Omega Oil Advertising Sign...Are the bottles rare?

[CarltonHendricks]

http://cecilmunsey.com/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=27&Itemid=47&mosmsg=You+are+trying+to+access+from+a+non-authorized+domain.+%28www.google.com%29
I recently purchased the c1900 trolley car advertising sign above, for Omega Oil...These types of signs were displayed overhead inside the trolley cars. I found a great paper written by Cecil Munsey on the company. His website stipulates the story is free to copy so I post in part below. You can access the full story he wrote via his website above. Turns out he is a bottle collector and has written on other products.

Are Omega Oil bottles common? rare? About how much do they go for? I'd like to get two trial size bottles to flank the sign.

 

[surfaceone]

Hey Carlton,

The bottles are quite common, but that sign is not! Any idea as to the identity of the track man?

From Rick.

 

[botlguy]

I know I will probably be critisized for name dropping but Cecil Munsey is an old friend from the beginning of my collecting. (I haven't seen him for a loooong time though) I simply want to recommend any of his writings, he is one of the brightest people I know and he does a very thorough job of researching. He knows more about bottles collecting than most of a dozen of us put together. That excludes some of you here.[]

 

[bostaurus]

They made a big bottle for Omega Oil horse liniment too.

 

[CarltonHendricks]

surfaceone,
Thanks glad to hear it's rare...I've seen very few track related advertising signs...once saw an Englsh one but I don't recall the product...I.D. of the track runner?....It's Jim Thorpe... ....naw I don't know..I assume it's just a model or they'd have his name on there...track stuff is tough...I post a few pieces below

botlguy,
Thanks for your comment about Cecil Munsey....he seems like a neat guy so I dropped him an email yesterday but haven't heard back yet..

bostaurus,
Whoa....I like that horse bottle...thanks for the post

Does anyone know of any other Omega Oil advertising signs?

 

[epackage]

There's a Bronze Plaque for this favorite daughter of Paterson, it went missing along with another from Hinchliffe Stadium here in the city but nobody realized it. It turned up in Montclair NJ in an antiques store and was later returned to the city after a court battle in 2004, I wish I had seen it in the store back in the day because I would have bought it myself....

Eleanor Marie (Egg) Kratiger (1909-1999), known as Eleanor Egg, began her track and field career with the Paterson Girls' Recreation Program in 1923. Her relay team achieved an outdoor world record in 1925. Egg went on to compete in the broad jump, setting a world record in 1927, the 100-yard dash, and the shot put. She was a heroine in Paterson, where a bronze bas relief of her by sculptor Gaetano Federici was placed in the city's Hinchcliffe Stadium.

 

[epackage]

The Federici Plaques ​

Italian-born Gaetano Federici (1880-1964) was nothing less than the "Master of Paterson" in the great Renaissance tradition he admired. His association with Hinchliffe Stadium began in the planning stage, about the time he became a Schools Commissioner in 1931 and sculpted a model of the stadium for public view. It lasted through '36, when his high-relief cast-stone Roman Gladiator was mounted on the stadium's northwest tower, above the concession stand.
Federici's career as the city's near-official sculptor had begun in 1905 with the Senator James Stewart memorial before the County Courthouse on Hamilton St. It didn't end till 1957, with his Bishop Thomas McLaughlin, second of two major pieces on the grounds of St John's Cathedral. (The other was his vivid portrait of the Irish community's beloved pastor "Dean" William McNulty in 1923). Scores more Federicis dot the city of Paterson, including formidable lifesize bronzes of Mayors Barnert (1924) and McBride (1947) outside City Hall, and exquisite popular culture icons like the Dublin Spring Water-Boy (1931) on Oliver Street.

The story of the bronze Hinchliffe plaques also begins in '31, with an invitation to honor Paterson champion athlete, Eleanor Egg. Egg was then 22, child of a striving theatrical family, a young acrobat turned track star, considered the "world's fastest woman" of her day. Like Hinchliffe Stadium itself, she'd risen out of poverty to become a symbol of the city's spirit of survival. Federici's beautiful bronze (dedicated with the stadium on September 17, 1932) remains one of his most brilliant creations, depicting the clean grace of the runner in full stride, unglamorously beautiful, her face alive with intensity and joy. The sculptor's pleasure in his subject is so real that he has carved a portrait of his own daughter Tessa running hard beside her.

Two years later, despite its hard-hit resources, the City intended to honor a native son and champion swimmer. Albert Vande Weghe, a Central H.S. student who later trained in Newark and Princeton, had a killer backstroke that won him a gold medal at the Japanese Outdoor Nationals in August 1934, and eventually a silver medal in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Homecoming from the Nationals in September '34 meant an instant hero's welcome at Hinchliffe, to be followed at the year's Thanksgiving games by the unveiling of Federici's companion plaque to the Eleanor Egg, a graceful bust portrait of the swimmer framed with Japanese-inspired foliage and water motifs.

These two great portraits represented then, and still represent, the poignant gift of a struggling Depression generation to future athletic hopefuls coming fresh onto the field. Every sun-up over the Falls for the next sixty seasons, catching the new daylight on the stadium's high west wall, they bore witness to the faith their donors had in a future symbolized by the young.. We may never know who took them off that wall, or precisely when, but chances are it was after the stadium was closed to regular use in 1997. Some picture a stealthy thief in the night, perhaps motivated by greed, perhaps by a warped zeal to "save" them. But easy access to the stadium meant anyone could have brought in a truck and crowbar and pried them off, perhaps even in broad daylight.

Ironically they weren't missed till they were rediscovered. This was in 1998, when someone saw them for sale in the shop of a Montclair, NJ, art and antiques dealer. He claimed he'd purchased them from another dealer, and fought to keep them. A court agreement in late 2004 finally obliged him to restore them to the Paterson Schools. At the time of this writing (2006), they remain in storage, with a now long-standing plan to display them at the Paterson Museum, ever-ready to tell their rich and now richly-layered story as they await their final homecoming return to the stadium wall!​

 

[botlguy]

You know, this is one of the things I really enjoy about these forums, at 73 I still learn things I didn't know and that I find extremely interesting about all sorts of things. You guys are FANTASTIC about taking a thread about a bottle and turning it into a true education. Trivia perhaps but very worthwhile in my opinion. "Keep on keepin on". THANX !