Mr. Peanut and Planters ๐ฅ From a Wilkes-Barre Fruit Stand to the Atlantic City Boardwalk
๐ฅ Mr. Peanut has been tipping his top hat at America for more than a hundred years. Most of us could draw him from memory: the monocle, the cane, the spats, that cheerful peanut-shell body. What most folks don't know is the story behind him, and it's a good one.
It starts with a boy getting off at the wrong train station. It runs through a Pennsylvania coal town, a schoolboy's sketch in Virginia, and a store on the Atlantic City Boardwalk you could smell a block away. I keep a little shelf of Mr. Peanut pieces, so let me tell you the story they come from.
๐ Who founded Planters Peanuts?
Planters was founded by Amedeo Obici, an Italian immigrant, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He started the Planters Peanut Company in 1906, and in 1908 it was incorporated as the Planters Nut and Chocolate Company.
Obici was born on July 15, 1877, in Oderzo, in the Veneto region of Italy. In March 1889 he sailed from Le Havre to join his uncle, Vittorio Sartori, in Scranton. His destination was written on a label tied through a buttonhole of his coat.
It didn't work. He was misdirected and got off the train in Wilkes-Barre instead. The station staff walked the boy over to the fruit store of Enrico Musante, and that wrong stop shaped the rest of his life. Musante's daughter Louise later became his wife; they married in 1916.
๐ฅ How did a fruit stand turn into a peanut empire?
The Musante store had a peanut roaster and a fan that blew the smell of roasting peanuts out into the street. Anybody who has walked past a nut roaster knows exactly how well that works.
Obici wanted a roaster of his own, but roasting ovens cost money he didn't have. So he built one out of scrapyard parts. He roasted, he sold, and he got clever about it.
Here's my favorite bit of company lore from those early days. Obici put one letter of his last name into each bag of peanuts: an O, a B, an I or a C. He slipped in only one "O" for every fifty bags. Find the O and you won a watch, a gold-colored Ingersoll he'd bought for a dollar. People bought bag after bag hunting for that O.
In 1897 he teamed up with Mario Peruzzi, another Italian immigrant, who was working for a wholesale grocer. Peruzzi later married Obici's sister Lizzie, so the partnership became family too.
๐๏ธ Why was Wilkes-Barre called the peanut capital of the world?
For nearly half a century, Wilkes-Barre was the peanut capital of the world. That's how historian William Kashatus put it in his history of the town, and the details he gathered are a delight.
The Planters store sat at 10 East Market Street, just off Public Square. Out front, an eight-foot Mr. Peanut in a black top hat, monocle and white spats handed free roasted peanuts to children, which brought their parents in the door. Inside, kids watched Mr. Peanut figures sitting astride the big grinding machines, pedaling away as the nuts were ground.
The company headquarters was a few blocks away at 632 South Main Street. Planters also ran an enormous mail-order business in premiums. By 1951, orders for things like stuffed dolls and savings banks had climbed to 25,000 to 30,000 a week.
Wilkes-Barre lost the headquarters after the company was sold in the early 1960s. In 2003 the South Main Street building went to the city for $100. Today only the concrete facade of the old executive office building is left.
๐ฑ Why did Planters move to Suffolk, Virginia?
To be closer to the peanuts. In 1913 Planters built a new processing plant in Suffolk, right in the heart of Virginia's peanut-farming country. It was the company's first mass-production plant, and by 1950 the Suffolk facility was described as the largest peanut processing plant in the world.
With the Suffolk shelling plant running, Planters brought out the "Nickel Lunch": a two-ounce package of whole blanched peanuts for 5 cents.
Obici and Louise moved to Virginia in 1924 and bought the 253-acre Bay Point Farm near Suffolk. Louise died in 1938, and Obici set out to build a hospital in her memory. He died at Bay Point Farm on May 22, 1947, before it was finished. Peruzzi saw it through with the money Obici left for it, and the Louise Obici Memorial Hospital opened in 1951.
โ๏ธ Who drew the first Mr. Peanut?
A Suffolk schoolboy named Antonio Gentile. In 1916 Planters held a contest for a trademark, and Antonio sent in sketches of a friendly, humanized peanut: tumbling, serving nuts, and strolling along with a dignified cane. His design won, and his family got five dollars for it.
Antonio was born in Philadelphia in 1903 to Italian immigrant parents. The family moved to Suffolk so his father could put his tailoring skills to work.
Five dollars wasn't the end of it. Obici took the boy under his wing and paid for his education. Antonio was valedictorian of Jefferson High School in 1920, went on to the University of Virginia, and earned his medical degree. He became a doctor in Newport News and died of a heart attack in 1939.
Antonio's original drawings are in the Smithsonian today. His nephew, Robert Slade, contacted the National Museum of American History in 2014 to offer them for the national collection.
๐ฉ Who gave Mr. Peanut his top hat and monocle?
A professional artist polished Antonio's peanut into the gentleman we know. Most accounts credit commercial artist Andrew S. Wallach with adding the monocle and top hat.
There's a rival claim. Some credit Frank P. Krize Sr., a Wilkes-Barre artist, with the additions. Wallach's daughter Virginia maintained that Krize joined the company after Mr. Peanut had already been created. Either way, the look stuck.
It stuck so well that when Planters ran an online contest in 2006 asking whether to add a bow tie, cufflinks or a pocket watch, the public voted for no changes at all. He has a proper full name, too: Bartholomew Richard Fitzgerald-Smythe.
๐ก What was the Planters store on the Atlantic City Boardwalk?
This is the part of the story I love most.
Planters opened its 28th store on the Atlantic City Boardwalk in 1930, and that same year Mr. Peanut started walking the Boardwalk. For many years the store sat across from Steel Pier, selling the Nickel Lunch to the summer crowds.
Leo Yeager III, whose father managed the store and who worked there himself through the 1960s, remembered it taking up about half a block, with seven peanut roasters going in the window. Herb Stern, remembering the store years later, said you could smell it a block away. The costumed Mr. Peanut out front handed out samples that were meant for the grown-ups, though the kids always snuck in for some.
Local lore holds that the very first Boardwalk shop had to close after rats got into the place. Mr. Peanut came back at Virginia Avenue, and that store ran until 1978. The Hard Rock Hotel and Casino stands on that ground now.
The man in the peanut suit never spoke. City historian Allen "Boo" Pergament remembered how visitors wanted him to talk, and he just wouldn't say a thing. He made one famous outing in 1964, riding a donkey down the Boardwalk with a flag in hand to greet the delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Atlantic City's Mr. Peanut even turned up in the 1988 movie Beaches, silent as ever.
One of the costumes is on display at the Atlantic City Historical Museum on Garden Pier.
๐ Did the peanut trade end when the store closed?
Not at all. The Boardwalk Peanut Shoppe opened in 1972 and carried on the tradition, roasting on original Planters roasters and selling plenty of Planters collectibles.
Leo Yeager III, the young man from the Steel Pier store, went into the peanut business himself. By the 2000s he was running his own Boardwalk Peanuts shops in three local casinos and on the Ocean City Boardwalk. In the early 1990s he even brought Mr. Peanut back to the Boardwalk at his Tropicana store, with a fellow in the shell and white gloves posing for photos. He opened his Boardwalk Peanut Shoppe at 10th Street in Ocean City in 1972, and in 2009 he told The Press of Atlantic City he had about 25,000 pieces of Mr. Peanut memorabilia, selling 1,000 to 2,000 of them a year.
The roasting smell outlived the company store by decades.
๐ข Who owns Planters today?
Planters has changed hands several times. Standard Brands took over the company at the start of the 1960s and began phasing out the retail stores to focus on supermarket sales. Standard Brands merged with Nabisco in 1981, and Kraft acquired Nabisco in 2000. Kraft merged with Heinz in 2015.
In 2021 Kraft Heinz sold its nuts business, Planters included, to Hormel for $3.35 billion. The deal closed on June 7, 2021.
๐ข Didn't Mr. Peanut die in 2020?
He did, for about a week and a half. On January 22, 2020, Planters released a teaser in which Mr. Peanut fell to his death. At his Super Bowl LIV funeral, the Kool-Aid Man's tears and a bit of sunlight sprouted "Baby Nut," and the old gentleman was back in a new shell.
After more than a century, he felt like family. Back in Virginia, the General Assembly had already passed a joint resolution commending him in 2017.
๐๏ธ What Mr. Peanut pieces can you still find?
Here's where the story lands on my shelf. Each of these comes out of a different chapter of his long life, and I have a small stack of each.
๐ถ The Mr. Peanut figural whistle
Planters had a whole premium trade aimed at kids, and the peanut whistle was part of it. A 1957 Baltimore and Ohio Railroad employee magazine described children saving their Planters peanut bags so they could get a "Peanut Pencil," and maybe someday even a "Peanut Whistle." You had to earn one.
The Mr. Peanut figural whistle is the full gentleman in molded plastic, about 2 1/2 inches tall: top hat, monocle, hand on hip, cane, legs crossed on his little base. "Mr." is molded on the crown of the hat and PEANUT runs across the band. The open top of the hat is the mouthpiece. I have them in red and in beige, and the beige is the harder of the two to find.
๐น The "Everybody Loves a Nut" swizzle stick
The Mr. Peanut swizzle stick is white plastic, topped with a die-cut Mr. Peanut in black, with EVERYBODY LOVES A NUT running down the stem.
The little mark after that slogan is what dates it. "Everybody Loves a Nut" was a Planters tagline of the 1990s. The trademark record gives its first use as September 1991, and the registration issued on February 23, 1993. This stick prints the slogan with a โข, not yet an ยฎ, which puts it in that early-1990s window. That's the very same stretch when Leo Yeager was bringing Mr. Peanut back to the Boardwalk.
๐งต The die-cut cloth sticker
The Planters Mr. Peanut cloth sticker is a little die-cut cutout of the whole figure, about 2 1/2 by 1 inches. He's printed in flat golden yellow and black on white cloth, with MR. PEANUT on his hat band and a small MR PEANUT with the registered mark at his feet. These unused ones never went onto a jacket or a lunchbox.
๐บ๏ธ The 1968 Mr. Peanut 50 States Coloring Book
This one ties the whole story together. The Mr. Peanut 50 States Coloring Book is printed ยฉ MCMLXVIII, 1968, by Standard Brands Incorporated of New York, the company that had bought Planters earlier that decade. It was published through Rand McNally & Company of Chicago.
The cover is a map of the country full of state symbols, with Mr. Peanut standing at the lower right. It's signed by Lowell Ellsworth Smith. Smith was born in Canton, Ohio, in 1924, worked as a commercial illustrator at Canton Art Service and Manning Studios in Cleveland, and drew covers for Saalfield's children's coloring and activity books. In 1960 he turned to fine-art watercolor, and in 1983 he won the Prix de West purchase award. His papers are at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.
Inside, the credit reads "Drawings by Joe Naef," one state to a page. Mr. Peanut drops in here and there: on the Alaska page with a spear and a fish, and on the Virginia page carrying a tray of peanut butter, cookies and ice cream. The Virginia caption reads, "There are many peanut farms in Virginia, the home of Planters Peanuts." Antonio Gentile's hometown, right there in a children's coloring book fifty-two years after his sketch.
๐ Why does Mr. Peanut still matter?
Because he came from people. A boy who got off at the wrong station. A schoolboy who drew a peanut with a cane for five dollars, and a businessman who paid his way through medical school. A silent man in a peanut suit on a summer boardwalk, and a kid from the Steel Pier store who kept the roasters going for another generation.
Every whistle, stirrer and coloring book is a little piece of that story. Nobody's making these again, and once the unused ones are gone, they'll be very hard to come by. If one of them brings back a summer on the Boardwalk for you, I'd love for it to end up on your shelf.
