Antique 1920s 1930s Burchs Kandy Korn Candy Coated Popcorn Bag 🐘 Kansas City Missouri Burch Manufacturing Co Elephant NOS

Burch's Kandy Korn Popcorn Bag 🐘 Burch Mfg. Co., Kansas City, Missouri

Size: 8 1/2" x 3 1/2"

An unused cellophane bag for BURCH'S Kandy Korn - "POP CORN, CANDY COATED," with an elephant tossing popcorn in the air - printed "MADE ONLY IN A BURCH MACHINE," "THE GREATEST OF ALL HEALTH FOODS - for Children... for Grownups," and BURCH MFG. CO., KANSAS CITY, MO. You have to love that health-food claim on candy-coated popcorn. I have a stack, so yours will look just like this one.

🏭 The Popcorn Machine Company

Burch didn't just sell popcorn, it built the machines. Around 1922 Julian R. Burch started making popcorn machines in Kansas City as the Burch Manufacturing Company, at 1906 Wyandotte. An inventor named Charles T. Manley joined him, Burch soon left for St. Louis, and Manley took over - and in 1925 he perfected the first electric popcorn machine. That was a big deal: the old steam and gas machines were street-cart and carnival rigs, but an electric one could sit right in a movie theater lobby. Manley kept the Burch name until 1940, when it became Manley, Inc. The company later took over the big building at 1920 Wyandotte, and that one is apartments today, the Popcorn Lofts.

So a Burch's bag can only come from 1922 to 1940, and since it's cellophane, the later part of that run - the late '20s or '30s.

🎬 Kansas City and the Movies

Kansas City has a real claim on movie popcorn. Julia May Braden, a tough Kansas City widow and former traveling medicine seller, had four popcorn stands at or inside theaters on Prospect and Troost by 1931 - the Linwood, the Isis, the Lindbergh - and said she cleared about $15,000 a year selling "Golden Flake" popcorn. Local press made her a legend as one of the first to get popcorn into a theater lobby.

📜 The Stories

Old-timers in Kansas City used to say the Burch machine was as much a part of the traveling show circuit as the tent itself - wherever a big top went up within five hundred miles of Missouri, a Burch machine went with it. Maybe that's why there's an elephant on the bag. Nobody wrote down why, but popcorn and the circus went together like peanuts and... well, elephants.