Vintage Planters Mr. Peanut Cloth Sticker 🥜 1950s-1960s Printed Cloth Patch

The Gentleman Peanut in Cloth 🎩 A Vintage 1950s-1960s Planters Mr. Peanut Die-Cut Cloth Sticker

Size: 2 1/2" x 1"

A little die-cut cloth sticker cut to the shape of Mr. Peanut himself, standing tall in his black top hat with MR. PEANUT on the band, monocle on, a big smile, one hand on his hip and the other on his long cane, legs crossed, spats on. He's printed in flat golden yellow and black straight onto white cloth - look close and you can see the weave right through the yellow - with a small MR PEANUT and the registered mark at his feet. Every one I have is unused. Nothing on them says who made them or when; sellers who've found them in old stock date them to the 1950s, and one batch turned up in an old envelope with 1950's written on the front.

🥜 The boy who got off at the wrong stop

Amedeo Obici was eleven when he sailed from Italy in March 1889 to join an uncle in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He got misdirected and stepped off the train in Wilkes-Barre instead, where the Musante family took him in and he worked in their fruit store, and later married their daughter Louise. He saved up for his own fruit stand with a peanut roaster, and one of the loveliest bits of company lore survives from his earliest days in business. To sell more peanuts he slipped the letters of his name, O, B, I and C, into the bags, but only one O for every fifty bags, and whoever spelled it out won a gold watch - a gold-colored Ingersoll, the story goes, that cost him a dollar. In 1906 he and Mario Peruzzi started Planters, incorporated in 1908 as the Planters Nut and Chocolate Company.

🎩 The schoolboy who drew a legend

In 1916 Planters ran a contest for a trademark, and a Suffolk, Virginia schoolboy named Antonio Gentile sent in a little peanut man with arms, legs and a cane. He won five dollars. A commercial artist added the top hat, monocle and spats, and that's the fellow on this sticker. Planters has since given him a whole backstory - British, with the full name Bartholomew Richard Fitzgerald-Smythe - which is the kind of thing you only do for a mascot people love. In 1935 he got his own car, the peanut-shaped NUTmobile, and Planters Peanut Shoppes put him in the windows on Times Square and the Atlantic City boardwalk.

🌾 Suffolk, the peanut capital

In 1913 Obici and Peruzzi built their plant in Suffolk, Virginia, right in peanut country, and it grew into the biggest peanut processor in the world. Suffolk already had peanut companies - the Suffolk Peanut Company, started in 1898 by John Y. King and Colonel John B. Pinner, is on the National Register now - but Planters is what made it the peanut capital. Obici never forgot the town: the hospital he founded in his late wife Louise's memory opened there in 1951, four years after he died. And when the old eight-story Planters factory came down in July 1995, after 82 years in the neighborhood, Suffolk folks showed up at 5:30 in the morning with lawn chairs, cameras and camcorders and stood on rooftops with their kids to watch it go. A Mr. Peanut statue still stands downtown.

🏛️ Still tipping his hat

Very few mascots from 1916 are still working. Mr. Peanut is - Planters belongs to Hormel Foods now, and the schoolboy's five-dollar peanut is still on every jar.

🎩 About these

They're about 2 1/2 by 1 inches. Frame one, put it in a scrapbook, a shadow box with a Planters jar, or a Suffolk kid who grew up smelling roasting peanuts. The supply is finite - Planters isn't making these cloth stickers again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.