Vintage Hackensack Supply No. 6 Jet Broom Label 🧹 Rampant Lion Crossed Brooms Hackensack New Jersey 1970s

🦁 What Is a Rampant Lion Doing on a Broom Label From Hackensack, New Jersey?

Size: 6" x 4" ~ Slight to minor wear on the top left hand corner.

In the 1970s every kitchen, stockroom, church hall and back stoop had a broom leaning in a corner, and somebody had to supply it. This label carries that somebody's name. It is a sky-blue and purple Jet broom label for Hackensack Supply, 165 State Street, Hackensack, N. J. A golden lion stands up on its hind legs in the middle of it, guarding a pair of crossed brooms as if sweeping were a royal matter.

This is a vintage broom label printed for Hackensack Supply and sold under the name No. 6 Jet. It measures 6 x 4 inches (about 15 x 10 cm) in portrait format, the size of a 4x6 photo print. It is a one-of-a-kind original. No year is printed on it. The five-digit ZIP Code puts it no earlier than July 1963, and a dated copy of the same stock design puts it in the 1970s. I'll show you how below.

The upper-left corner is the one place this label shows where it has been handled, and it is pictured in close-up so you can judge it for yourself.

🧹 Hackensack Supply: What the Label Says and What It Doesn't

The label names its owner and says very little else about the business. It does not say who made the broom, and it credits no printer beyond "PRINTED IN U. S. A." "Jet" is the brand.

A Hackensack Supply Co. is still in business today, selling restaurant and janitorial supplies from Orchard Street in Hackensack and Route 17 in Paramus; its listings say it has been at it since 1952, and they give a different address and phone number from the ones on this label. If you worked for Hackensack Supply, or remember it on State Street, I'd love to hear from you.

🦁 The Lion, the Brooms, and a Number: 111

In heraldry, rampant describes a beast in profile, standing upright on its hind legs with its forepaws raised. The lion is the traditional "king of beasts" and stands for courage, nobility, royalty, strength and valor. Two objects crossed diagonally are said to be "in saltire," the X-shape of the St Andrew's cross. On a broom label this is borrowed coat-of-arms styling, a way of saying strength, quality, built to last. It's nobody's family crest, just a lion hired to sell brooms.

The art was a printer's stock design, and I can show you the sibling. The same rampant beast on a red disc between crossed brooms appears on a label for Johnson Products Company of Memphis, Tennessee, "Quality Brooms & Mops," marked "Now 31 Years." The Memphis label reads "Ask for a Black Dragon Hotel Broom." It has the same blue field, the same purple border, and the same small number 111. The Memphis firm called the figure its Black Dragon, and Hackensack Supply put the same drawing under "No. 6 Jet." That is one drawing with two names. (Not the Chicago hair-care Johnson Products, by the way.)

That pairing is why I read the 111 as a stock-design number. Broom houses bought a ready-made picture from the printer and had their own name set into the panel.

Here is a word-history aside that has nothing to do with this label's design. "Broom" was a shrub before it was a sweeper, and a sprig of that shrub was the badge of England's Plantagenet kings. A heraldry glossary even lists a Welsh coat of arms with broom sprigs and a golden rampant lion. It is a coincidence, but I never tire of a lion and a broom turning up on the same shield.

📮 Reading the Clues: How a ZIP Code Dates a Label

With no date printed, the small print does the work. The five-digit ZIP Code is the floor. The Post Office began ZIP Codes on July 1, 1963, so a label carrying one cannot be earlier.

Beside it, the state is still spelled "N. J." with periods. That was the Post Office's official abbreviation in its lists of 1831, 1874 and 1943, until the two-letter "NJ" replaced it in 1963. This printer took the new ZIP but kept the old spelling.

The phone number is printed in plain digits with its area code. The 201 area code is one of the original 1947 codes, and at first it covered all of New Jersey. Hackensack never left it, so it gives no end date. What settles the decade is that Memphis sibling. Johnson Products started making brooms and mops in 1944, so its label marked "Now 31 Years" dates to about 1975, and this Hackensack printing of the same design 111 belongs to the 1970s with it.

🏙️ Hackensack, and the Street Called the "Back Street"

Hackensack is the seat of Bergen County. The city's own history says its name honors Oratam, a Lenape chief born in 1577 who deeded the land to settlers in 1664. The township went by "New Barbadoes" until a 1921 referendum.

Hackensack also has a Revolutionary War chapter that is easy to love. On November 20, 1776, Washington led his retreating army into what was then a small village around The Green. The troops camped there while he decided to keep retreating, which set up the victory at Trenton the next month. That stretch of the retreat is sometimes called "The Great 1776 Hackensack Foot Race."

State Street has its own line in the town's story. George J. Ackerman recalled the 1840s and '50s in writing published in 1902, reprinted in the city's 1976 history Hackensack – Heritage to Horizons. He wrote that "Main Street was known as Front Street and our State Street was the Back street," and that the two joined at the Courthouse. It's easy to imagine a supply house settling on the working side of town. The same book records the police moving into a new State Street headquarters, No. 225, in 1958.

To see the heart of town, the Library of Congress holds a panorama of Court House Square, Hackensack, by Haines Photo Co., taken about 1913 (item 2007662578). It predates this label by decades, but it shows the civic center the street ran to. The county's Beaux-Arts courthouse is the work of architect James Riely Gordon.

Then the shopping map changed. Before the malls, Main Street was a destination for Bergen County shoppers, with movie theaters and department stores. Garden State Plaza opened in Paramus on May 1, 1957, and Bergen Mall on November 14, 1957. Downtown then entered a decline that lasted decades. This label was printed into that changed world.

🌾 A Broom Label at a Turning Point in the Broom Trade

American broom-making has a famously specific starting point. Levi Dickinson of Hadley, Massachusetts, began making brooms from broomcorn, a kind of sorghum, in 1797, and the Shakers later invented the flat broom. Legend credits Benjamin Franklin with bringing broomcorn to America. It is repeated wherever brooms are discussed, and I pass it along as the legend it is.

The years this label comes from sit at a turning point. Broomcorn was still grown in the Midwest in the 1960s, but production was moving west and then into Mexico. A U.S. International Trade Commission report and a broomcorn trade timeline both describe it. Mexico shipped its first 2,400 tons in 1965, and between 1965 and 1975 the industry switched over from U.S. to Mexican broomcorn. The brooms drawn here are classic straw brooms, the kind that era was built on.

🦁 About these

The label never says what No. 6 means, and the word broom isn't printed anywhere on it; the crossed brooms do the talking. The JET BROOM name went on the federal register as a broom trademark on January 3, 1978 (reg. 1,081,081, first use November 1976), registered to Jet Broom, Inc. of Houston, Texas, a different company from Hackensack Supply. The supply is finite in the plainest way - there's just this one, and once it's gone, it'll be very difficult to acquire.