Vintage 1950s-1990s Planters Mr. Peanut Kit 🥜 Red Figural Whistle, Cloth Sticker, Everybody Loves a Nut Swizzle Stick

🥜 How Did a Five-Dollar Peanut Sketch Get From a Kid's Pocket to the Cocktail Glass? A Vintage Mr. Peanut Whistle, Cloth Sticker and Swizzle Stick Kit

Size: Whistle 2 1/2" x 1", Cloth Sticker 2 1/2" x 1", Swizzle Stick 6" x 1" ~ New old stock, never used.

Three ways Mr. Peanut got into American hands, and I put them together because together they cover most of the little guy's long working life. A red plastic figural whistle from the 1950s, the prize a kid saved up peanut bags for. A die-cut cloth sticker from the 1950s, cut right to the shape of the man himself. And a white plastic swizzle stick from the 1990s, when he'd moved up to the rim of a highball glass to tell the whole room, in black capital letters, EVERYBODY LOVES A NUT. Each piece is drawn from my stack of unused stock.

🎩 Five Dollars and a Monocle

In 1916 Planters ran a contest for a company trademark, and a 14-year-old Suffolk, Virginia schoolboy named Antonio Gentile won it with a drawing of a peanut with arms and legs, walking with a cane. His family got five dollars. Somebody then added the monocle, the top hat and the gloves, usually credited to commercial artist Andrew S. Wallach, though the credit is disputed in favor of Frank P. Krize Sr. of Wilkes-Barre. The joke was the whole point: a nickel snack dressed like old money.

Amedeo Obici, the boss, thought five dollars wasn't enough. He put Antonio and four of his siblings through college and paid for Antonio's medical school besides. Antonio became a doctor in Newport News and died of a heart attack in 1939. His drawing went a long way further. Mr. Peanut made his national debut in the Saturday Evening Post on February 23, 1918, and when Advertising Week opened the Madison Avenue Walk of Fame in 2004 he was one of the first five in. Not bad for a five-dollar sketch.

🎵 The Red Whistle: A Prize You Saved Up For

Top hat, monocle, one hand on his hip and the other on a cane, standing on a little rectangular base with his body textured like a peanut shell. Mr. is molded on the crown of the hat and PEANUT right across the band. You blow into the open crown of the hat, and there's an oval opening cut into the back of his head behind the face. A 1957 railroad employee magazine has children saving up Planters peanut bags so they could send off for a "Peanut Pencil," and "maybe some day even a Peanut Whistle." That's the part I love. A kid had to want this, save for it and wait by the mailbox.

🧵 The Cloth Sticker: Printed So You Can See the Weave

Standing tall in his black top hat with MR. PEANUT on the band, monocle on, big smile, legs crossed, spats on, printed in flat golden yellow and black straight onto white cloth. Look close and you can see the weave right through the yellow. There's a small MR PEANUT and a registered mark at his feet. One batch turned up in an old envelope with 1950's written on the front, which I think is about the best label a thing like this could ask for.

🍸 The Swizzle Stick: Dated by Its Own Paperwork

Six inches of molded white plastic, the full figure printed in black at the top, a registered mark at his feet, and EVERYBODY LOVES A NUT.™ running down the stem to a small ball tip for stirring. Here's the best clue on the whole stick. Planters LifeSavers Company filed that slogan as registration No. 1,754,080, swearing it first used the line in September 1991. The registration came through in February 1993. A company puts ™ on a mark it claims but hasn't registered yet and changes to ® when the certificate arrives, so a stick with ™ on the slogan was made in that gap, roughly 1991 to 1993. And that's exactly why the little Mr. Peanut standing above it, registered for decades, already wears a full ®. One piece of plastic, two marks, two different stages of the same paperwork.

Swizzle sticks put a brand in the customer's hand at the exact moment of leisure, and the hobby of collecting them even has a name, rhabdophily. Try that one at the bar.

🥜 Give People the Thing First

Here's what connects all three. Amedeo Obici was eleven when he sailed from Italy in March 1889, bound for an uncle in Scranton. He got misdirected, stepped off the train in Wilkes-Barre, and landed in the Musante family's fruit store, where a fan on the peanut roaster blew the smell out onto the sidewalk to reel people in. He built his own roaster out of junkyard parts and slipped one letter of his last name into each bag, and whoever spelled it out won an Ingersoll watch. In 1906 he and Mario Peruzzi founded Planters in Wilkes-Barre. For nearly half a century that town was the peanut capital of the world, and every summer an eight-foot Mr. Peanut walked the shopping district handing roasted peanuts to children. A whistle in the mail, a sticker for your scrapbook, a stirrer in your drink: it's the same idea in three materials. Give people the thing first and they'll remember who gave it to them.

🎡 Boardwalk Legend

Mr. Peanut began walking the Atlantic City Boardwalk in 1930, never saying a word, selling the five-cent Nickel Lunch just by being there. Local legend holds that the first shop had to close after rats got into the stock. It reopened at Virginia Avenue across from Steel Pier, where old-timers remember the smell of roasting nuts pulling people in off the boards for decades, and it shut its doors in 1978. Here's my favorite part. The store manager's son, Leo Yeager III, opened a peanut shop of his own in 1972 at 10th Street in Ocean City, a few miles down the shore. Planters let licensees buy Mr. Peanut merchandise by the case, and once he saw what collectors were after he bought everything he could, around 25,000 pieces, and it's still open.

🪦 RIP 1916-2020

On January 22, 2020, Planters announced that Mr. Peanut had died, in a campaign built around Super Bowl LIV. In Suffolk, where a full-color Mr. Peanut has stood on a granite pedestal since 1991, fans left flowers and candles. At the funeral spot the Kool-Aid Man cried, one of his tears hit the grave, and up popped Baby Nut with the line "Just kidding, I'm back." By February 2021 the grown-up Mr. Peanut was back in his top hat and monocle. Very few mascots from 1916 are still working, and this one has outlived his own funeral. Hormel bought Planters in 2021 for $3.35 billion.

Set all three in a shadow box or a bar-cart corner and let them tell it. It still stirs a drink if you want it to. There is no new press run coming. When the last of these are hanging in collections and galleries, they will be very hard to track down for sale.