The mark without an author

1891–1901 · DESIGNER ANONYMOUS IN EVERY RECORD REACHED

It may be the most-seen image Mishawaka ever produced, and no record says who drew it: The Red Ball — a plain red disc — was the trade device of the Mishawaka Rubber & Woolen Manufacturing Company, in use from 1891, carried on the boots and shoes of Ball Band until the mark was known in every town in America: "Look for the Red Ball." The Arts section of this record prints the device's paper trail whole. The "Ball Band" word mark was registered on 19 January 1897 (No. 29,476); the red disc itself was registered on 28 May 1901 (No. 36,471) and re-registered in 1915, 1927, and 1938. The 1955 federal court record that preserves the company's scale — some 44,000 dealers, on the order of five million dollars of advertising, more than five hundred million dollars of merchandise sold under the mark — preserves everything about the device except its making. In the trademark records, the company records, and the court record reached for this history, the mark has no designer. No artist is credited, no employee named, no agency given. A red circle is, to be sure, a thing a committee could arrive at without an author worth naming — but that is an explanation offered by shape, not by document, and this record does not print explanations the documents do not contain.

The question is a small one with a named file. Trademark registrations were prosecuted on paper, and the file wrappers of the 1897 and 1901 registrations — the correspondence, the specimens, the drawings as filed — are one settling source. The company's own papers are the other: the Mishawaka Rubber & Woolen corporate records, and the exhibits of the 1955 case, which put the mark's history into evidence at a depth no other proceeding reached. Until one of those files is pulled, the most famous image this city ever sent into the world stands in this record the way it stands in its own registrations: dated, numbered, owned — and unsigned.

Sources:

1. the Arts section of this history — the device's course printed whole: use from 1891; the word mark of 19 January 1897 (No. 29,476); the disc of 28 May 1901 (No. 36,471) and its re-registrations; the 1955 court record's figures, printed as the court record's; the anonymity finding, printed there as a finding.
2. The settling sources, named in the Arts section and carried here: the Mishawaka Rubber & Woolen corporate papers; the trademark file wrappers; the 1955 case exhibits.