A Colorful Past

Topps ran vigorous ad campaigns for their early products as they plowed profits back into the company to encourage growth.  Ads for Topps Gum were legion in various magazines, buses and subway cars in the 1940's and Bazooka joined the fray in 1947 with the launch of the nickel roll.  When the first Topps novelty project, Tatoo, was unleashed in 1948, there was no letup.  Let's take a look at some of their ads for the product launch today.

Color was the name of the game as Topps used multiple hues on the gum itself: 

I haven't been able to track down the specific titles yet but that sure looks like a centerfold from a comic book. (UPDATE-it's actually  a 1/3 page Sunday Comics ad per Mark Newgarden) The year would be 1948 and it may have run in some Fawcett titles, based upon an early alliance with Topps, but I've had no luck so far with further tracking.

They ran trade ads as well:

It may seem strange but "As Natural As Freckles" was surely coined to drive home the idea that Tatoo was a safe product, which it was as there are still to this day regulatory requirements for inks that come into contact with any food items (they have to be vegetable based and thus limit the color palette). The window streamer is colorful too, of course, and is a fairly close match to the center spread ad above. Sorry for the left/right divide, it's not stitching properly in my graphics editor:

But for me, the best promotional piece for Tatoo is this one, even though it ties in other early Topps products:

Now that is one colorful ad!  The Party-Pak Topps Gum canister at upper right was a short lived product, eventually replaced, albeit not in kind, by the familiar 20 and 25 piece Bazooka party boxes that were ubiquitous in supermarkets and groceries in the 1950's and 60's.  Party-Paks were sold at Sears candy counters from the looks of things in these two photos provided by Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins, although I'm sure it was offered in many other locations:

I'm not positive and it's a little hard to count but I believe there were 60 pieces and at a guess the suggested retail price was 49 cents.  Check out this other Sears photo, which shows the 1948 Tatoo canister (100 count) at right and the Party-Pak, which is clearly smaller and is seen a little left of center.  There's a nice run of Bazooka nickel rolls on the counter below them too:

Tatoo was also offered in something called a Tourist Pouch but the only time that's ever come up, so far as I can tell anyway, is in an old picture, presumably from a sales sheet, that was reproduced in one of Chris Benjamin's Sport Americana Non-Sports Guides. You can see it says "Tatoo Tourist" on the side of the retail box:

Tatoo sold well enough that it was slightly reconfigured in size for confectionery vending machines of the day (the 1948 original was for counter sales only) and then saw yet another relaunch a scant few years later, attributed to 1953 but that date is hobby lore at present and not confirmed. The "1953" issue was in an obviously larger size and this all bears further investigation. And then beginning in 1955 Topps started keeping a brand or two of mostly character-driven tattoo sets in circulation well into the 1970's. 

Merry Christmas!

 Read to the end for a Christmas surprise!  But first...

And last but certainly not least, a tip o' the Santa hat to Jason Rhodes, who alerted me to this stellar image of Santa's Fun Pack from 1950, which was discussed not too long ago:

(copyright Christopher Benjamin & Dennis W. Eckes, 

Sport-Americana Price Guide to the Non-Sports Cards 1930-1960, Edgewater Book Co., 1991)

The "surprises" are just the novelties (inserts) included with each pack but I am wonderng if the Fruit flavor Gum tab had something like a "Topps Daffy-nition" on its wrapper interior as I don't believe they came with anything like a comic insert. Questions, questions....which will keep us busy in to 2022 and beyond!

The First Christmas...

 ...Fun Packs! And it seems appropriate to look at Christmas just after Hallowe'en, although I'm a bit of a piker as my local Home Depot stores have had their holiday displays up since mid-September.

Among the many mundane tasks I undertake to keep this blog and my related research going, I sporadically scan (or download if I can) pertinent articles from various hobby magazines, auction catalogs and the like.  I'm in the midst of a monster scan-a-thon of almost 340 issues of The Wrapper and I've already extracted a ton of great articles and ads just from the first 77 issues.  

But this one took the (fruit) cake, from issue #51 (May 15-July 1, 1985) as Wrapper King John Neuner describes buying Topps Gum tabs in 1949:

You will note he specifically mentions the Fruit flavor.  Well that is interesting as the only example of a Fruit wrapper that I have ever seen came from Chris Benjamin's' Sport Americana Non-Sports Guide, whcih featured this singular image:

I can't make out the copyright date but suspect it's 1946 as the wrapper style matches the other flavors (Spearmint, Peppermint, Cinnamon and Pepsin) from that year and by 1949 Topps had converted to selling Chiclets style gum in their non-Bazooka penny tabs (2 pieces per pack) [Update Nov. 8, 2021-it is indeed a '46, see postscrip below]:

I'm not 100% sure but think only Spearmint and Peppermint survived the transition period. Dig that LBP (Lord Baltimore Press) logo on the back's waste area!

Getting back to the Fruit wrapper, I have to believe it came from Neuner's collection.  1939 Ginger wrappers have popped up (2 tabs and a wrapper at last count) so the Fruit variety seven years hence is presently the holiest grail for Topps Gum.

Notice too the sell sheet that makes up the article's background art shows the last round retail canister Topps sold their tab gum in, for the original 1948 issue of Tatoo. By 1949 they had switched to true display box format, which would have elimiated the need for overboxing each canister in a shipping carton.

The Stop 'N' Go (aka License Plates) set is, other than 1955's Hocus Focus series of 126, the hardest gum tab card issue of them all. I suspect it had only just been introduced when Topps switched over to the larger, 1950 version for the reissued Stop 'N' Go set (and the slightly renamed Flags of the World-Parade) and pulled the ol' retail plug. Given the paucity of surviving cards I doubt it even saw a vending issue like X-Ray Roundup --and I suspect Flags of All Nations-Soldiers of the World-- which can be found with relative ease.  

The story does not end there though, as Neuner saves the best for last, describing a "Santa's Fun Pack" (per the header card but with no illustration provided, alas, he had picked up for what looks to be $420, or a little less if the Fun Pack was dicounted (can't tell):

That backdates Fun Packs to 1949 and not 1950 as I had previously thought.  

For the record, it's not clear if all the products he listed could be found in Santa Fun Packs.  That Hocus Focus is Magic Photo of  course and Pixie is X-Ray Roundup. The theory was, if the card set failed, the gum name (Hocus Focus, Pixie) could live on I guess.

OK, who's got a Santa Fun Pack to show?!

Postscript Nov. 8, 2021 - Lonnie Cummins reminded me that he now owns a Fruit wrapper and I believe it's likely the one shown in Benjamin.  Embarassingly, he had sent me scans of it awhile back, which I promptly misfiled!  So here is the 1946 Fruit wrapper in all it's considerable glory, with a tip of the Topps cap to Lonnie:

Pretty Fly (For A Tighty-Whitey Guy)

Robert Edward Auctions, as I am sure you all know, is home to some wondrous offerings each and every time they unleash a catalog on the world.  Their recently concluded August auction was no exception.

While Topps test issues ebb and flow, Mantles tick up and Wagner's continue to go for unimaginable sums, there's usually a lot or two with things I've never seen before. This time out it was a cardboard Topps Gum display, mostly still full of product and not round like their canisters nor made of bakelite like their more durable displays. I didn't bid (and the lot went for some relatively big bucks) but boy was I tempted.  Check it out:

I suspect Pepsin ended up stranded in some of those displays, long after the other flavors ran out!

So here's the thing-most of the New York City wrappers I am familiar with had a very prosaic slogan ("No cost has been spared in giving this wholesome and delightful gum every quality that would add to your enjoyment") in the little slug on back whereas these say "Only Natural Flavors".  They switched to a Brooklyn, New York wrapper later in '39  (I think, it could have been the other way around or both co-existed for some reason) and then all the 1946's I have seen just say Brooklyn.  So this is something uncommon and REA advises they can't see any dates on the wrappers.

These came in a sleeve (also undated) with a Fruit of the Loom hanky (!) and ten free tabs:

Seems weird right?  Well, if my hunch is right these gum tabs, display and box hail from 1942 as there are metal and cardboard canisters out there with that copyright date.  A handkerchief in 1942, during World War 2, was probably a little bit of a bigger deal than it is now and some of the sales premiums Topps offered were aimed at "Mrs. Retailer" so it does make some sense. The question that remains uanswered though is-are they, or any wrapper at all, available with Topps Gum, coprighted 1942?

Check out another wartime sales premium item, 1/2 a Topps Certificate with a "U.S. Victory Stamps" tear off tab:

Look at the offered prizes, hot items in some quarters then, I'm sure:

It's pretty amazing Topps could offer all of this with a war raging and rationing occurring but even more astounding to me is this little detail:

At some point during the war, or just after, Topps advertised a return to "Natural Flavors" but I'm not really sure when that occurred now. This is all getting curiouser and curioser! It seems like most certificates started coming out approximately 18 months prior to the expiration date (in this case September 30, 1945), so at least through 1943 it seems there were still no artificial flavors to be found in your standard Topps chew.

Fields Of Screams

BFF o'the Archive Jeff Shepherd was nice enough to loan me some old tobacco journals a little while ago to pick through for Topps-related content and they did not disappoint. While I continue to search in vain for any American Leaf Tobacco Company ads (some mags were from the 30's), Bazooka and its early ad partners certainly were present and accounted for. I've included one a little further below I think many of you will like.

Topps took advantage of radio in advertising Topps Gum (which had a jingle I'm still searching for) and also Bazooka on the Abbott & Costello Show. I've shown this original piece before but it gives you the setup perfectly:

 A&C had been on NBC Radio for a five year run before switching over to ABC in the fall of 1947.  A couple of months later they launched a Saturday morning show for the smaller fry and that is where Topps parked their radio ads for Bazooka.  Topps Gum was marketed to adults and would have been hawked on the traditional, evening show. 

Both of their ABC shows are described in the references I have as "sustaining", which means they had no national sponsor but instead relied upon a little meager, often  local "spot" advertising or merely network promos to remain on the air.  Sustaining shows did not necesarily have long lifespans but the "plug" for Bazooka seems to indicate the Abbott & Costello Show had some national revenue generated via Topps buying "spot" advertising. Given that they aired their last children's episode on March 26, 1949, this ad from the April 2, 1949 edition of "The Tobacco Leaf" Topps must have been in at the kill:

A&C's evening show only lasted about ten weeks after the Saturday show aired its final episode and television was about to change everybody's lives whether they liked it or not. I actually have a transcription disc of one Abbott & Costello radio show with a Bazooka plug but have no way to play it as it requires a special turntable that plays "inside-out" and no audio files have yet turned up on YouTube or the Internet Archive but I keep digging.

Topps was about to come around on the idea you could have multiple price points on a confectionery products but at the time the above ad ran, the penny Bazooka tabs we all knew and loved were not yet in the market.  That referenced DC advertising campaign was also widespread and lasted slightly over two years, running from mid-1948 to mid-1950.  These two ads were running in a couple of dozen DC titles at the same time the above one appeared:

Yes, 1,800 colleges to choose from, meaning those pennants were printed on demand!

Abbott & Costello continued to make movies and of course had a syndicated TV show for two seasons running from 1952-54. Their best known routine is obviously "Who's on First?" but that's been played to death and I find this clip from the telly a lot funnier personally:

"Good night to everybody and good night Paterson, New Jersey!"

A Killing In Milling

I was lucky enough to pick up a Spearmint Topps Gum five-cent box recently which not only complements my Peppermint pack but also allowed me to glean some additional information as to how Topps provided confectionery products to the U.S. Government for various military field rations.

The original field rations from Topps were one cent gum tabs, some slightly in differing size from the retail Topps Gum tabs that they made their name on before and after World World 2. When Topps Gum went from a traditional "flat" chew to a "chiclet" style around 1950 (once Bazooka penny tabs proved their staying power) some similarly sized one cent packs also held two of their flagship's chiclet-style, candy-coated "nuggets" (wafers?).  These also seem to have been used for field rations into the 1950's. See here for the deets.

Topps also introduced a nickel pack of this smaller, minty gum in the 1950's, likely after they got keel-hauled in court by the American Chicle Company for ripping off the look and style of not only Chiclets packaging but also that of Clorets. The pack was sized to fit into cigarette vending machines (remember the Shorin family's fortune was originally built on tobacco) but it could also handily nestle in with various field rations in each kit:

There's been anecdotal evidence of these being military ration components previously (alluded to when I bought my Peppermint pack a few years ago) but this one comes with a pedigree:

Not sure what all of that means (maybe no caffeine is indicated by the crescent moon?) but it's like a Topps commodity code on steroids!  Here's the all important box bottom, with more details:

Van Brode Milling was a packager and distributor of military rations for years as near as I can determine and they had a subsidiary that seems to have perfected the plastic spork. The auction listing describes the rations as being Viernam-era and I e-mailed the seller for some details.  He came back with these carton scans but not a year of issue and that manufacturing date under the burst test information sure looks like March 1957 to me, although it's hard to read.

Multiples of five seem to be a US military ration "thing" and there some that mention "tens" as well.  Anyone out there familiar?

What is odd to me is that the pricing remains on the Topps packaging.  It seems like it doesn't belong but as we have learned with Topps, the unexpected is very much expected!

Advertising Age

We'll be time-tripping to the 1940's this week folks, courtesy of some vintage trade magazine ads run by Topps.  BFF o'the Archive Jeff Shepherd was (and is) offering these on eBay and while I snagged the one I wanted, the graphics on the others caught my eye for sure.

The March 1940 issue of International Confectioner magazine brought us this little beauty:

I won one of these displays a while back and it's a sweet piece, made of Bakelite:

Theres a blonde verison as well and it seems a lot harder to find than the black ones, which pop up from time to time (EDIT 3/19/21-that's beacuse it turns out the lighter colored version was made out of cardboard!):

The flagship Topps Gum spawned several amusing ads throughout the 40's, including this gem from the July 1945 International Confectioner, and the "Don't Talk Chum, Chew Topps Gum" slogan even lasted a couple of years or so past the end of World War 2, a testament to its selling power:

Exactly two years later Topps, in the same publication, was pushing their Gum as a "changemaker" on store counters across the globe

The 1948 Candy Buyer's Directory showed just how well the new slogan was working:

Change (groan!) was coming though, as this Candy Merchandising ad from December 1948 succinctly shows:

We've seen that SSI slogan before and sales of various Topps products were pretty much booming at this point. The "changemaker" catchword was still there though and would be for another year at least. 

Bazooka was really the flagship brand now but still only available as a nickel roll and Topps took a leap of faith introducing their first "novelty" product, Tatoo gum, as it wasn't clear at all to them if a competing penny product would harm the sales of the "Changemaker".  It seems like that's exactly what happened though and once Bazooka went to their own penny tab in mid 1949, Topps Gum started slowly fading away, undergoing a conversion to a chiclet style that was a staple of military rations for another ten years or so but increasingly a non-entity as a retail product.

I like how this ad backstops the initial 1948 date for Tatoo as some Topps PR blurbs indicate a 1949 debut (commonly accepted issue dates are 1948, then 1949 with its bigger wrapper and even then more subjects came in 1953). The 1949 issue with its redsigned wrapper that used graphical instead of textual application instructions, if I'm not mistaken, no longer appeared in the little round canisters Topps used in the first decade of their existence, instead residing in a square bin-style box. In fact,1948 Tatoo was the only Topps novelty (their first, not counting five cent Bazooka) I could find that came in the round style used by Topps Gum. 

I suspect Tatoo was actually perennial through 1954 or so, or very close to it. Topps issued a very hard to find set of generic Davy Crockett Tatoos in 1955 (possibly into early 1956) until new tatoo issues started appearing in 1957 as Popeye debuted a new line that would usually feature the hottest kiddie TV cartoon or comic book stars of the day.  This trend lasted yet another decade before fizzling out and giving way to a newer style once again at the end of the 60's. If you issued three essentially identical versions of a cheaply produced product over a five or six year period, it must have bene popular, so why stop selling it?

Bang On A Can

There are still some amazing things popping up when it comes to Topps.  I've posted about several different 1940's Topps Gum displays previously, with a good summary found here. If you click that link and scroll down, you will see a traditional cardboard Topps Spot Display that measures about two inches high and held 100 gum tabs.  I've now landed an entirely different beast, namely one made of mild steel:

It's a smidge under 4 inches tall and quite heavy.  It could easily have doubled the gum load held by the cardboard version and then some. This metal version's visuals are similar to the 1946 cardboard graphics; earlier canisters, some with foil highlights and some without, are dated 1942 and mention "Only Natural Flavors". There's at least one later version as well but I don't have any dated past 1946 here at the main Topps Archives Research Complex. The seller obtained it from a collection in Syracuse, New York but he didn't know any history of it beyond that.

Topps had to use some artificial ingredients as WW2 raged on, so I'm not exactly sure when they switched over from "Only Natural Flavors" to "Take Your Change" but believe it was either during the latter part of the war or just after it ended and this motto clearly ties to their Changemaker ad and PR campaign that went into overdrive after the war.  

Yes it's rusty!

I mentioned opening earlier, didn't I?  Well you needed a key to open these and Topps handily sent one along for the ride.

Another key certainly opened this bad boy up, perhaps from the same shipment. Well guess what, the day after I received my metal can, another popped up on eBay, albeit from a different seller and sans affixed key, which obviously got used as intended.  This one though, still had the lid, although it had been keyed:

I'm about 99% sure the example with the lid was being offered by a store a little to the Southeast of Cleveland. Both of the known metal canisters seem to be connected to the old Rust Belt/Great Lakes area then, which is interesting given the packaging and Topps' connections to a printer or two in the Great Lakes vicinity. The heaviness of the can though seems at odds with Topps micro-managing the shipped weights of their products in the 40's as they had razor thin margins on their penny confections.

This may all show details of an old Topps jobber's distribution route but it's not really clear and another one of my guesses as to its market tends toward military or similar rough use.  Shipboard in the Navy or on display at a foreign PX somewhere seems to make sense but I just don't know.   All I know is I had never seen one before and now two popped up within ten days of each other!

Foreversharp

BFF o'the Archive Jeff Sherman sent some old Topps promotional material across my transom the other month and it's high time I unveil things here.

Regular readers of this blog know that Topps unofficially dubbed their pre-Bazooka penny gum tab the Changemaker. I have no idea who came up with this slogan but it was genius.  Now Bazooka eventually led to the demise of their first and quite traditional gum line but in 1947, as the postwar boom was taking off, things were going full tilt at Topps. Until the point of discontinuance was reached in the early 50's they had deployed a multi-layered advertising and promotional campaign that was a thing of beauty.

In a continuation of their waritme use of comic illustration humorous ads aimed at consumers were deployed in various magazines, on subway cars and buses around the country and pretty much anywhere they could fit one in.  Here's a prime example:

The best way to push their ubiquitous penny tab to consumers was to get the jobbers and their customers in line. Jobbers (wholesalers) got to participate in the Topps Jamboree, which gave away such prizes as new cars and exotic vacations to the top selling individual performers.  This blurb from a 1949 trade journal shows just how well their PR machine was oiled:

You can see an old American Leaf Tobacco Company connection in the winner of that 4th place prize. Retailers didn't get left out but the prizes became commensurately skimpier the further down the food chain they went. This promotional pamphlet from 1947 (about a year earlier than the cartoon ad above) laid it all out:

Those premium certificates have been covered here in depth and were key to the Topps sales and marketing strategies. For this iteration of the Changemaker promotional cycle, things were decidedly Eversharp:

As to what was so Eversharp, I have to say it was quite disappointing, although not having been around at the time maybe I'm overthinking things...

...or maybe I'm not-mechanical pencils were probably just as boring a prize back then as they would be today!

Sometimes You Feel Like A Nut Roll...Sometimes You Don't

I managed to snag a tough Topps Candy piece off the 'bay recently and thought I'd show a little parade of their hybrid Brooklyn-Chattanooga wrappers that appeared following their purchase of Bennett-Hubbard in 1943. A smaller procession of penny gum tab variants made in Brooklyn will close things out today.

The latest addition to the Archives is this impossibly pristine candy wrapper.  It looks like a pretty yummy candy bar if you ask me.  Note the 1943 Copyright:

I've been trying to determine if the Opera Bar below was originally a Topps product. Newspaper reports at the time of the Bennett-Hubbard acquisition indicated Topps would continue producing "their" product in Chattanooga at their new plant. Tempering that is the fact I've never seen a reference to Topps producing candy prior to the purchase, although it's only a four year period or so and one that included some WW2 paper drives.

This is another wrapper in amazing shape, I think it and the one above came from a sample stack used by salesmen.  Once again, a 1943 Copyright, obviously obtained for package redesign purposes after Benn-Hubb was in the fold:

Marshmallow could stretch scarce sugar supplies, which were about to be rationed in the U.S. as the war raged on (and probably spurred the acquisition) as this next piece, which looks to have actually been wrapped around a candy bar, attests:

I don't really like the look of that wrapper (it's even uglier in person) but imagine the yellow was thought to be snazzy enough to grab a kid's attention. At a guess I'd say Topps didn't bother waiting for a new copyright for the wrapper meaning this was likely a new product sold during World War 2 whereas the Caramel Nut Roll and Opera Bar could and likely did continue in production for several years after 1943.  Topps would eventually re-brand their candy production operations as Topps Candy Division, until the early 1950's when they just snugged it under the main Topps Chewing Gum umbrella.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, Topps bought out Shapiro Candy Manufacturing in 1944 which netted them not only a better sugar ration and more manufacturing capability, it also presented access to waterborne transportation via the 4th Street Basin, right across the avenue and which connected to the Gowanus Canal and eventually the Atlantic Ocean.  A mere three miles from Topps HQ at 134 Broadway in Williamsburg at the time of the purchase, it became an additional warehouse for Topps after they moved all executive and manufacturing functions into Bush Terminal in mid-1946.  It appears all the prior Topps plants and offices in Brooklyn served such a purpose until the 1966 Duryea move, when only the executives and office staff remained behind.

This is a rare 1939 Topps Gum tab wrapper with Shapiro shown as the manufacturer and would have barely outlasted the war as Topps went for a slight redesign and new copyrights in 1946:

I suspect Topps still manufactured this product at their original Gretsch Building plant location at 60 Broadway but named Shapiro as manufacturer to allow for expanded sugar ration compliance.  The normal 1939 wrapper looked like this-I imagine amending the indicia slightly was no reason to obtain a new copyright.:

That little notch at the top is what leads me back to the Gretsch Building!

There's a 1939 Topps/Brooklyn variety as well.  I'm not sure which came first and this is actually BFF o'the Archive Jeff Shepherd's as I don't have this variant yet:

That'll "wrap' things up for today (groan)!