Antique Spirit of St. Louis Cigar Label 🛩️ Lindbergh New York to Paris Flight NOS 1927-1930s

Size: 5" x 2 1/4" ~ very slight corner softening/edge wear. They vary a little one to the next.

✈️ The Label

"Spirit of St. Louis" runs in pale yellow serif italic, outlined in black, across a green globe that curves like the earth itself. A little skyline at the left is labeled NEW YORK; a church spire at the right is labeled PARIS. A red border frames the whole thing, and along the foot: "REG. U.S. PAT. OFF." at lower left, "AMERICAN LITHOGRAPHIC CO., N.Y. U.S.A." at lower right. The back is plain, unprinted cream paper. This is the outer end label from a nickel cigar box - the inner lid of the same box carried the airplane itself, the flight dates, and the maker's name.

🚬 Mazer-Cressman, Detroit

The company behind it was the Mazer-Cressman Cigar Co. Inc. of Detroit. The matching inner-lid label - held today by the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum - shows the plane, "FIRST FLIGHT - NEW YORK TO PARIS - MAY 20-21, 1927 - 33 1/2 HOURS," and the price: five cents. Mazer-Cressman filed the trademark for the whole design in July 1927, weeks after Lindbergh landed. This end label itself carries no date - only "REG. U.S. PAT. OFF." - so it was printed sometime after that July 1927 filing, into the 1930s.

🏭 The Grandy Street Plant

Jacob Mazer and his brother Henry built a Detroit cigar business that survived one factory fire in 1911 and another in 1924; that same year they merged with Allen R. Cressman's Sons of Philadelphia, with Henry Mazer as president. That October, 1,500 employees opened the company's new five-story plant at 5031 Grandy Street, designed by Albert Kahn - the same architect behind Ford's River Rouge complex and the Packard plant. Detroit's cigar industry rivaled Tampa's in those years, and this Kahn building is one of the few survivors of it. In February 1937, about 400 of the plant's workers, mostly Polish women, walked out in a sit-down strike and won union recognition and a raise that April; by that summer the plant had been bought and closed by E. Rosenwald & Bros. of New York.

🛩️ A Detroit Flyer

Lindbergh himself was born in Detroit, and his mother, Evangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh, taught chemistry at the city's Cass Technical High School - so a Detroit cigar maker naming a nickel cigar after him wasn't as much of a reach as it looks. He lifted off from Roosevelt Field at 7:52 in the morning on May 20, 1927, crossed the Irish coast around three the next afternoon, and set down at Le Bourget outside Paris at 10:22 that night - 33 1/2 hours in the air, no radio, a wicker seat, in a plane he'd helped design with Donald Hall. He carried five sandwiches, a canteen of water and 451 gallons of fuel. A crowd of about 150,000 broke through the barriers to reach him, carried him off on their shoulders and tore strips of fabric off the plane for souvenirs. Within weeks his name and the Spirit of St. Louis were on hundreds of products, licensed and not, and a Detroit nickel cigar was one of them.

🌍 What I Like About It

It's a nickel cigar box label that put Lindbergh's flight on a shelf in a Detroit factory built by the same architect who built Ford's Rouge plant - printing, aviation and industrial Detroit all on one small piece of paper.