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.