The Red Ball's distribution: sixty thousand retailers, then forty-four thousand dealers

1933 – 1955

The best-documented distribution in the city's record: Ball Band's outward record is not a shipment record — no consignment of boots to a named foreign port was reached — it is a distribution record, and at its documented size it is the largest outward fact in this build before the truck. The abstract of the company's own records at the Indiana University South Bend Archives fixes the machine at its height: by 1933 the Mishawaka works fielded over two hundred sales representatives selling to over sixty thousand retailers worldwide. The word is the archive's own — worldwide — and it is printed with its carrier: the finding aid of the company's records, summarizing the company's own papers. A generation later the figure stands in a harder record. In the company's 1955 trademark litigation — its suit to defend the Red Ball mark against a Czechoslovak rival, carried whole in the Arts section — the court record puts more than half a billion dollars of merchandise sold under the mark, through 44,000 dealers, on some five million dollars spent advertising the goods. The two figures are not one series and are not averaged: the 1933 count is retailers reached by the company's own sales force at the works' independent height; the 1955 count is dealers sworn to in litigation a generation later, after the 1922 sale to the United States Rubber Company had folded Mishawaka's selling into the parent's national machine. The company's own telling, in its commemorative history, runs warmer than either: products "known to millions of people in the United States" that had "spread its fame to many foreign lands" — company copy, printed as company copy. What the distribution was made of is the Ball Band file's: knit boots, rubber footwear, canvas shoes, and after 1939 the auto mats that put a Mishawaka product into Studebaker, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler cars — an outward flow that rode inside other makers' products to every dealer those makers served, at the marker's itemization. The honest limit of the entry stands where it began: the counts prove the reach; no source reached names the foreign share of it, and the Red Ball's overseas sales, as distinct from its worldwide retailer network, remain at the company's "many foreign lands" strength and no higher.

Sources:

1. Indiana University South Bend Archives, finding-aid abstract of the Mishawaka Rubber and Woolen Manufacturing Company records — over 200 sales representatives selling to over 60,000 retailers worldwide in 1933, as carried in this build's Ball Band file.
2. The company's 1955 trademark case record, as carried in this build's Arts section — more than half a billion dollars of merchandise sold under the Red Ball mark, through 44,000 dealers, on some five million dollars of advertising.
3. The History of Ball Band (the company's commemorative history, St. Joseph County Public Library's Michiana Memory) — the products "known to millions of people in the United States" and fame spread "to many foreign lands," printed as the company's own copy.
4. Ball-Band Factory marker, as carried in this build's Ball Band file — the auto-mat business from 1939 supplying Studebaker, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.