The fascinating story behind these iconic York County tree sale signs

When Glenn Olsen was in high school in Reading, his mother helped him find a job at Karetas Fruit and Produce.

It was a good job and he enjoyed it. It fit in with his school schedule and the baseball season – he was a pitcher on Wilson High School’s powerhouse team back then.

During the holiday season, the produce distributor sold Christmas trees and put Olsen in charge of the lot. He oversaw marketing, and he painted the signs advertising the lot and placed them around town. The lot did well, selling some 300 trees when he was running the lot.

After high school, Olsen was selected by the Cincinnati Reds in the 37th round of the 1968 Major League Baseball draft. (He was the 795th player selected in that year’s draft, according to the Baseball Almanac.) He had a tryout and decided to go to college instead, earning a scholarship to play baseball at York College, where he studied business management and administration.

Upon graduating, he went to work for Keebler, marketing its products to grocery stores. Part of the job included making signs to post in the store to attract buyers. He enjoyed that work; he has always liked drawing and art.

He continued doing that work for a variety of employers over the years, including San Giorgio pasta and Purina pet foods – producing signs to market products in supermarkets and presentations for business meetings. It was all analog back then, he said. “There were no computers, so I had to do it by cutting out pieces of paper and putting them together.”

In 1972, he started his own Christmas tree business. He was friends with Jay Miller, who owned two supermarkets in York, and he set up shop in the parking lots of the stores − one on Haines Road in Springettsbury Township and the other on Maryland Avenue in York. He did well and wound up buying a 25-acre Christmas tree farm in Mount Wolf. He partnered with Bob Anderson, a York City firefighter, and started selling trees, donating a portion of the profits to the York County Food Bank.

“We had three lots going, the two at Jay’s and one at the Lincoln fire station,” Olsen said. “That’s when the signs started.”

The signs, all these years later, remain. You can see them posted all over town, plywood signs, hand painted, advertising the Christmas tree sale that now benefits the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank. They are simple, almost like pieces of folk art.

And they haven’t changed for 50 years.

‘A great opportunity’

Over the years, Olsen estimates that the tree sales have generated about $100,000 for food banks, a cause that is near to his heart.

His travels would often take him past the former York County Food Bank distribution center on West Princess Street in the city. He would see people waiting in line for food, and it touched him. He wanted to do something to help.

“I have had such a good life,” Olsen, now 75, said. “I have been very lucky, and when I saw people at the food bank, I just wanted to stop and hug them.”

That prompted him to donate some of the profits from the tree sales to, first the York County Food Bank, and now, the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank, which distributes to food banks throughout the region, expanding the reach of his donation. The tree lots also solicit food donations. It’s been slow, said Dan Johnson, Olsen’s son-in-law who runs the lots now. “We’re not getting as many food donations as we used to get,” he said. “We used to have pickups every other day. Now, it’s once a week.” To that end, the lots are offering a $5 discount to anyone who brings in a bag of food this Wednesday, Dec. 10. “The need is definitely growing,” he said.

For Olsen, meeting the needs of the hungry is a matter of faith. Certainly, it’s a business, but he said connecting with the food bank “was a great opportunity to support something.”

As a matter of expression of that faith, he said, “You’ll notice I never put ‘X-mas’ on the signs. My minister told me that using ‘X-mas’ is like crossing Christ out of Christmas. I always spell Christmas out on the signs.”

Stealing signs?

To produce the signs, Olsen goes to Home Depot and Lowe’s, seeking out 4-by-8-foot sheets of plywood that are deemed unsuitable for sale, either warped or slightly delaminated or whatever, and buys them for cheap.

He then saws them in half, creating 4-by-4 sheets and paints them spread out on the driveway of his home off Camp Betty Washington Road, re-painting the signs every summer. Sometimes, he makes the text three-dimensional. Sometimes, he paints a little Christmas tree on it. “I’ve always enjoyed doing this kind of thing,” he said.

He posts about 40 signs a year. Some make it year to year. Some don’t. “Some get hit by a car and some get stolen,” he said. “A lot of times, people feel they have to take them. I don’t know why they’d want them.”

It might have something to do with their iconic status – a York County tradition for five decades.

Olsen doesn’t know. All he knows is that “they work.”