A Political Basketball

Continuing last week's look at Topps Presidential sets, in 1965 they took a theme more well known to baseball card collectors, foil embossed portraits, and married it with a larger sized "tall boy" card in creating the Presidents and Famous Americans set. Gold foil borders were used all around too, as Topps honored all 35 U.S. Presidents at the time plus 9 Famous Americans. Covered HERE in more detail, the set used five different colors, with black reserved for Chief Executives who had been assassinated, like the card of John F. Kennedy:

The backs were pure white and as you might imagine, the set is a condition nightmare.

Three years later, as protests rocked the 1968 race, Topps came out with, well, a card of a guy running for Pennsylvania governor:

Yup!  I have more on this HERE and I've always assumed he had something to do with greasing the skids for the big Topps plant move from Brooklyn to Duryea in the state in 1966, at a time when he was the Lieutenant Governor.

Spoiler alert-he won! I guess there was a sports-related angle there, as we can see Shafer captained the Allegheny College basketball team, where attended school from 1934-38.

So that was it for 1968!  1972 brought back the U.S. Presidents, with a nice twist. Topps again used the original 1952 Bowman illustrations they had already re-used in '56 for all the Presidents through Eisenhower:

The backs didn't change either:

What did change was the creation of three new portraits for:

No. 34 JFK

No. 35 LBJ

and No. 36 Richard M. Nixon:

That wiped out the three historical events cards but Topps was in the habit of making up card sets divisible by 11 at the time, so they added several subjects in the form of that year's hopeful Candidates.  These were:

37 Shirley Chisolm

38 Hubert Humphrey

39 John Lindsay

40 George McGovern

41 Edmund Muskie

42 Edward Kennedy

43 George Wallace

OK, so that's not 44.  I'm not sure why the dropped a candidate as they could have used Pat Paulsen or some similar "unreal" pretender but they clearly did not.  So there is an obvious slot for a double print and while I have no clue as to who got the honor, I'd like to think it was Grover Cleveland!

Here's the Shirley Chisholm card, which will require a little more explanation in a minute:

The Candidates had backs quite close to those of the Big Boys:

Back to Ms. Chisholm shortly.  But first, for 1972 Topps provided an insert in the form of a Campaign Poster. There were 15 of these and the selection was somewhat random:

1. Abe Lincoln For President

2. Vote Republican William H. Taft Our Next President

3. Kennedy For President

4. I'm Wild About Harry Truman

5. I Like Ike For President

6. Stay Cool With Coolidge For President

7. All The Way With LBJ For President

8. Generally Speaking I'd Vote For Grant

9. Win With Woodrow Wilson

10.Washington Our Nation's Leader

11. Teddy Roosevelt For President

12. Our Next President Thomas Jefferson Father Of The Constitution

13.Vote Democratic Franklin D. Roosevelt Our Next President

14. Vote for Hoover For President

15. God Bless America John Quincy Adams 6th U.S. President

Here's ol' JQA himself:

That's not really a campaign poster and I'm not even sure that's even John Quincy Adams depicted there but maybe that's nitpicking.  You can see how they were folded twice to fit in the packs and when opened they measure 4 7/8" x 6 15/16".

Now, that's the last set of U.S Presidents Topps issued for a long time, sort of.  In 1976, Topps partnered with Holsum Bread and re-released the 1972 set, minus the Candidate cards.  Things got a little interesting though.  They had to wedge in Gerald Ford, which was easy enough:

The back is the same as all the other 1972 cards:

As part of this promotion, they also amended the Nixon card to reveal his resignation.  

The Ford card and the Nixon resigns variant are tougher than any of the other cards spread across these two interconnected sets. Which brings us back to the Chisholm card. 

Chris Benjamin, in his Sport-Americana Price Guide days, mentions her card was pulled for the Ford card.  OK, but the Candidates do not appear in the Holsum re-issue (branded still as Topps -T.C.G.) in case you missed the indicia. So that seems like an intentional misdirect, which he used to sprinkle in to some of his work to catch plagiarists (sigh). Pretty sure I'm correct on this point as Holsum issued an album - imaged here by Friend o'the Archive Ken Bush - for the set that specifically mentioned 37 cards to collect, all of them actual Presidents:

Nice Bicentennial tie-in, despite the cheesy quality of the album!

This 'N That

It's been a while since i posted a miscellaneous thread with absolutely no focus or connecting material but I have to admit I'm hard pressed to find a topic this week given my post Thanksgiving torpor, so I'm just plumbing the depths of my hard drive. Sorry to be so lame but that's how it goes sometimes! Here's some stuff celebrating things not necessarily sold in a typical Topps retail pack:

Take a gander at a greeting card with a Hopalong Cassidy pack in it, pardner:

Freaking awesome, right?!

Here's some inserts that came in a typical Hoppy pack, or probably anything from Topps in 1950 (hey, I guess I did link something together):

Notice the little red spyglass that came with the "Wild West" cards?  Those were leftover X-Ray Roundup cards and you needed it to properly read the backs! Somewhere around here I have one of these I somehow acquired as a kid but it's not with the main collection and, truth be told, is semi-lost.

Here's a 1968 Ray Shafer card I just picked up-it's actually got a slight diamond cut, typical for Topps at the time unfortunately:  

More on that story here. Topps must have gotten a boost from him when they moved their plant to Duryea, PA from Brooklyn in early 1966 and helped out his campaign; it's certainly one of the more unusual items they ever produced.

Finally, here's a group of early 1960's Bazooka pennants:

At some point in the future I am going to try and disentangle all the various Bazooka baseball premiums but it's a major job. See ya next time!

Shafer Is The One Gov To Have When You're Having Only One

The never ending election season is on many minds at the moment and while I stay away from politics on this blog, there are a few Topps themes that touch on such matters.  Today we travel back in time fifty years to the Pennsylvania Gubernatorial election of 1966 and the successful campaign of Ray Shafer.

I've known about a campaign item Topps put together for Shafer for a few years now but until last month I had no inkling of what it was.  Now, thanks to Friend o'the Archive Terry Gomes, we can take a look at one of the strangest Topps pieces of all time. Here is what I assume to be a one card set:

Terry grabbed the scans herein from an old eBay auction that he, sadly, did not win.  Here is the back:

Now the fact that this thing has finally come up for air is pretty amazing but what's even better is that these were distributed in wax packs with a stick of gum!  Here, look:

I have no idea how many of these were produced but the survival rate for such a pack must be absurdly low.

I own a postcard from the campaign which I don't think was produced by Topps. I have no clue who printed it as there is no information detailed on it that would help suss that out.  

I've obscured the addressee but the left side of the PC back is quite revealing.  I suspect Shafer had a huge hand in luring the Topps plant from Brooklyn to Duryea, which not coincidentally opened in 1966, so the card "set" may have been some kind of soft payback by Topps:

Shafer served a single term; he was barred from running again under an old statute that was later changed.