https://buffalonews.com/2...ghts-to-szelagowski-name/
It's as though the Montagues bought out the Capulets -- but instead of Venetian aristocrats, the opposing families are lords of Buffalo's sausage business.
F. Wardynski's & Son Inc. has bought the rights to the logo of its longtime rival A. Szelagowski & Sons, with plans to revive the largely dormant "Shelly" brand of hot dogs and bologna, the company said.
"That was always a great name . . . it's like an old friend," said Raymond "Skip" Wardynski, president of the meat processing company his family founded in 1919.
The rival maker of sausage and cold cuts was founded several years earlier, in 1889, by Arthur Szelagowski. It was for many years the city's No. 1 name in lunch meats, Wardynski says.
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From their plants on the city's East Side, the competitors vied for shelf space in Buffalo stores and kitchens, along with names like Malecki and Frey's.
Shelly's fleet of maroon delivery trucks was part of the city's landscape, and longtime residents can still hum its polka-style jingle, "Shelly brand meat products -- really grand meat products!" (Out of use commercially, the ads are still heard sometimes on nostalgia-oriented WKBW radio.)
Wardynski's marketing rejoinder, still in use, is: "Don't give me that baloney, I want Wardynski's!"
Sausage and lunch meat still sells under the Shelly brand locally, although it's been out of the Szelagowski family's hands for many years, Wardynski said. He said he acquired the rights in December from a local food broker whom he wouldn't name. Before that, his company produced some Shelly-labeled hot dogs under license.
"For a good period of time they were the biggest player in Buffalo, but they had to compete with the big guys," Wardynski said.
The Szelagowski family sold the business to a Rochester company in 1957, according to press reports, although competitor Wardynski remembers the brand staying in local hands for years beyond that. In 1980s the brand was kept alive by Shelly Foods Co. in Buffalo, a unit of Paul Snyder's Snyder-Darien Corp. In 1983 the company announced plans for a reduced fat "Shellylite" line of cold cuts.
"We developed that; we just stopped producing it because it wasn't profitable," Snyder said. His company, which owned the former Szelagowski plant on Bailey Avenue, stopped production sometime in the early '90s. He said he wasn't certain what happened with the brand after that.
In recent years the marketing of Shelly meats has been low key, mainly in independent groceries, Wardynski said. Now his plant on Peckham Street, a few blocks from the Broadway Market, expects to ramp up higher volumes of bologna and hot dogs, perhaps increasing production 20 percent.
"To get that product in our facility is a good thing for us," he said. "It'll still be 50 people, but they'll be 50 really busy people."
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so true 
