"Many older people first came across the word as the name of the boxer in Ham Fisher’s famous comic strip. This is variously stated as having begun in 1928 or 1930, though the truth seems to be that it was briefly syndicated in the earlier year but then disappeared for a while, only becoming widely available two years later. The strip featured the eponymous Joe Palooka as a slow-witted and inarticulate boxer, even though “his heart was pure and his ideals high”. But Ham Fisher didn’t invent the word: it had been around for several years by the time his strip first appeared. (The earliest I can find is in the Lincoln Star, Nebraska, in March 1923: “But [Jack] Dempsey against some palooka who had been press agented into greatness and into the form of a Dempsey menace — that would pack any outdoor arena.” The casual reference shows that it was even then familiar to the writer and that he expected his readers to know it.) The boxing associations seem to have been particularly strong, to judge from the magazine The Ring, which in November 1926 glossed the word to mean “A tenth rater, a boxer without ability, a nobody” and which implied it had been known for some time."

From: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-pal1.htm

You know, talking about security blanket, the most famous one is Hugh Heffner's bunny blanket. That's where he got the logo for Playboy.

Good article, though - except I'd never heard of any of them apart from the security blanket. Mine was a bit of old blue terry-towelling dressing gown and was called MiMi.