The auction-house staffer was just as curious as me. After he lifted the tray from a case behind the counter, he reached for one of the pinback buttons as soon as I did.
The buttons bore the name “Bond Bread.” But what I found more interesting were the tiny drawings of famous airplanes, along with the names of their aviators. The flip side noted that each was one of a series of six buttons:
Lindbergh’s “Spirit of St. Louis”
Post and Gatty’s “Winnie Mae”
Commander Byrd’s “Floyd Bennett”
Coste and Bellonte’s “Question Mark”
Amelia Earhart’s “Friendship”
Floyd Bennett’s “Josephine Ford”
The 1 ¼-inch buttons were advertisements by the maker of Bond Bread, the General Bread Company, founded in the early 20th century. After company president William Deininger learned that a loaf of bread contained not-so-good ingredients, he asked housewives across the country for their best bread recipes. He got more than 40,000 responses and Bond Bread was born.
The Bond name was its customer assurance that the bread was made of the finest ingredients. The company printed on the bread wrapper that “the loaf contained within this germ and dust proof wrapper is made from the following pure food materials, and no other ingredients of any kind: best spring wheat flour, compressed yeast, pure filtered water, best fine salt, pure lard, granulated sugar, and condensed milk.”
A Bond ad in a 1922 edition of the Saturday Evening Post noted that 43,040 housewives contributed to the recipe. In 1925, the company offered a money-back guarantee.
The buttons also noted the merits of the bread: happier health, sounder teeth, firmer muscles, greater endurance, stronger bones, greater strength.
General first started baking bread in a factory in New York and eventually stretched out to other areas. In 1930, the company moved into a newly constructed architecturally distinctive building in Washington, DC, that is currently owned by Howard University. The building has been designated as a national historic landmark.
Bond Bread made good money for the company, but the Depression hit it just as badly as other businesses. General Bread survived those hard times, though, and was around until the Bond Bread division closed in 1972.
In 1935, the company produced cookbooks that were given away free at grocery stores to help families stretch their too-few dollars.
Like most companies, General used advertising and promotions to sell its products and beat out the competition. Continental Baking Co.’s Wonder Bread was its fiercest competitor.
Bond Bread sponsored Long Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy radio and TV shows. It gave away baseball cards, including Jackie Robinson and Joe DiMaggio’s, and ran ads in magazines. It also offered “Toy Town” paper buildings as a series to get women to buy the bread. Each building was part of a model village.
The company’s advertising featured a boy named Bondie in a chef’s hat and apron, as well as a boy in a delivery man’s outfit. Bondie also had a pal club with its own pinback buttons.
In the 1950s, the company distributed ink blotters as free advertising. These were used back in the days of fountain pens and before ballpoints. The blotters were used to clean up ink. The Bond Bread blotters showed “Famous Firsts,” important first-time events in the country’s history.
The company chose four of them: the Wright Brothers’ first plane flight at Kitty Hawk, NC, in 1903, the opening of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 and the first steamboat to make regular trips, Roger Fulton’s Clermont in 1807. The other button states “the first automobile regularly built for sale, the Duryea’s Motor Wagon, first demonstrated in 1892.” It refers to Frank and Charles Duryea who designed the first successful gasoline car in this country in 1893 and were the first to sell these types of autos.
The buttons at auction were similar to another series that I found on the web. That was also a series of six but with a slogan across the top. Those were said to have been distributed after the first group.
Nice work on the Bond items.
If you look on several facebook pages on baseball, you’ll find the 1947 Bond Bread Extended Virtual series, a card set modeled after the Jackie Robinson cards.
Thanks, Bob, I’ll take a look.