When I saw the broom holder with the attached Bond Bread metal sign, I knew I had found what I was looking for. The wooden holder was exactly what I needed to store the vintage Berea College-made brooms that I had purchased at auctions some years ago.
I sat through a litany of items for sale before the auctioneer finally got to the area where the broom holder stood among one person’s collection of vintage store signs and other items, along with Coca-Cola memorabilia. An auction-house staffer mentioned that they had driven truckloads of stuff from the owner’s warehouses and had more to remove.
I focused on the signs rather than the Coke products because they were so large and overwhelming, and significant. Most of them embedded a history of companies and stores that I’d never heard of or no longer existed. But there were a few familiar names, though, that had survived: Sherwin Williams, Gulf, B.F. Goodrich, Quaker State, Hershey’s. Several were businesses from the Philadelphia area, among them Bond Bread.
I’d never heard of Bond Bread; it wasn’t the white bread I grew up with in Georgia. My auction buddy Janet recalled it from her childhood years in Brooklyn in New York. The bread was baked in Rochester, NY, and its competitor was Wonder bread. Bond seemingly got its name from a pledge by General Baking Co. that it would only use quality ingredients in its bread, thereby creating a bond with consumers.
Bond Bread was one of the “rare companies” that hired Negro League players as pitchmen to sell its store-bought white bread at a time when companies did not feature African Americans in advertisements. The company use black folks in its ads in the black press – the Amsterdam News in New York, in particular – as a way to tap into that market.
Walter “Bricktop” Wright of the New York Black Yankees pitched the bread in the 1940s. Then came Jackie Robinson, whose Bond Bread ads were national, again in black but not white publications. (The pitchman for Wonder Bread was Fred “Dixie” Walker, who was vehemently opposed to playing with Robinson on the Brooklyn Dodgers.)
As for my brooms, I have six of them, four with a slip of fabric bearing the name “Berea College Student Industries, Berea, KY.” I bought the first one after seeing the inscription and subsequently picked up the others as they showed up at auction.
I learned that Berea College was founded in Lexington, KY, in 1855 by an abolitionist as the only racially integrated and coeducational college in the South. Students were required to do work-study, and in the 1920s they began making brooms for sale.
I was hoping, but didn’t expect, the broom holder to go cheap. The structure and the sign itself were both in good condition. The bidding started too high for me and went even higher. It sold for $275.
Here’s a sampling of the signs and other items from the auction:
