Button, Button, They’ve Got the Novelty Buttons
Spread out inside a former hardware store on Oregon Highway 99, Ephemera resembles a quirky combination of a graphics firm and a neurotic Goodwill whose stock was stripped in a going-out-of-business sale.
Frank Sinatra croons over the loudspeakers, computers sit on the desks, and thrift-store statuettes line the window and fill a box on the floor. One wall features a collection of velvet paintings of big-eyed children; on another, posters of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao hang beside ads for the most American of products--McDonald’s Happy Meals.
Visual wisecracks are what Ephemera is about. Each year the company designs and ships 1 million novelty buttons--that campaign-style lapel decoration with a slogan on the front and a pin on the back. And in the 100th anniversary of the novelty button, co-owners Ed Polish and Jeff Errick sing the praises of the pithy pins that fill drawers and lie on desktops and are dumped in a trash barrel at Ephemera central.
“What’s amazing to me is with all this new technology over the years, buttons are still around,” says Polish, a 43-year-old former Philadelphian in a Mr. Rogers sweater and horn-rimmed glasses. “It’s a simple tool-and-die process, a simple industrial revolution machine. You don’t even need electricity to make them.”
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With sales of $500,000 a year, Ephemera designs and markets its own buttons (the buttons are actually made at plants in California, Chicago and New York). Thus, you won’t find a Ron Wyden or Gordon Smith button in its collection. Some are political (“Oh My God? You’re Stark Raving Republican”), and some offer bumper-sticker philosophy (“Sometimes You’re the Bird, Sometimes You’re the Windshield”).
Ephemera sells buttons ideal both for harried waitresses (“Leave a Tip or I’ll Burn Down Your Home”) and poorly served customers (“Give Me Coffee & No One Gets Hurt”).
Buttons long have been a means of attracting attention, according to Ted Hake, author of “The Encyclopedia of Political Buttons.” Hake, who owns Hake’s Americana in York, Penn., said buttons were given out in cigarette packages and distributed by advertisers in the early part of this century. And they caught on in political campaigns almost immediately.
“Their main purpose has always been as an inexpensive giveaway,” Hake said. “And lots of people found use for them for their companies, selling everything from shoe polish to Hollywood movies.”
As a wholesale distributor, Ephemera doesn’t cater to walk-in traffic. But those seeking, say, its best seller (a happy face with the words “I Took My Prozac Today”), or others of its 1,181 buttons and refrigerator magnets can find them in 1,500 stores nationwide and even internationally (the Japanese are big fans of American buttons).
Ephemera’s lapel politics leans to the left for a couple of reasons. This reflects the positions of Polish and Errick. Also, people who wear buttons--often kids making a statement at school--are more likely to be liberal than conservative, Polish says.
Ephemera boasts a number of irreligious, ribald or gay rights buttons. There are a few for those wishing to proclaim their paranoia--”They’re Spying on Us Through the Ozone Layer.” And while the collection shows a pro-feline bias, cat haters too may find something suitable to pin to their tux at the next Humane Society ball: “I Had a Cat Once--Tasted Like Chicken.”
“There’s a lot of rude stuff,” Polish says. “I personally grew up on Jerry Lewis, Mad Magazine and horror moves, monster movies.”
The business began in 1976 when Errick, a struggling graphic artist getting by as a security guard, borrowed a button-making machine from a friend. He sent away for 1,000 button-making parts and set to work incorporating his designs into buttons.
The result was a kind of magic for Errick: turning a two-dimensional image into a disk that someone can pin to his shirt. He got a vendor’s license and set up shop.
Oddly, in that most patriotic of years, bicentennial designs didn’t sell well. People wanted the wise-guy stuff.
When winter hit, Errick couldn’t sell outdoors, and he moved to California and eventually San Francisco. There he teamed up with Polish, a political science major, and in 1991 they moved to the Rogue Valley.
The reasons for wearing buttons are as diverse as the wearer.
“It’s always been kind of a wacky novelty,” Polish says. “In the 1960s, it was the hippies and the anti-war movement. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, in was the punks and the environmental movement. We’re continuing the tradition.”
If Ephemera customers seem like a loud-mouthed lot, consider: There are buyers who think somebody else would look great sporting an “Honor Perversity” button.
“I think a lot of people buy buttons not to wear them, but to give to other people,” Errick says. “They say, ‘Oh, I’ve got to get this for my friend.’ I think it’s a humorous way to say something to people that you wouldn’t say otherwise.”
