Vintage 1960s Pinup Broom Label 🧹 NOS Sexy Housewife Art Yellow & Navy #87 Kitchen Wall Art

Did a Broom Label Really Stop You Cold? 🧹 This One Will. A Vintage 1960s Pin-Up Broom Label, Design No. 87

Size: 6" x 3 1/2"

I'll admit it: of all the broom labels I've handled, she's the one that makes people laugh out loud. A housewife with bouncing curls, a blue halter apron and a red ruffled half-apron, holding her broom like she's already done the floors and is off to the dance, over one big red word, BROOM. Somebody decided a broom needed a pin-up girl, and honestly, they weren't wrong.

She's new old stock - never wrapped around a broom. There's no brand, no maker and no town on her, just a small 87 and PRINTED IN U.S.A. along the bottom, because she was stock art: a broom maker ordered her by the thousand, by number, and let her do the selling.

🧹 Number 87, and the Wichita house that sold her

Numbered stock broom labels like this one were sold by John L. Denning & Company of Wichita, Kansas, a broomcorn house that got its start in 1924, ran fourteen branches in different states, and at times held 75 to 90 percent of all the broomcorn in the country. Denning's sample booklet told customers "Order by Number Only" and "Do Not Tear Out These Labels," and it wouldn't take an order for fewer than 1,000 of any one design. The company kept advertising to the broom trade until February 1995. It made sense to buy your labels there - the same outfit could sell a broom maker the broomcorn and the paper that sold it.

Here's the part I love. Design 87 wasn't always her. The older printings of number 87, with the foot line "87 LITHO IN U.S.A.," show a prim Edwardian maid in a mob cap, a red bodice and a long white apron - same yellow field, same navy band, same red BROOM. When the series was reprinted with the newer PRINTED IN U.S.A. foot line, number 87 got a complete makeover: the mob cap went, the curls came in, and the long apron turned into a short halter number. The two of them turn up side by side in one collector's lot, the old maid and this gal, both wearing 87. She's even been reproduced on the cover of a modern journal, so I'm not the only one who can't stop smiling at her.

📅 How old is she?

That makeover dates her. Denning's booklet carries a "Wichita 1" postal-zone address, so it was printed between 1943, when postal zones began, and 1963, when ZIP codes replaced them, and every page in it has the old LITHO IN U.S.A. foot line. PRINTED IN U.S.A. is the later style, the one that shows up on broom labels with ZIP codes. So she's a 1960s girl - and one look at that hairdo would have told you as much. By then the pin-up was everywhere, on the gas station calendar, matchbooks and ink blotters, and putting one on the most ordinary chore in the house was a wink she's clearly in on.

🏭 The broom trade

At one time the country had some 1,500 broom shops turning out 45 million brooms. One of the men behind them was August Rosenberger. He and his brother-in-law, Mr. Klein, ran a grocery in Evansville, Indiana, big enough to keep twelve horse-drawn wagons out delivering. A farmer who couldn't pay his bill gave Rosenberger a shack with one broom machine and one sewing machine instead; Rosenberger and one of his store hands taught themselves to make brooms and sold them over the grocery counter, and that was the start of his broom business in 1888. He sold the grocery to Klein and headed for Wichita, then the center of the broomcorn market. In March 1907 he started the Atlantic Broom Company in Baltimore, buying the equipment, stock and contacts of Calvert Broom and Brush, which operated out of the Baltimore City jail. On January 30, 1911, it merged with the Southwestern Broom Company of Evansville into the Atlantic-Southwestern Broom Company, which by 1932 made 3.6 million brooms a year with 300 people and didn't close until November 1989, after 101 years.

Zephyr Manufacturing of Sedalia, Missouri, is another one: Harry E. Lindstrom started it in 1927 making nothing but brooms, registered ZEPHYR as his broom trademark in February 1938, and Zephyr still makes brooms and mops in Sedalia. Denning's North Carolina branch carried on as R.E. Caddy. Then imports and plastic came - a 1951 headline warned that witches would have to ride imported brooms, and plastic brooms made their mark in 1967.

Local legend in the broom towns has it that at the height of the trade, the smell of dried broomcorn - faintly sweet, grassy and dusty - settled over whole neighborhoods on warm afternoons when the factory windows were open, and the old residents called it the smell of prosperity. With a 1,000-label minimum on every design, it's easy to see how a stack of one girl could outlive the broom maker who ordered her.

💃 About her

She's an unused number 87, 6 by 3 1/2 inches, colors bright. She's a natural for a laundry room, a kitchen, a pantry door, or a pin-up collection. The older maid version of 87 turns up now and then, but this pin-up redraw almost never comes up for sale. The supply is finite - nobody's printing her anymore, and once these last ones are framed, they'll be very difficult to acquire.