{"product_id":"vintage-irvin-s-cobb-embossed-cigar-label-duke-paducah-ky","title":"Vintage 1940s - 1950s Embossed Cigar Label 🎭 Irvin S. Cobb Yorkana Cigar Co. Duke of Paducah Inner Lid Art","description":"\u003ch2\u003eIrvin S. Cobb Cigar Label 🎩 The Duke of Paducah, Yorkana Cigar Co., York, Pa.\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSize:\u003c\/strong\u003e 8 1\/2\" x 7 1\/2\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv style=\"max-width:315px;margin:0 auto 20px;\"\u003e\u003cdiv style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:177.78%;height:0;overflow:hidden;\"\u003e\u003ciframe src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/3Y5c-ysHBSE\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer;autoplay;clipboard-write;encrypted-media;gyroscope;picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp\u003eIrvin S. Cobb in his brown suit and high white collar, his name arched over him in raised, gold-edged red letters, his signature at his shoulder and the Yorkana Cigar Co. of York, Pa. on the red banner at the foot. Never used - the whole design is pressed right through to the back. I have a stack of these, so yours will look just like this one.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003e🎩 Who Was Irvin S. Cobb?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor a good stretch, Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb was just about the most famous funny man in America. Born in Paducah, Kentucky, on June 23, 1876, he went to work at the Paducah Daily News at seventeen and was the youngest managing editor in the country at nineteen. After he covered the Russian-Japanese peace talks in 1905, Joseph Pulitzer's New York World hired him, and he became the highest-paid staff reporter in the United States. He joined The Saturday Evening Post in 1911 and covered the First World War for it from Europe - in August 1914 he set out from Brussels in a taxicab to look for the war, found it outside Louvain, and put the whole thing in his 1915 book Paths of Glory. He wrote more than 60 books and 300 short stories - his Judge Priest stories became two John Ford pictures, Judge Priest with Will Rogers in 1934 and The Sun Shines Bright in 1953 - and he hosted the Academy Awards in 1935. Folks called him the Duke of Paducah. And he looked made for a cigar box: round, bushy-browed, triple-chinned, with a cigar always hanging from his mouth.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003e🚬 A Cigar, a Dahlia and a Bass Bait\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe cigar came early. The brand's own trademark papers give 1916 as the first year the name went on cigars. By July 29, 1929, The New York Times counted Cobb's name on a cigar, a dahlia, a Missouri corn cob pipe, a race horse, a bass bait, a hunting shirt, an Oregon canyon, a Texas street and a pointer dog - and that April Paducah had opened the Irvin Cobb Hotel, the biggest and fanciest in western Kentucky. The portrait on this label is credited \"From Photo by Pirie MacDonald,\" the New York portraitist who billed himself the Photographer of Men.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003e🔎 When This One Was Printed\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere's the fun detective bit. Under the portrait it reads REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. NO. 435,331. That's the federal trademark for this very portrait, name and signature, and it wasn't registered until December 16, 1947. It was filed that March by W. P. Allen of Paducah, doing business as the Irvin S. Cobb Cigar Co., and the papers note that the man pictured is the well-known American author and humorist, now deceased. Cobb had died in New York on March 11, 1944, and gone home to Paducah's Oak Grove Cemetery under a stone that says simply \"Back Home.\" So this sheet came off the press after the war, with the brand in his hometown's hands and Yorkana of York still named on the banner. The registration was renewed in 1967 and finally lapsed in 1988.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003e🏭 York County, Cigar Country\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYork County, Pennsylvania, rolled cigars by the hundreds of millions. In 1907 the United Cigar Manufacturing Company built a factory in York alone, one of nineteen it ran across New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, turning out 400 million cigars a year between them. Yorkana itself is a little York County borough that took its name around 1880 and did a good cigar trade of its own, and the Yorkana Cigar Co. put out other brands besides this one - Lyra and El Tutor among them. Red Lion, the York County town whose cigars were known all over the country, had one cigar factory in 1880. By 1920 it so dominated the trade that York County kept two tax offices, one for the county and one just for Red Lion; by 1924 two thousand men and women worked in its cigar factories, turning out more than two hundred million cigars a year; and by 1927 the town had 109 cigar factories - most of them maybe just a man, his wife and a child - responsible for a fifth of all the nickel cigars made in America. Old-timers in York County tobacco circles tell how whole families worked the leaf at home, rolling and banding at the kitchen table and carrying the bundles to the factory at the end of the week, and how small makers came and went within a generation. Red Lion's own cigar people remembered the home work in the oral histories recorded for Pennsylvania Heritage magazine's 1981 story on the town: a cigar bench in the house, mother rolling, father making the bunches, and the kids stripping leaf as soon as they were big enough. Then the Depression closed dozens of Red Lion's small factories, the cigarette took over from the cigar, and the automatic cigar machines finished the job.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eHandsome framed in a den or a library, maybe next to one of his books.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"relatedBlock\"\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e🔎 More From The Vintage \u0026amp; Antique Gifts Archive\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/bundle-antique-lucky-bill-embossed-cigar-labels-1900s-1920s\"\u003eAntique Lucky Bill Cigar Box Label Set 🍀 Embossed Outer Lid \u0026amp; Inner Flap NOS Tobacco Ephemera\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/antique-sweet-embossed-cigar-label-red-lion-pa-1900s-1920s-treasures\"\u003eVintage 1940s Have A Sweet Cigar Label 🍂 Embossed Red \u0026amp; Gold Litho | Red Lion PA Beauty\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/antique-watchman-cigar-label-schnauzer-milwaukee-wi-1900s-1920s\"\u003eAntique Watchman Cigar Box Label 🐕 Schnauzer Portrait, Gold Embossed Inner Lid Label, Milwaukee NOS\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Vintage and Antique Gifts","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40906991829157,"sku":"VAG-7074170175653","price":5.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0597\/2718\/4037\/files\/il_fullxfull.3363146684_4a9z.jpg?v=1785355297","url":"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/vintage-irvin-s-cobb-embossed-cigar-label-duke-paducah-ky","provider":"Vintage and Antique Gifts","version":"1.0","type":"link"}