Campbell Kids and Other Memorabilia : Soup Museum to Ladle Up Marketing History

The Campbell Kids, those cherubs with heart-shaped eyes who sold millions of red-and-white cans of condensed soup, are getting their own museum.

They’ll be displayed with hundreds of other Campbell Soup Co. memorabilia, including such items as 1910 ketchup bottles stopped with corks, Depression-era advertisements showing actor Fred MacMurray slurping chicken noodle soup and a 1985 painting by the late Andy Warhol.

But the Campbell Kids, whose cheeks aren’t quite as chubby now as when Philadelphia artist Grace Gebbie Drayton first drew them for Campbell in 1904, will be the stars of the collection. They’ll be side-by-side with company’s familiar red-and-white label featuring the gold medallion for excellence from the 1900 Paris Exposition.

“Everyone grew up with some semblance of the Campbell Kids,” said Ralph Collier, who is researching the marketing history of the company that was founded in 1869 by Joseph Campbell and Abram Anderson.

The museum is scheduled to open in 1991 when Campbell Soup, whose 3,000 products generated $4.4 billion in sales last year, builds a new international headquarters on the Delaware River waterfront in Camden.

Collier, based a short distance away in current corporate headquarters, is now curator of the state-chartered Campbell Museum, which houses a collection of soup tureens.

But instead of combing art galleries in Europe for silver and porcelain tureens, Collier has been searching flea markets lately for wastepaper baskets, T-shirts and anything else with the Campbell logo.

An Ohio couple recently sold him two rooms full of Campbell memorabilia they had collected for years.

The company is hoping other customers, harboring Campbell lunch boxes from the 1960s or cardboard pop-up banks from the 1930s, would like to share their treasures.

Collier is also seeking items related to Campbell’s other labels, including Swanson, Pepperidge Farms and Franco-American products.

“Donations are lovely, but we are buying,” he said.

Selma P. Kessler, a retired librarian hired to help Collier catalogue the growing collection, ooh s and aah s over tattered posters touting vegetable soup, or a Campbell Kid dressed like Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp character.

Some of the items are stored in a Philadelphia warehouse, the rest are hidden away in several different spots in the corporate headquarters.