Issue Date: November 23, 2003

AMERICANA

The incredible value of everyday things

From soda to soap flakes, even mundane objects have blue-chip appeal.

by Kevin Markey

One morning last July, Lynn Downey was at a Levi's store in Dallas when a middle-aged woman walked in with a jean jacket of a cut not found in any retail establishment. Downey took one look and guessed the garment was worth $2,500, a sum she would be willing to pay for the right article of Levi's.

Downey is no shopaholic. As corporate historian for Levi Strauss & Co., she just happens to be an expert on vintage denim. She was in Texas as part of a kind of "Antiques Roadshow" the company has been staging to celebrate its 150th anniversary this year. Across the country, fans of the brand lined up to show Downey everything from Woodstock-era, peace-patched jeans to dungarees dating to World War II, when rationing made thread scarce; in lieu of stitching, Levi's trademark arches were hand-painted on the back pockets of every pair.

Downey belongs to an elite group of historians, librarians and archivists who ply their professions at some of America's best-known companies. Keepers of corporate heritage, they collect and catalog materials and disseminate information for internal use. "When people think of an archives, they tend to think of the National Archives in Washington," says Dave Smith, who manages the Walt Disney Co.'s multimillion-piece collection of artifacts. "But a lot of organizations maintain them, including businesses."

It was a different story back in 1970, when Smith arrived at Disney. "At the time, companies had maybe the bottom drawer in the corporate secretary's file cabinet," he says. As businesses expanded and evolved, that sort of haphazard historical preservation became untenable. By Smith's estimate, hundreds of companies now have full-time archivists.

Occasionally archival work spills out of corporate halls and into the public domain -- as with Downey's magical history tour. To honor Ford Motor Co.'s centennial this year, corporate historian Bob Kreipke published a coffee-table book about Ford's history that makes liberal use of the company's photo collection, one of the world's largest. "Henry Ford believed a picture was worth a thousand words," Kreipke says, "so he sent photographers across the country to document small-town life." The car company also made films -- lots of them. In the 1920s, Ford was actually the world's leading distributor of motion pictures. "The archive is an unbelievable asset now," says Kreipke, who fields requests from news organizations every day to reproduce images.

Phil Mooney landed perhaps the ultimate corporate gig in 1990, when he helped develop the World of Coca-Cola, the company's Americana-filled museum in Atlanta. "It's an archivist's dream to have people come to see what a company like Coca-Cola is all about," Mooney says.

"For any archives to be successful in a company, it has to utilize the material," says Ed Rider of Procter & Gamble, which started as a Midwestern soap and candle company in 1837 and now markets more than 300 brands worldwide, including Crest, Pampers, Ivory, Charmin and Pringles. "It's not enough to collect antiques and create historic displays," he says. "You've got to use them. If it's not relevant -- boy, that archivist sure has a nice office filled with old soap boxes, but it doesn't help the company."

Still, as with any serious collector, it's the rare archivist who is immune to the allure of a piece of history. A battered shipping crate for candles holds a special place in Rider's collection. Dating to 1865, it sports the oldest-known representation of the original Procter & Gamble trademark. At Coke, Mooney singles out the original prototype for the company's trademark contoured soda bottle. "There's only one of these in existence," he says. "Its value is immeasurable, just because of what it represents in our history. Without that bottle, we'd have generic packaging like everybody else."

Disney's collection of films, movie posters, sheet music, books and vintage Mickey Mouse watches fills an entire warehouse. Among its gems: the Oscars the studio has won over the years. At weekly training sessions conducted by archivist Smith, new employees get to hold the golden statuettes.

Corporate collecting is not limited to the Disneys and Cokes, whose merchandise and printed advertising have long been prized by collectors. Items in Microsoft's 4,000-linear-foot vault include marketing posters, software and Bill Gates' original office furniture. The company also has what may be the world's largest collection of old operable PCs. "We need them to run all that vintage software," says Peggy Crowley, one of Microsoft's two archivists.

That's a record no company with 19th-century roots can ever hope to match. Reliant on auctions and antiques dealers, older businesses have learned to discriminate when shopping for history. On her tour, Levi's historian Downey appraised many items but bought relatively few. She didn't need to. The company's 5,000-piece clothing collection already contains the holy grail of denim: a pair of 1880s jeans recovered from a dump in a Nevada mining town. They have a hole in the left knee and a rather alarming rip in the crotch, but otherwise they're in surprisingly good shape.

"If I wore the Nevada jeans down the street," Downey says, "people would stop me and ask where I got them." Of course, they'd probably blanch at the price. Downey paid $46,532 for the jeans on eBay. Even when it's 120 years old, fashion doesn't come cheap.

Kevin Markey last wrote about sneaker design.

Levi's historian Lynn Downey with one of the oldest known pairs of jeans

Microsoft Windows 1.0 (1983) and 19th-century Ivory soap are prized artifacts.

Levi's paid more than $46,000 to recover a pair of 1880s jeans.

Microsoft: Microsoft Archives