Roll The Presses!

UPDATE 4/10//20: SEE THE COMMENTS SECTION AND AN ADDENDUM BELOW FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON WHERE THE CARDS LOOK TO HAVE BEEN PRINTED  TOPPS WAS STILL MAKING UP THEIR OWN NARRATIVE FOR UNKNOWN REASONS WHEN IT CAME TO CARD PRODUCTION.

Well about a month ago I promised a look at the very strange time when Topps took their printing in-house and thanks to Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins, I now have the pictures to prove it.

Topps Magazine, which lasted 16 issues and premiered the year prior, ran a feature in one of their 1991 issues detailing the printing of the then-current, 40th Anniversary Baseball cards. A large number of pictures were included and I've snagged some instructive ones to share here.

The article notes the Topps Art Department prepared everything to produce this 792 card set and then sent the films to Duryea for production.  So the art was all composed in Brooklyn at Bush Terminal then shipped out for printing.  As noted in the prior post about the various printers used by Topps over the years, the backs were once printed separately from the fronts, then trucked to the printer of the day to have the fronts applied.  Going by the article here, that may not have been the case anymore by 1991 but it's not clear.

Here are sheets hot off the press, ready for inspection:

The sheets passing muster (which must have been 99.99% of them) went off to the cutting and collating department, where the slitting machines did their thing:

The article goes on to say the cards went on to their coded boxes and then into to their coded cases, yielding the finished stacks o'wax seen here:

If you've ever wondered how many wax cases of cards fit on a skid, the answer is 24! I assume those above were about to be banded to avoid toppling over in transit. Alternatively, they could have been hand loaded, which if done correctly fills the shipping container to the point nothing would shift. I spent a couple of years working in a warehouse during college and spent time both stuffing and unstuffing containers by hand; oh, I put in my time with the banding gun too! It was a good, physical job-not too, too strenuous but enough that you got a pretty good workout most days.

I'm not sure but Topps could have bought those presses from one of the defunct printers that did their work over the years.  They don't look all that old and there were plenty of skilled printers around Pennsylvania to run these at Topps.  This didn't go on for long I don't think and marked a massive change from how their cards were printed over the previous decades but as transport costs rose, it does seem to have been a sensible solution.

UPDATE: AS NOTED BELOW IN A COMMENT, THE CARDS SEEM TO ACTUALLY HAVE BEEN PRINTED BY QUEBECOR IN PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND.  TOPPS WAS STILL FAKING IT IN 1991!

Mays and Means

Exciting times here at the Main Topps Archives Research Complex kids! I was recently contacted by Ken Liss, whose father, Norman, handled PR for Topps for more than 30 years. I'll hopefully fill in his details a little more down the road (a brief overview is here) but it looks to me that Norman Liss commenced his work for Topps right around the time the Rookie All Star project (1959 start) got underway, maybe a just a smidgen later.

Ken has kindly sent along three shots featuring Willie Mays during a 1974 visit to the Topps plant in Duryea, Pennsylvania that also feature his dad:

Clockwise from left:  Norman Liss, the Say Hey Kid and a man believed to be Ken Byrnes, Topps VP of Manufacturing. If I didn't tell you the year, you could probably guess at it pretty closely given the haberdashery and grooming of the times.

Here's a bit more of a closeup:

Wide ties were definitely the "in thing" in '74!

Here the boys are touring the manufacturing floor, with none other than Sy Berger (a Mays confidant and friend) in tow:

Look at those bags of what must be sugar off to the right-and can't you just smell the Bazooka?! Ken Byrnes recollected this visit a couple of years ago, it's a fascinating read.

There was a groundswell of publicity surrounding Topps and the Duryea plant in the mid 1970's, from Sy Berger's starring role in the Great American Baseball Card Flipping ,Trading and Bubblegum Book to inserts in various baseball annuals and mainstream magazines through things like Willie's visit to Duryea. Norman Liss would have been the instigator of all this PR.

You Can't Go Home Again

While Topps moved their gum production and card cutting, wrapper wrapping and pretty much everything that wasn't nailed down from Brooklyn to Duryea, PA in early 1966, it took three more years for their packaging to reflect the fact. If you took a peek at the bottom of a box or a wrapper flap from 1966-68, it would show Topps as a Brooklyn company.  That changed in 1969, for reasons that are not clear to me but which probably had something to do with a tax advantage. Topps still maintained their executive offices in Brooklyn after the move, where Sy Berger and Woody Gelman worked along with dozens of other people but that was pretty much it.

So when did the change happen?  Well, right in the middle of the baseball card run it seems, although like everything else associated with Topps, it's complicated.

The regular nickel wax packs in 1969 all showed Brooklyn when they debuted. Here is a basic pack, from either the first or second series, although it could be a high number pack as well:



You can see that Brooklyn (or, rather B'KLYN) is shown for the Topps address.



It's the same with the 3rd and 4th series pack, which held the Deckle inserts:



But not the the 5th series pack, which held the little rub off decals:

That says Duryea folks!  As a bonus, I never realized there were instructions on how to rub the rub offs before researching this post. The change in wrapper graphics to show the instructions may have prompted the switch to Duryea (the fronts would just have been overprinted with the triangle splash on the earlier wrappers).

Now, here comes the tricky part.  The ten cent cello wrappers, introduced with ten cards as Topps was trying to put damper on spiraling production costs, show Duryea:

The problem with this cello pack is that it was sold at least from the first through the fifth series.  I can only find Duryea versions but can't confirm a Brooklyn cello is not out there.  As Topps liked to issue a new series every six weeks or so back then, the fifth series would have hit the streets around July and been printed at most a month or so earlier.  But almost every other '69 wrapper I can find shows Duryea, whether it be the Baseball Posters, Man on the Moon or Football.  I'll have to keep looking but Topps issued a lot of sets in 1969! For the record, the '69 Bazooka box shows Duryea.

Any Archivists out there who want to help out, send scans to the e-mail address at the top of the frame.  Just beware, some sets identified in the guides as 1969 issues are really from 1968 (like Planet of the Apes).

Incidentally, 1966 also marks the beginning of Topps production codes, sometime in the late summer or early fall, which are quite useful for dating certain issues but would require me to use a slide rule to explain and which will be addressed another day.  If that's not enough, the curved Topps logo also debuted once the move to Duryea was made in '66.  So why didn't Duryea replace Brooklyn at that time on the packaging?

Production Era

This is no April Fool's joke, kids-today we take a solid look at Duryea, PA home of Topps Chewing Gum for about 30 years commencing in 1965, after the move of most production of cards and confections from their Brooklyn base at Bush Terminal, although some corporate presence would remain behind.

From the May 17, 2009 edition of the Pittston Dispatch:

"The Topps Gum Plant in Duryea was to be dedicated on May 18 of 1965. Some 500 people indicated they planned to attend the ceremony including then Governor William Scranton and Attorney William Shea, the man responsible for the construction of Shea Stadium for the New York Mets. Rumors swirled about Topps bringing in workers from their Brooklyn plant, but a major part of the labor force was to be recruited from this region."

The Shea connection is intriguing as he was one of the prime movers in bringing National league baseball back to New York in 1962. This also gives us a timeline for pruduction in Duryea and it sure looks like the first major sports set produced there would have been the '65 "tall boy" Football. Pittston, by the way, is essentially the next town west of Duryea.

In addition to the football set, I show the following sets produced in '65:

32 MINI STICKERS

BATTLE (PLUS EMBLEM INSERTS)

BONANZA (PROOF)

DANIEL BOONE (PROOF)

FIGHTER PLANES

FLYING THINGS

GILLIGAN'S ISLAND

HOT RODS

KING KONG (PROOF)

KOOKIE PLAKS

MONSTER GREETING CARDS

PRESIDENTS & FAMOUS AMERICANS

PUSH/PULL

RAT FINK GREETING CARDS

SOUPY SALES

SUPERMAN

TOM & JERRY TATTOOS

UGLY STICKERS

WISE GUY BUTTONS

To that list you can probably add Bewitched and Flash Gordon, both essentially proof sets. The Bonanza and Daniel Boone cards above are very hard to find and as I have stated before, I believe Bonanza to be the toughest of any Topps set, issued or not. I am working on a unifying theory for most of these style of B&W cards (there are others as well) but need to do more work in the lab.

That is a big increase from the 1964 issues, which understandably enough centered around Beatlemania and was indicative of Topps' production big push going into 1966. But I digress.

Topps built their facility at 401 York Avenue in Duryea:


View Larger Map

You can click away the balloon and see the bird's eye view in all its glory. I beleive Topps leased some space in the plant even from the beginning. Now, we have lucked out here today as Jeff Shepherd, a Friend o'the Archive if there ever was one, was able to snap some pictures there in 1999:



Here's a similar sign elsewhere on the property:



Jeff also shot the Topps entrance but cautions it looked completely different than it had on his first visit in the 80's:



I'll delve into this subject more deeply but Topps' diminished presence was likely the result of their selling the plant in the mid-90's and then leasing back less space than they had previously used. This had to do with a lot of things but they moved their HQ back to New York City around this time ,leasing floors at One Whitehall Street in Manhattan, where they reside to this day.

Much more to come on the inner workings of Topps, stay tuned!

Takin' Care of Business

Well your blogmaster is off for some hard-fought rest from the real world for the next couple of weeks. Fear not though, Topps-heads, all sorts of goodies are planned for the south side of the All Star Break. Until then, take a gander at this production still from Topps' Duryea plant, which makes me exhausted just looking at it!



Those are 1974 baseball cards hot off the presses-cello retail boxes on the left, wax boxes on the right (I originally though the latter were factory sets but can't find a reference at the moment positively identifying the factory set graphics). The 74's were the first set of cards that could be bought all at once in complete form (all 660!) and they were housed in a nice, Topps-produced box to boot. The boxed sets were sold through Sears and probably a few other big retailers of the day. I'll try to score a scan of the factory box down the road.

See you at the end of July!