Commercial art: the Red Ball, the sign brush, the painted shoe

1891 – present · the art Mishawaka sold

The red ball: The most widely seen artwork ever made in Mishawaka is a trademark. The Mishawaka Rubber and Woolen Manufacturing Company's knit boot carried a black band at its top and, woven into the boot's pulling straps in red warp, a ball — and from those two facts the company built the Ball Band name and the Red Ball device. The court record states the chronology at legal strength: the red ball in actual use from 1891; the word mark "Ball Band" registered January 19, 1897; the red circular disc registered May 28, 1901, and re-registered across the decades (1915, 1927, 1938). The slogan the company's advertising carried everywhere was "Look for the Red Ball," and the same record — the company's own 1955 trademark case, in which it defended the mark against a Czechoslovak rival — puts the scale in figures no catalog essay would dare: more than half a billion dollars of merchandise sold under the mark, through 44,000 dealers, on some five million dollars "judiciously spent by Mishawaka in advertising its goods." The tin signs that carried the red ball into every crossroads store in America — a boot, a red ball, two words — survive as collectibles; a circa-1935 pair of the boots themselves stands in the costume collection of the Brooklyn Museum at the Metropolitan Museum. The firm's course stands in Businesses and its flagship file; the mark stands here, as the city's commercial art at its documented size: a piece of applied design, authored by no named designer in any record reached — the designer's anonymity is itself part of the record, and is printed rather than filled.

The sign trade: Beneath the trademark stood the trade that lettered the city. Its documented Mishawaka face in this record is Lyman Unruh — firefighter and sign-business proprietor, painter of the 1954 fire mural above, whose mural is a sign painter's work in the strict sense: lettering-hand composition, flat color, a picture built to be read from the street. The directory record of the city's painters and sign shops stands in the owners' roster at roster strength; no shop's advertising art survives in the sources reached at a size that would carry an entry of its own, and the trade is printed at the size its one documented master gives it.

The emblem returned as art: The commercial record closes where the public ledger opened its newest page. On the Ball Band works' demolished ground, Beutter Riverfront Park keeps the works' emblem standing as civic sculpture — the Ball Band workers' monument and a giant painted sneaker, the red-ball product made emblem, carried as objects in Architecture. And Project Shoe City's fiberglass shoes take the same product out across the whole city as painted public art. Mishawaka's commercial art and its public art are, in the end, one continuous record: the city first drew a ball on a boot, sold it to the world, and then, when the works were gone, set the shoe itself in the parks.

Sources:

1. Mishawaka Rubber and Woolen Mfg. Co. v. Bata Narodni Podnik, 222 F.2d 279 (C.C.P.A. 1955) — the red ball's use from 1891, the "Ball Band" registration of January 19, 1897 (No. 29,476), the red-disc registrations beginning May 28, 1901 (No. 36,471), the "Look for the Red Ball" slogan, the 44,000 dealers and the advertising expenditure, all as the court's record states them.
2. Michiana Memory (St. Joseph County Public Library), "The History of Ball Band" — the company's own history: the knit boot's black band and red ball, the actual use of the Red Ball from 1891 and its registration in 1901.
3. Collectors Weekly, the Linderman collection record — the circa-1900 tin Ball Band sign; the circa-1935 boots in the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
4. This build's Architecture section — the Ball Band workers' monument and the giant painted sneaker at Beutter Riverfront Park, cross-referenced; South Bend Tribune (December 2, 2007) — Lyman Unruh's sign business, as cited in the mural entry above.