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!

Presidential Succession Plan

Very early in their "novelty" issuing history, Topps seized upon the U.S. Presidency as fertile ground for sets that were meant for entertainment but also had an educational angle.  Two of their first issued sets were Golden Coin (click HERE for some background) and the intertwined It Happened To A President, a set of twenty comic strip mini-biographies of many Chief Executives. These were packaged and sold together, appearing just after the first post-World War 2 U.S. Presidential Election. Golden Coin is not all that interesting to me as a novelty as it was forged by a third party and it's also pretty basic. It Happened to a President, though, is a bit more fun:

Here's how the original release of IHTAP looked. The set is attributed to 1949 based upon the outer Golden Coin wrapper, even though I'm pretty sure it saw the light of day as the election was ongoing. But 1949 is the common hobby attribution and I'll just leave that here...

These comics were each affixed to the back of a Golden Coin wrapper, and were quite large at 5 1/8" x 6 3/16":

That scan does not do it justice-these were a dazzling foiled gold color that would have been quite eye-catching.

While IHTAP does not get recognition for a 1952-53 issue, I believe Topps just reused the same comics as they repurposed the Golden Coins possibly in plastic, vs. the original metal. I say this because Harry Truman got a pair of glasses somewhere along the way, plus I can't see Topps missing a presidential election cycle at the time. Here's Harry:

The conventional hobby wisdom has the sets reappearing as an OPC issue in Canada in 1956, which seems odd but is supported by the Golden Coin wrapper indicia.  It Happened To A President got red and black accents for this release (sorry for the miscut):

Topps slightly revised the IHTAP subjects for 1956.  The original 1948-49 set and this re-release shared nineteen subjects, in this ordering:

1. Andrew Jackson

2. George Washington

3.Ulysses S. Grant

4. Theodore Roosevelt

5. Abraham Lincoln

6. George Washington

7. Andrew Jackson

8. Grover Cleveland

9. Zachary Taylor

10. James Monroe

11. James A. Garfield

12. John Adams

13. John Quincy Adams

14. Abraham Lincoln

15. James Madison

16. Franklin Roosevelt

17. Thomas Jefferson

18. Calvin Coolidge

19. Woodrow Wilson

20. (See below)

As you can see, not all Presidents were treated equally.  First of all, the mediocre ones are almost non-existent, except for one.  Here, The Simpsons will tell you who:

All but one of the other ignorees served a single term (or less), save for William McKinley, and Harry Truman, who was in office when the set debuted. 1956 saw the twentieth subject changed from William H. Harrison to Dwight Eisenhower. The only possible thing I can think of as to why the set was an OPC release is his presence.  I can't find his comic proper, so the original artwork will have to do:

Bowman's 1952 U.S. Presidents set got a quick re-release after Topps bought them out in early 1956, which also utilized the slightly different dimensions used by their former competitor. Here's the Bowman Ike, front and back:

Unlike the action-packed front, the back is very plain (and may peg the set to 1953, not '52):

Compare that to the Topps version, which at least added some color (the fronts were not altered):

Ike was the 33rd man to be President and to top off the 36 card set, three subjects, all "prez-adjacent," had to be wedged in.  Bowman (and then Topps four years later) went with:

No. 1 Washington Takes Command

No. 2 Declaration of Independence 

and No. 7 Burning of White House

The horizontal nature of these three makes finding centered examples quite difficult.

Golden Coin and IHTAP were then shelved for good, while U.S. Presidents would not see the light of day again for another sixteen years. Instead Topps issued a series of stamps circa 1962 that included all 34 POTUS through JFK.  Here's four:

Bazooka also got into the political mix with a 33 card package design set that presented three at a clip in particular order:

1964 though, was commemorated in a different way.  Topps issued a slapdash set of cards following the assassination of John F. Kennedy:

The backs were prepared just as quickly as the front, I'd say:

Topps did, however, address the 1964 Presidential Campaign with a set called Johnson Vs. Goldwater:

Not the worst design but as a card set?  I dunno....

Here's the ultra-exciting (not) back:

Topps mixed things up a bit after the 1964 election; we'll get into that next time out.

Riddle Me This

Following their move to Duryea, PA in the winter of 1966 and subsequent period of settling in, Topps started toying with the use of what are usually referred to as commodity or production codes toward the end of that year. These codes, documented, in a way, the vast majority of their output for decades thereafter.  I've shown and tried to explain these here several times - perhaps haphazardly - in the past but today I'm trying to sift through the origins of these little strings of numbers, which as we all know, generally followed this kind of pattern (example taken from 1972 Baseball): 0-401-90-01-2.

Here's a closeup of the code:

The first digit represents the medium (wrapper, box, sheet) and the second two the product number (which also covered pure confectionery products, somewhat reset every year and is loosely tied to the chronological order of release within that year as well). Sometimes the code for a product issued series-by-series could slightly change. The third set of digits is for the packaging format code, while the fourth batch represents an iteration number, documenting meaningful changes in some aspect of the release such as revised retail box or pack artwork. The last, single, digit is often said to represent the year of conception but that's not entirely true. This often does tie to the year of conception (and 95% of the time, release) and can never represent a date after the release year but sometimes (there's that 5%) can signify the one before. So a set with a final digit of -2 could have been released in 1973 but not 1971.Worth noting, the annual Baseball sets have this number matching the season of release, presumably tying to some form of contractual wording with the specific league and/or player's union regarding payment of royalties.  

As mentioned, thanks to another superb sussing out by Friend o'the Archive by Lonnie Cummins, this use of the commodity codes is well known in the hobby but does not match the packing date codes stamped on each shipping carton (the solution to which can be found here). So, the commodity code  represents an internal green light for production as it ultimately details a "Bill of Materials" code. This was assigned and authprized by the Topps Bill of Materials manager, who (possibly) oversaw and (definitely) coordinated with such disparate departments such as Manufacturing, Engineering and Shipping but also had to dovetail with others such as Woody Gelman's New Products and Ben Solomon's Art Departments.  In essence, the code was assigned when a project intended for full release was formally started and the costs associated with producing and distributing said product needed to be tracked, all of this happening once the BOM Manager gave it the thumbs up.

Some exceptions did occur. Test issues from some time in 1966 until 1973 or so were not always tracked via any kind of numbering system found on the issued boxes or wrappers.  After that, Topps began using using a much shorter T code for tests. In addition, most products that were imported from abroad, such as some of the metal pin issues, and merely repackaged (and sometimes rebranded) and then sold as a Topps release (i.e. not manufactured by Topps but merely distributed instead) had no codes at all. That simply meant these projects were tracked internally via some other system. Products that contained an insert, which was another 95% situation, did not have a separate code for them, although a handful of times even that was not the case.

Of utmost interest are the annual sports releases, primarily baseball, where, as noted above, the BOM code date matches the intended season of issue. This does not always apply to some of the myriad baseball test issues roughly running from 1967 to 1971; some of those have a BOM code that predates the year of issue. A non-recurring project, such as sets timed to Valentine's Day, would usually have a code also signifying the year prior to issue, as it took several months for most of these to be prepared, tested and then tweaked for general release.

I've tried to track down the start of these codes and it seems like they all may have started with the Batman Color Photo (aka Bat Laffs set):

 Check out this box bottom:

That's 454-06-1 snaking up from the bottom right corner.  The expected prefix indicator digit is missing, and it's unclear what 06 refers to (probably not the year, as we shall soon see). That trailing -1 could be the iteration number, in this case the first iteration. 

As for the wrappers, no code was imprinted on them. However, a revised box was used to sell the Riddler Back cards:

That's pretty much the greatest Topps box art ever! The bottom of some didn't have a code though, although to be fair it was a generic box bottom used that year for several releases:

There is a catch though-some of the Riddler Back box bottoms did show a code: 444-06-1-6

Throwing me a little, however is this wrapper for the Riddler Backs:

That code reads: 444-01-1-6.  This somewhat matches up with the cello box code for the series...

(Courtesy Lonnie Cummins)

... which reads 444-046-1-6. So that's not quite there yet.  By the way, there was a special Rak Pak header created for Bat Laffs:

The Riddler Backs also got one, a sure sign Topps was making bank on Batmania;  it's also a thing of beauty:

The green header has no coding but the yellow one does:  444-029-1-6. It seems like -029 could refer to the pricing but I think it's just a coincidence.

At least two other sets with non-conforming codes were issued in 1966:

Green Hornet Stickers
Display Box:    466-06-1-6
Wrapper:          466-01-1-6

Lost In Space
Shipping Case: 470-10-1-6

Topps seems to have fumbled around a bit in '66 looking for a consistent code but they nailed it pretty quickly. By the time Rat Patrol came around the system was set:

That code?  It reads:

The codes were also assigned to pure confectionery products so they are hard to fully track but Rat Patrol has to be one of the earliest ones to use the familiar cadence.

There's a lot more to unpack with these codes (and all the myriad others) but that's the 101/102 Level looksee.

The 21 Club?

Friend o'the Archive Steve Schnaper has been sending in some scans of anomalous doings in the 1974 Baseball set, specifically related to certain team cards deployed by Topps. 

The scans started off with thIS Oakland A's card, which had a mysterious "21" printed next to the team name:

The reverse staining shows clear evidence of the card once being from a pack:

Following this, and noting the "2" and the "1' above are from two different typefaces, sans-serif and serif respectively, this Pirates card turned up with either a sans-serif "11" or two parallel lines in the same general area:

There's also a back scratch froma  pen on the card that Steve advises was not applied post-factory (hard to tell if that' s another 11 or not but it's pretty sloppy either way):

The A's card was sent in to SGC and determined to be authentic and garnered a grade of 4:

Steve also says he has found a Red Sox Team card with a front dot in the same general area as the other two markings and mentioned the Pirates card has now been slabbed by SGC.

Rich Mueller at Sports Collectors Daily posted about the A's card a little while back and a friend of mine with a LOT of 1974 team cards looked through his stash to no avail; neither had ever encountered anything like these oddities before.

If anyone out there has a clue what's going on here, please reach out!