Hey Rook!

Last time out I was surprised to discover I had never covered the 1973 set Topps issued to commemorate The Rookies. Originally an ABC-TV Movie of the Week that aired in March of 1972, the flick and the series that followed that fall focused on the work and personal lives of a small group of Los Angeles police officers that had recently graduated from the police academy.  The most famous member of the cast turned out to be Kate Jackson, who played a nurse married to one of the fledgling cops. Ratings were middling until the third season when it crept into the Top 25 and a syndication deal was reached. That fell apart and after one more season the show was done.

The middling ratings may explain why this set is so hard to track down these days.  It's clearly a 1973 issue based upon the test T-code assigned by Topps and in fact it's only the second one to use their new nomenclature for test sets (the first was Emergency!/Adam-12, which also kicked off a rather generic refinement of many non-sports sets to follow). A test wrapper is known:

As mentioned in my post last week, only 60 cards have been graded by PSA.  I can't say I've seen any with gum stains but that wrapper does look like it had been folded with cards inside. I have to assume the test failed miserably. With many examples known in the hobby being severely miscut, I wonder if a sheet, or a partial, was cut up after the fact somehow?  

Happily, my type example is cut well; it's not perfect but for this set it's close:

The backs, also standardized, feature some text and partial puzzle piece action:

That's Georg Sanford Brown pictured, whose missing "e" I found fascinating as a kid. 

As I've written, the cards are extremely tough to find and only one full set is shown in the PSA Registry. In theory, it's easier than Emergency!/Adam-12, which has a mere 46 graded PSA examples, with 50 cards needed for a set, but that's splitting hairs.  In fact, I've seen more raw E!/12 cards than examples from The Rookies over the years , although not by much. Not all of the most difficult Topps test cards are from the Sixties!

Brown & Blue

While I didn't bid on it, a curious piece of Topps history was hammered on eBay late last year.  Using their own employees for photo shoots was a continuing theme with Topps in the Sixties and Seventies, and some of their antics are a little humorous in retrospect.

This is an original photographic pasteup from the archives of Brown Brothers, a stock photo firm that was big for a good chunk of the Twentieth Century: 

Lelands has been auctioning off the firm's archival items on the 'Bay and also in some catalog auctions but the three notations are masking another Brown reference, namely the friendly "shopkeeper" pounding a baseball mitt, one Len Brown.  Brown was Topps New Product Director Woody Gelman's assistant at the time and he's helping the PR push for those 1963 Bazooka boxes that not only had three package design baseball cards on the revere but five All Time Greats cards within. 

These were the boxes being hawked by Len:

The reverse of the photo shows a lot of decrepit rubber cement along with a notation:

I've blown it up to make it easier to read:

I am surmising this particular piece came from Len's first wife and was in her possession as part of their divorce.  Of note are mention of three 1973-74 test issues; in order these are Deckle Baseball cards from '74, plus The Waltons and The Rookies, both TV shows of the day that Topps tried to make work as card sets in 1973.  I've covered the first two here previously but to my surprise I've never referenced The Rookies, which is one of the tougher test issues of the decade and far harder to track down than the other two, at least from what I've found.

They come from a time when Topps was trying to standardize some of their graphics:

A little text and a puzzle make up the reverse:

The example above is unusual as it's not severely miscut, since most of the set's surviving examples are found that way. In fact, many of its 44 subjects are horizontally-oriented and the cuts can be so bad that the caption is often found above the photo and not below:

Yikes!  It's truly a tough issue and finding well-cut cards is super challenging.   PSA has graded a mere 60 examples overall with nothing above a grade of 7 given. However, 44 of them are in the sole registry set, which is complete with a GPA of 6.898. By way of reference, 255 Waltons cards have been PSA slabbed (nine 9's given) and over 3,000 1974 Deckles, with seventy-six 10's granted somehow!