Saturday, January 28, 2023
A Colorful Past
Saturday, January 21, 2023
Some Jive In 1965
I generally spend the end of a calendar year reorganizing things at home and on and in my various devices and cloud accounts. True to form, I've pulled up some things sent to me in years past that I never got around to discussing at the time. Today's excursion in exhumation takes us back almost 60 years, to the 1965 Topps Baseball set.
This was the final Baseball set Topps packaged out of Brooklyn and its always been one of my favorites, with some really nice photography, excellent use of color and a pleasing blue reverse. I managed to unearth a full 1965 proof sheet featuring 5th and 6th series cards from an old REA auction that went for a relative song. Here she is:
This behemoth is blank backed and is a little beat up but I'll bet it framed up really nice. There are seven discrete rows of players, so we have a 77 subject sheet, meaning there's some kind of extra or short printing going on and sure enough, that's how things turned out.Left side (A Slit):
B
C
D
E
A
F
G
B
C
D
E
Right Side (B Slit):
C
A
F
G
B
C
D
E
A
F
G
That yields the following distribution:
4X Rows: A B C
3X Rows: D E F G
In terms of Hall-of-Famers making an appearance on this sheet, Luis Aparicio (#410) is the one 3X print, the rest (Al Lopez, Carl Yastrzemski, Harmon Killebrew and Willie Stargell) are 4X subjects.
There is another twist though. I note the 5th Series Checklist runs from #353 to #429 while the 6th Series Checklist spans #430 to #506. This is why REA describes this as a 5th and 6th Series sheet since the numbering plays out as follows:
361 (5th Series Checklist)
368
371-385
387-446
So that's two stand-alones, 15 cards before the next missing number occurs (386), then a 60 card run to land at 77. The 5th Series Checklist is easy enough to explain as it originally appeared on the prior press sheet, which would primarily have included the 4th Series plus a smattering of cards from the "5th Series" here. This is because Topps lagged their checklists when compared to the press sheets by "previewing" the next series, which meant some cards from the later series had to be printed with what was ostensibly the prior series. I have to admit I thought it would be cleaner than this with consecutive numbers missing but in sure Topps fashion, it's not and seems a little sneaky to me.
Saturday, January 14, 2023
You'll Shoot Your Eye Out Kid
OK, today's title is a total Christmas Story cop, with the holiday season firmly in the rear view even, but as we shall see, it's apropos. I've been mining my old G-mails for content that will span a couple of special projects and am finding all sorts of treasure, much of it from BFF o'the Archive Jeff Shepherd. Today's adventure brings us a Bazooka Premium Catalog, with a distinctly rugged and masculine tilt.
Dating from 1955, kids could mail away for these and get a better look at some of the premiums offered, although most of these seem beyond anything offered on the newly launched Bazooka Joe comics:
We've seen the folding camp knife before and it would appear again and again over the years. It wasn't a Topps exclusive, there must have been millions of these floating around, with a nameplate that would allow for branding by any entity. Things get progressively sharper through, that sheath knife looks lethal and that axe looks like it could get you through any kind of wilderness campaign or viscera. For 1,125 comics it should, yikes!
A clear escalation occurs when we get to the last page and what looks to be the world's best cap gun, requiring a mere 1,875 comics. The notation about choosing a a boy's or girl's leather craft set in no way diminishes the adolescent male vibe here and things conclude with some heavy metal; this surely one of the most industrialized premium offers ever seen from Topps:
The cash to comics ratio in force certainly had some reasoning behind it and you can get a rough idea of how much premium "overhead" was calculated for every piece of Bazooka, also bearing in mind they had some very nice retailer and wholesaler premiums on offer for the adults. Dividing $3.75 by 1875 yields .002 cents per penny gum tab, ignoring the 45 comics also needed to seal the deal. The ratio on the craft kits though, .75/375 is also .002 though, so the cost of acquisition must have been baked in to any and all Bazooka products.
I did some sleuthing on the Ramar Jungle Gun and the history is an interesting one. Ramar of the Jungle was a syndicated TV program that originally ran from 1952-53 (or '54, sources differ), airing 52 episodes in all, then it was shown in reruns through the end of the decade and beyond. Four movies were spliced together from the TV footage, two of these premiered in 1953 and the other two in 1955 and there was extensive merchandising as well. There's a lot more to the story, which I'll leave to others, so the Bazooka offering therefore reflected an active toy campaign tie-in. The cap gun was really something to behold:
Saturday, January 7, 2023
A Child's Garden Of Turf
Well, the final week of the NFL regular season concludes tomorrow and what more opportune time to explore an obscure Bazooka package design set called A Children's Guide To TV Football. Issued in 1971, presumably due to the launch of Monday Night Football the season prior, ACGTTF represented a new direction of sorts for Topps after they killed off the printing of baseball cards on the back of Bazooka party boxes and fumbled an attempted football card set thereon, all in 1971.
There were 12 box backs created, some primarily text-based:
No.1 Football Lingo
No. 9 Officials' Duties
No. 12 Officials' Signals
You will note the set derives from a Grosset & Dunlap book (published in 1967) called Football Lingo, written by Zander Hollander and Paul Zimmerman, with illustrations by Jerry Schlamp. Hollander wrote 8-10 sports related books a year, many of them annual paperback guides in his Complete Handbook series and if you are a certain age you may recall them being offered by Scholastic. Hollander also wrote for Howard Cosell when the nasally one received his first big broadcasting break and that connection to Monday Night Football is an intriguing one in light of this set.
But Schlamp is our link here as his illustrations look to be adorning the Officials' Signal box but not necessarily the Officials' Duties box. I base this upon the similar Basketball Lingo book cover art and you can see why as the ref on the latter looks a lot like those officials on No. 12:
Saturday, December 31, 2022
A Winter's Tale Or Two
Good stuff here today kids, as a smattering of 1960 Topps Venezuelan Baseball Tattoos surfaced recently, which is a akin to a Brigadoon sighting I'm sure. Previously, I was aware of a Don Drysdale example and I think two others were out there but that's not confirmed. Obviously, they are scarce as hell.
Luis Arroyo was one of the subjects in this batch but here's the thing, he doesn't appear in the US checklist:
So the obvious questions are:
1) How many subjects are in the Venezuelan set? (the US set has 96 subjects)
2) How many subjects from the major Caribbean, Central and South American Winter Leagues did Topps create for the Venezuelan release?
At a guess the Venezuelan Tattoo set contains less than 96 subjects (of which only 55 are actual ball players in the US release). My reasoning is that, since Topps did not replicate their entire 572 card 1960 Baseball set for release in the country, issuing only 198 cards (essentially the first two series), why would they issue a full tattoo set AND add players? As to who was added locally, well who knows at this point? Much more information is needed and they would add a couple players to replace checklists in the card sets, but now I see there is another question:
3) What year saw the release of the Venezuelan Baseball Tattoos?
If you look at Arroyo, he was essentially a journeyman in the U.S. until 1961, when he plied his screwball into a monster year for the Yankees and finished 6th in the MVP voting as a relief pitcher! However, a native Puerto Rican, he had played locally since 1946 and appeared in 19 seasons overall in his native country, beginning with Ponce in the Puerto Rican Winter League. He later appeared numerous times with the ostensible Puerto Rican National teams in the Caribbean World Series. In 1948 he began his U.S. Baseball odyssey and despite a 1955 call-up to the Cardinals that led to an All-Star nod and, of course, his 1961 breakout year, Arroyo mostly bounced up and down until 1963 and also in-and-out as he sometimes pitched summer ball in Puerto Rico instead of playing in the minors.
He was a big deal in the Caribbean and quite well known in the Winter Leagues and their associated World Series tournament but did Topps make up a tattoo because of that or because of his big 1961 season with the Yankees? If the latter, it points to this being a 1961 or even a 1962 release, which seems quite possible given the straddling of calendar years for their Venezuelan issues. A full checklist might help answer all three questions but I'm not too optimistic we'll ever see or develop one fully. What we do have is the following:
Ed Mathews, Nellie Fox, Rocky Colavito were in this latest batch, photo ID-only Early Wynn and Juan Marichal are also not in the US checklist but alas, without a scan right now. Marichal and Mathews are said to have have two known examples, per Joe Morris, who tipped me off to all to this. So this is the ur-checklist, all of seven (ten) subjects in length at present (Update Jan. 2, 2023-Friend o'the Archive and advanced collector Larry Serota advised of two additions to the checklist, Bob Allison and Ruben Amaro and thinks the set was issued after 1960 as a standalone, with a cello overwrap). (Update Jan. 5, 2023-HArmon Killebrew is now a confirmed subject):
Ruben Amaro (Venezuelan only)
Luis Arroyo (Venezuelan only)
Rocky Colavito
Don Drysdale
Nellie Fox
Juan Marichal (Venezuelan only)
Ed Mathews
Early Wynn
Saturday, December 24, 2022
Siren Song
Well, I tried my darndest this year but I don't have any new things to show that relate to Christmas from our good friends at Topps. Early efforts made by the company to sell Christmas themed items around 1950-53 seem to have gone poorly and much of what I am aware of otherwise consists of things like corporate greeting cards. So instead I've turned to good old Bazooka Joe and a bit of an anomaly involving everybody's favorite mascot.
Check out this Bazooka Joe Club Membership kit ephemera:
Yes, "Young America's Favorite" Bubble Gum was being used with the A&BC plant address in Essex, England! Topps had previously done this "YAM" thing with Bazooka in Canada too, as part of their packaging and promotions in that country. You would think it should say "Young England's Favorite", right?
Saturday, December 17, 2022
Edison's Medicine
Today we will explore a mysterious hybrid Topps half sheet from what looks to be 1969. But first, we need to peek into the Summer of Love and examine a wonderfully gimmicky set called Who Am I?
Topps used a scratch off feature for the set, which was nothing new as they had used such technology as far back as 1949. What was new however, was using it on the front of the card and not the reverse. Another gimmick involved a question and answer format, time tested again and again in Topps-land, with some additional hints offered as well if the initial question proved to be too vexing. It's a great set and one of my favorites from the 60's:
The scratch off material seems to have caused some issues in production as it would often streak the uncoated portion of the front of the card, or foul the reverse with little dots. Once scratched, the result was revealed:
1 George
Washington
2 Andrew Jackson
3 James Monroe
4 Joan of Arc
5 Nero
6 Franklin D. Roosevelt
7 Henry VIII
8 William Shakespeare
9 Clara Barton
10 Napoleon Bonaparte
11 Harry Truman
12 Babe Ruth
13 Thomas Jefferson
14 Dolly Madison
15 Julius Caesar
16 Robert L. Stevenson
17 Woodrow Wilson
18 Stonewall Jackson
19 Charles DeGaulle
20 John Quincy Adams
21 Christopher Columbus
23 Albert Einstein
24 Benjamin Franklin
25 Abraham Lincoln
26 Leif Ericsson
27 Adm. Richard Byrd
28 Capt. Kidd
29 Thomas Edison
30 Ulysses S. Grant
31 Queen Elizabeth II
32 Alexander Graham Bell
33 Willie Mays
34 Teddy Roosevelt
35 Genghis Khan
36 Daniel Boone
37 Winston Churchill
38 Paul Revere
39 Florence Nightingale
40 Dwight Eisenhower
41 Sandy Koufax
42 Jackie Kennedy
43 Lady Bird Johnson
44 Lyndon Johnson
Mantle retired as well on 3/1/69, five weeks before before the 1969 season kicked off, so he was another baseball subject pulled, maybe for the same reason as Koufax or just due to the changeover to 1969 for the Fun Pack sheet, being a "stale" player by then as the calendar flipped from 1968 to 1969. Mays was likely on a 1967-69 extended contract that didn't end in until April 7, 1969, or one that ran 1968-70 but Topps never did anything to jeopardize the baseball card licenses and perhaps they just pulled another stale player. Ruth's image was licensed by Topps on and off, as needed, from 1952 until around 1970 I believe, so they kept him on the Fun Pack sheet as they had him in the bag in 1967 and 1969 (Babe is on some Bazooka Baseball All Time Great cards in 1969-70).
Three other 1967 subjects that were dropped can be explained easily enough. Jackie Kennedy married Ari Onassis on 10/19/68 and was no longer a Kennedy, so she was out. Lady Bird and Lyndon Johnson would have been known to not be continuing on as First Lady and US President. The election was held on 11/5/68 but LBJ had announced he wasn't running well before that and he was out of office on 1/20/69 anyway.
That leaves two headscratchers: Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison. About the only thing I can think of is that Edison's card mentions electricity and Franklin, while his card is silent on that, was unmistakably associated with it and they were removed due to an overabundance of caution, lest some kid stick a fork in an outlet.
The Milton Bradley game was released no later than the Summer of 1968 based upon Dr. Miller's recollections, so the timing of an early 1969 update for the game makes sense. Miller notes the 1968 game was prepared to be marketed at the NY Toy Fair, which started on Feb. 16, 1968. Based on all this, I surmise the 1967 coated Who Am I? set was made up sometime in the first six weeks of 1967 and the 1969, uncoated Fun Pack cards were produced after March 1, 1969 and likely after the start of the 1969 baseball season in April. None of this explains why they rejiggered the WAI? cards. Target: Moon makes sense due to the impending moon launch in July 1969 and Hot Rods were always popular with young boys.
For the record, the eight 1969 Who Am I? uncoated Double Prints are:
8 William Shakespeare
10 Napoleon Bonaparte
12 Babe Ruth
18 Stonewall Jackson
21 Christopher Columbus
15 Abraham Lincoln
35 Genghis Kahn
39 Florence Nightingale