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!

Foiled Again, or, Two Wrights Don't Right A Wrong

Topps was starting to experiment a bit with production methods and materials in the years leading up to their February 1966 plant and warehouse move from Brooklyn to Duryea, Pennsylvania.  For reasons that may or may not be linked, after this occured some really innovative products and almost-products being worked upon by Woody Gelman's New Product Development department for a period of six or seven years, right up until the company started reigning in costs to prepare for their IPO.  NPD were still getting their bearings though in 1965 when they popped out not one but two sets featuring foil embossing.

The most well-known of these embossed sets are the 72 inserts that came with the 1965 Baseball cards,  which I've touched upon these briefly in the past and won't dwell on here.  That set is heavily documented and I'll probably end up dissecting it more fully down the road in a sports inserts series I'm contemplating anyway.  Those cards were essentially credit card sized while today's subject, Presidents and Famous Americans, were produced as "tall boys" that measured 2 1/2" x 4 11/16".  Topps was enamored with using these larger cards in many of their mainstream 1964-65 issues, for reasons I cannot quite determine. 

The 44 subjects in the set include 35 U.S. Presidents and 9 Famous Americans. The run of Chief Executives includes Lyndon Johnson and with Grover Cleveland's two terms only requiring a single card, the first 35 cards in the set are presented in a straightforward chronological manner, with a short paragraph of description and the some indicia. The cards, which were blank backed, spread the subjects amid five colors, with black reserved for Presidents who had been assassinated, as shown here:

Presidents who did not die at the hands of others were issued with red, white or blue backgrounds and the Famous Americans were all done in green. There is no variation among colors and subjects, if Woodrow Wilson was blue, he stayed blue.

The wrapper, to my eye,  is one of the better ones produced by Topps in the 60's and the tall boy format let them go horizontal, unleashing Mount Rushmore to great effect:

The red, white & blue theme was also one dear to the Shorin family, the owners of Topps, going back to 1908 and Morris Shorin's American Leaf Tobacco Company, although no examples of any ephemera exist to show this, only family recollections. This patriotic livery is still on display today with Bazooka.

I'll not bother with a checklist for all 44 cards but will detail the 9 Famous Americans that close out the set:

36. Benjamin Franklin

37. Charles Lindbergh

38. Alexander Graham Bell

39. Alexander Hamilton

40. Albert Einstein

41. Henry Ford

42. Orville Wright

43. Douglas MacArthur

44. Frank Lloyd Wright

While one of the Wright brothers apparently got short shrift, the inclusion of another similarly surnamed fellow, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, was unexpected:

(Courtesy The Wright Library)

Most of the others are no-brainers though and it's worth noting Albert Einstein was a frequently depicted Topps subject, going back to 1952's Look 'N' See set.  

As you can imagine, the combination of the tall boy sizing and foil embossing is not one that allowed higher grade examples to survive in any kind of quantity.  The set also seems to have been pretty limited in release and it's not the easiest thing to find these days. Demand is low and let's face it, the portraits look, well, kinda boring.  It's an odd duck of a set, albeit one that pulled together a few overarching themes at Topps in 1965.