Stocks With Household Names

Interesting collection!

Very nice!

Here are a couple more that I bet most people have heard of. In fact, my dad worked for Dow Chemical for some years.

By itself, this stock certificate for Poor & Company may not ring any bells, but it's related to a very well known present day firm. Let's see if anyone can make the connection...

Very good! Yes, Poor & Company merged with Standard Statistics in 1941 to become Standard & Poor's Corp. -- administrators of the fabled S&P 500 stock index.

Very nice!

It may not be a household name today, but Childs restaurants were known far and wide from the 1920s and into the 1950s. The company was started in 1889, about a block from where the twin towers would eventually be built in Manhattan. The Childs family is credited with inventing affordable cafeteria-style dining. By 1925, Childs operated more than 100 restaurants in 29 cities. In 1927, when this certificate was issued, William Childs began introducing vegetarian meals, which were not well received. The stock price dropped and after a lengthy proxy battle William was forced out as president/CEO and the family lost control of the company (though it retained the Childs name until 1955).

I bet a lot of people are familiar with Ronson cigarette lighters, which were nearly as well known as Zippos. Here's a Ronson stock certificate. The vignette of this is quite interesting to me because I have a steel die of it. I was able to print this on a spider press earlier in the year -- it came out quite well!