and decided to use that horizontal format and cut together, put together pieces of paper that was a sequence of orange, red, going to yellow, to orange "
His wife, Heather, loves it to this day.
"I thought it was beautiful because I loved the colors," she said. "And it is beautiful. And it's a nice design. "
It makes sense. The Astros wanted a uniform, Amuny said, that appealed to women.
Now a classic design inextricable from the team, at the time it got mixed reviews such that Amuny kept quiet about his participation.
"I heard some negative things about what had I done to baseball," he said. "People liking it and not liking it, so I didn't tell anybody I'd done it. And to this day I don't think anybody out at the Astros knows that I did it. "
Interestingly, the Astros made only one change to his original work -- they shifted the star from the center to the side.
All these years later, it's a top seller and Jack Amuny, an Astros fan who wishes he'd gotten tickets to the series, knows it was a home run.
A 10-foot tall rooster, free hot dogs, head-shaving and pumpkin carvings: We've got all the World Series bases covered.
