Vintage 1940s Have A Sweet Cigar Label 🍂 Embossed Red & Gold Litho | Red Lion PA Beauty

Who Made Have a Sweet Cigars? 🍃 Vintage 1940s Have A Sweet Cigar Label, Red Lion, Pennsylvania

Size: 7 3/4" x 7 1/4" ~ little to no wear

I love this one because it tells you exactly what was going on when it was printed. Up in the corner, "5 CENTS" is crossed out, and a red banner says Now 2 for 5¢. Across the bottom: MILLIONS sold for 5¢ each, THE SAME CIGAR, NOW 2 for 5¢. That is a nickel cigar cutting its price in half to stay alive.

🪙 The Twofer

Two-for-a-nickel cigars were called twofers, and Red Lion, Pennsylvania made them by the million. The cheap leaf that went into them was the whole point - the fancy Sumatra wrapper the five-cent cigars wore cost too much to use on a twofer. When the Depression hit, a lot of nickel brands did exactly what this label does: same cigar, half the price. The Federal Trade Commission noticed. In November 1935 it had at least one Red Lion maker, J.C. Winter & Co., agree to stop advertising "5¢ Cigar Now 2 For 5¢" - the very pitch printed here.

🏷️ A T. E. Brooks Brand

The label never names its maker, but the Patent Office does. HAVE A SWEET was a cigar trademark of T. E. Brooks & Co. of Red Lion. Thomas Edward Brooks was born in 1872 in Chanceford Township, York County, and owned and ran the company from 1914 until he died in November 1951. He also sat in the state House for the 1919 and 1921 sessions, and he was president of the Red Lion school board from 1934 to 1946. In February 1952, a couple of months after his death, the firm filed HAVE A SWEET as a trademark for cigars. It was registered in January 1953 and renewed in 1973. And the name kept going: a 1980 cigar almanac still lists Have A Sweet from T. E. Brooks & Co., right next to a sister brand called Have A Crook.

🖨️ Printed in Brooklyn

Down at the foot, in tiny type: CONSOLIDATED LITHOGRAPHING CORPORATION, BROOKLYN, N.Y. Jacob A. Voice put that company together around 1925 and 1926 out of older New York label houses, and it grew into the biggest cigar band printer in the world. TIME magazine ran the numbers in January 1935: of about five billion banded cigars made in America the year before, seven out of ten wore a Consolidated band. Voice himself came over from Romania at four and went to work for the New York lithographers William Steiner & Co. at 14, as a bronze feeder, for $2.50 a week. It worked out of Brooklyn until 1952. So this label is no older than the mid-1920s - and the trademark file narrows it right down. When T. E. Brooks & Co. registered HAVE A SWEET, it swore the name was first used in 1941, and Consolidated was gone from Brooklyn by 1952. That makes this a 1940s label, from the years when the twofer was still Red Lion's bread and butter. Turn it over and you can see the whole design pressed into the back - it is embossed, not just printed.

🏘️ Red Lion, the Cigar Town

Red Lion was incorporated in 1880, and it took its name from an old tavern that stood at the crossroads. Mary Nicholas and her husband, W. Jacob Nicholas, who ran it from 1826, named it the Red Lion after a tavern his family owned back in England, and hung out a sign with a lion painted red. The old tavern building is still standing. The first cigar factory in the borough was in Nathaniel Neiman's basement, and his wife, who knew the cigar business, ran it while he was out working as a plasterer. In 1880 the town had just one cigar factory, with three or four people working in it. By 1920 it was so big in cigars that York County kept two tax offices - one for the county and one just for Red Lion. By 1924 its factories employed 2,000 men and women and turned out more than 200 million cigars a year. By 1927 it had 109 cigar factories and was rolling a fifth of all the nickel cigars made in America. Plenty of those factories were just a man, his wife and a kid, rolling at the kitchen table. At one time the town made about a tenth of all the cigars in the United States. Then everything hit at once: the Depression cut demand, men were switching to cigarettes, and new machines could turn out 6,000 cigars a day against a hand roller's 600. In 1934 the cigar workers struck, blocking shipments, and police broke it up with billy clubs and tear gas. The town kept rolling cigars far longer than you would think - there were still 60 cigar factories in Red Lion in 1947, and its last cigar factory closed in 2011. Red Lion made its own cigar boxes, too. The Consumers Cigar Box Company built its factory in 1921 and made boxes there until the 1950s, and the building, also known as Red Lion Woodcraft, is on the National Register of Historic Places. And every New Year's Eve, instead of dropping a ball, Red Lion raises a cigar. In 1999 it was an eight-foot cigar held by a big lion, rising to the top of the historical society building on the Square while 1,500 to 2,000 people watched from outside.

It is a big label, almost a counter card, and it never went on a box. Frame it for a den, a bar or a tobacciana wall. You'll get one like the one shown.