NEX U.S.

The Topps Premium Rewards Program for wholesalers, direct markets, consolidators and retailers has been covered here a few times previously.  It required a full department, called Premium Records, to deal with all the paperwork as Topps had thousands of accounts, all of which were eligible for the program. I suspect this department also took care of the prizes ballplayers received if they chose not to take cash from Topps. 

I've shown this several times before but it's germane here, from the internal-only team building exercise creation 1970 Topps Teamates set:

Salaries, overhead, etc. would have eaten up some dough, so Topps clearly valued the program.  All good but also not what I want to make the main focus today, although it's certainly tangential.  

I've recently found some official records detailing purchases made by the U.S. Government in 1952 and Topps Gum, a product already reconfigured for retail before a final transition to Military Rations-only occurred mid-decade.  In July of 1952 the U.S. Army placed two separate orders with Topps for their flagship product.  Here, check one out from the 1952 Public Contracts Bulletin:

The order presumably was for 33,000 pieces of Topps Gum and I imagine they were destined for ration kits.  There's another order that month for 24,000 more that I don't feel the need to show (same with the codes that unravel what the line entries mean) as it really just resembles the one above.  I believe the amounts referenced do represent individual pieces rather than some larger configuration but I would like to confirm that someday. 

Speaking of the military, I've shown the Topps Gum rations before as well (yes, this is a total re-hash post!), which wre very close in some cases to the retail product, and in other cases they were the retail product. This is a 1949 dated wrapper and this particular gum tab indeed came out of a ration kit but Topps was still sending the traditional "wafer" gum for ration kits as well into the 1950's as well:

Now, nine years ago I showed this letter from Sy Berger to a woman from South Carolina who was redeeming some certificates for three bath towels.  Today, it ties in with my musings above and the address it went to is intriguing:

Miss Livingston lived on the Naval Base in Charleston as I've now noticed.  It seems possible to me she was ordering for the Navy Exchange on the base but I'm not sure if such places sold everyday retail items to the people who lived on the base or if they came through an official procurement.  I also note Sy Berger was still working in premiums and promotions, right as 1952 Topps Baseball, a set helped create, was launching. And check out the 20% inflation that diminished the value of the merchandise being offered out of the most recent catalog. Topps must have amended up all the old catalogs and related form letters before printing up new ones.  Very typical for them.

It's all very intriguing and raises the possibility Miss Livingston was buying the old, non-candy coated version of Topps Gum, as seen on the receipt attached to the letter.  Or maybe the gum was procured by the Navy in retail boxes and she accumulated the certificates. I like how a new certificate recognized and memorialized the submittal of certificates for redemption! The ladies in Premium Records must have been extremely busy!

I hope to unearth more information about the commercial ventures Topps had with the various branches of the military but do know it was a long relationship, very much tended to by the Shorin family, and two of the founding Shorin boys (Abram and Philip) served in the army during World War 1. The family was a patriotic bunch and their use of red, white and blue packaging for Bazooka was a direct result of this.

Flower People

Today we travel back to a simpler era, where every mom and pop candy shop in the country must have been in dire need of a dinnerware set. Diving right in, this was a 24 pack of Bazooka nickel rolls:

Get a better look:

What's awesome is that the smaller pieces from the set were actually packed in the box! The china set was widely distributed, both by Topps and in the real world.  It looked a lot better than the drab colors above show:

You can still readily buy the pattern today on replacement china sites and eBay.  Salem was located in Ohio and stopped manufacturing china in 1960 after a sixty two year run but distributes wares from other manufacturers to this day and was known for large, inexpensive production runs.

The 240 count jumble pack would likely have held two 120 count penny boxes.

Here's a certificate.  While this box is described as being from 1953 in the eBay listing, I believe it dates back to 1951 or so.  As the certificate below expired in 1956, it's obvious Topps had a literal boatload of this china to unload:

Given the address, I surmise the china was all stored at the Topps warehouse in Bush Terminal, Brooklyn. Here's the full Monty:



Some more detail from the Bazooka box, don't forget Topps scored their Bazooka rolls to make it look like you got 6 pieces for a nickel::

The penny packs also were scored, two for one, split down the middle!

Topps introduced the penny sized Bazooka in 1949, which is why I think this box is earlier than 1953.  It also features the original Bazooka Joe mascot, also from a bit earlier I think:

Salem sold 36 piece sets for two and a half bucks in the 1930's but Topps must have cut a hell of a deal on some overstock as they somehow had to break even at the end of the day.  I have to believe they paid just scant pennies on the dollar for whatever amount of china they ultimately bought.

For some reason, I am now hungry!

Invoice Of Reason

So I picked up a neat little item last week, a Topps invoice from March of 1960:

I really value finds such as this as they help decode some of the inner workings of the boys from Brooklyn.  We have a St. Louis jobber (wholesaler) getting a fairly pedestrian shipment of product, namely a couple of cases of Popeye Tattoos and some Bazooka, which allows me to continue marveling at the small dollar amounts that were the norm before the mid to late 60's.

The Tattoos in question are the yellow labels:

Topps was in the midst of a three series run of Popeye tats when this invoice was printed (off a system using IBM punch cards I'll bet), as the cartoon was being heavily syndicated on television by the late 1950's as the baby boomers began to seriously watch some tube after getting home from school in the afternoon. I'm not positive but believe the tattoo issues of the late 50's into the mid 60's, many of which were timed to the fall and winter TV schedules, were also a financially friendly product for Topps in what would be a somewhat fallow time of the year for them. Remember, after football season they didn't really have a US sports lineup until the spring for many, many years and the end of this type of penny tattoo issue for them coincides with their nascent Basketball and Hockey issues in 1968 and 1969.

I'm pretty sure this, or something very similar, was the proffered Bazooka product:

240 count x 12 boxes x 3 cases weighed 186 pounds-yikes!

However, there is also an oddity on the invoice that the eagle-eyed among you will notice, namely that Baumritter Swivel Chair! I don't have a picture of one in white but I do have this shot, taken from a late 60's or early 70's Bazooka retailer-wholesaler premium catalog of what should be the "luxurious foamold swivel occasional" chair in question:

And that dear readers, completes the order!

Needful Things

Gonna span the decades today kids...by way of a sideways look at premium offers.

You remember of course the retailer premium certificates we have looked at a few times previously; some of the posts that are germane to this discussion can be found here, here and here. The gist was the more a retailer sold, the more he or she could accrue toward gifts, some of which were quite nice.

Well all those certificates had to be mailed somewhere and that somewhere was Topps HQ in Brooklyn (albeit until the early to mid 1950's it was via a PO Box). So what happened to each redemption once it hit Brooklyn?  Well thanks to a recent pickup of mine, it can be told.

Yes, Sy Berger himself (errrr, his secretary actually) would respond to you via form letter once your certificates were dispatched.  It's interesting that war stamps were still being discussed seven years or so after the end of the Big One. It also looks like inflation was rearing its head as well.

The supremacy of Bazooka is on display here; the original certificates lost their Topps Gum headings and changed over to Bazooka by the mid 50's although they flip-flopped sometimes before going over to Topps Chewing Gum later on, probably in the 1960's.

Here is a real early one, which lists Topps' original commercial address, although they used one of the Shorin family house addresses when they started up in 1938:

This certificate has no expiration date, a situation they would eliminate pretty early on in the process. The earliest expiration date I have seen is January 30, 1944. That one also had 60 Broadway as the address so the one above is quite early as its A 1624 registration number also attests. The main group of certificates switched to a format where the letter followed the numbers and was in place by the time the 1/30/44 expiry certificate was issued. The paper is of a type used in the securities field at the time so these certificates were considered to be as important as cash to Topps, almost like a bearer bond.

So anyhoo, the certificates had to be collated and once that happened a receipt was filled out and sent to the lucky recipient.

Can you imagine how much paperwork was involved in this operation?!?!

Even as late as 1970 there was a coterie of clerks keeping track as this internal Topps Teamates trading card shows:

I'm not sure when the program was halted (if indeed it has been) or switched over to some digital or online format but I have some certificates from the mid 1970's, although they were called Gift Certificates by then. They still had registration numbers on them and were validated by the Topps treasurer.  The security paper was long gone by then though.

Crumb-bling

It has been an auction season of mixed success for your intrepid webmaster. I've won some nice, old Topps companion pieces, made some purchases (some of which will be featured here in future posts) and lost out on some really killer items.  My most recent whiff concerns some Robert Crumb sales material produced for Topps in 1965, during his first foray to New York where Woody Gelman reeled him in for a short time after a hoped for job at Harvey Kurtzman's Help! magazine fell through.

During his nine months in New York City Crumb produced Monster Greeting Cards for Topps and did a couple of other projects.  One of these was an 18 page sales brochure designed for Topps jobbers and their retailers, a piece I did not manage to snag.  The brochure is rare (possibly his rarest extant publication) and also chased after by Crumb collectors, who are legion:

Much like his work on Monster Greeting Cards, Crumb's style was not fully developed in 1965. According to the man himself, he didn't start drawing in the style for which he is known now until after he started experimenting with LSD in late 1965 into mid 1966. I am curious if his LSD adventures were shared with anyone at Topps!

Two pages of interior artwork have been auctioned by Heritage fairly recently.  Here is page 5:

Page 13 is a doozy:

I love the old pasteups; everything was done manually back then.

I'm of the opinion that original Crumb artwork is moving into that magical realm of high end art collectors, if it's not there already.  He's going to be looked back upon as one of the 20th Century's major illustrators and artists.

SSI*

No, not Supplemental Security Income but rather a Sound Selling Idea for the typical retail shop owner circa 1950.  I've covered the Topps Premium Certificates here before and now I have a nice catalog to show what was available to Joe Shopowner.

I suspect this was a 1949 publication as it came with a bunch of Certificates that expired in 1950.  It's an 8 page accordion style flyer, although I have gone with a four page presentation here.

Can you say "whitebread?!"  The eagle eyed among you will note the presence of the original Bazooka Joe on the left front corner of the box:

You would have to sell a lot of Topps product to obtain a toaster and there were so many products available not all could be illustrated:

 2,155 half certificates for a type-writer?!

With one half certificate per box, and say 24 boxes per case, you would need to sell 180 cartons of  Topps products to get the typewriter-yikes!

Considering how extensive the retailer certificate program was and how thin profit margins often were, it's amazing Topps was able to make any money but indeed they did.

Counter Point Of Sale

For some reason I have had the scan below for a long time but never got around to posting it here.  I have written extensively about Topps Gum, the Shorin's main bread-and-butter product before Bazooka became what it became.  Much of the success that came to Topps because of these humble penny tabs came because of their marketing savvy.  The counter top display for the "Changemakers" is one such example:

The spot display tub held 100 tabs of Topps Gum (originally only one flavor came per tub but that changed) and the retailer got a handy redemption certificate he or she could accumulate and put toward some nice housewares or clothing.  The tub above is made out of cardboard and is not all that sturdy.  An earlier version, which I do not have a scan of, had a foil outer layer and was probably changed over to cardboard during World War 2 as the military needed as much metal as possible for the war effort.

Topps sold the tubs to their jobbers or wholesalers, if you break the figures down, at around 38 to 40 cents per tub, if a full carton was bought.  The jobber probably retained about 35 cents per tub so the retailer made a whopping two bits for each full tub they sold.  Still, it was a phenomenally successful product and it helped hundreds of Mom and Pop stores keeps the lights on.

Fireworks of A Different Sort

Sometime in the late 1940's or early 1950's, Topps began transitioning their "changemaker" Topps penny gum tabs into a product produced for U.S. Military field rations as Bazooka began taking off.  The production line for the gum tabs looks like it was changed to manufacture Tatoo beginning in 1948 and also various other Tattoo issues well into the 1960's.  This is the same production line that caused a rip to the wrapper during production.

Topps then attempted a line of Chiclets style gum, originally in Peppermint and Spearmint flavors from what I have seen but was destined to lose two court battles with the American Chicle Company and the strategy was abandoned.  The also introduced a line of what were probably fruit-flavored, candy coated gum pieces (or nuggets) called Block Buster:

(Courtesy of Jeff Shepherd)

I'm not sure of the pack configuration but would guess either one large nugget per penny pack or maybe 2 in a small, box type configuration.  The Geranium Premium offer for retailers may help date the issue; we'll get back to that in a minute.

The side panel shows this was a product Topps was aiming at kids-the Bazooka logo and reference is a dead giveway:




(Courtesy of Jeff Shepherd)

The style of box is definitely older; the quality of cardboard is not up to what Topps would be using by 1957 or '58.  There is a Topps premium certificate referencing a Block Buster Chef's Knife with a  September 1952 expiration date that I have to think was tied to Block Busters.  This would seem to give a late 1951 or early 1952 start date for production:
 




However, since this is Topps, it is a bit more complicated than that.  Here is a Geranium Chinaware certificate that expires January 1, 1956:




Topps probably had a warehouse full of this stuff and was slowly disbursing it to their retailers.  Given all this, I would estimate that Block Busters was marketed somewhere between 1951 and 1955 and did not catch on as Topps would have hoped.  However, in 1972 Topps would revive the product for another brief run:



I was eleven years old in 1972 and do not ever recall seeing this gum being sold.  Does anyone out there on the World Wide Web recall ever seeing the original version?

Topps Certificates-Update

I've picked up a few more Topps retailer premium certificates and it is clear there were numerous varieties of these issued over the years. These were first discussed here, not too long ago. Note the "gams" back in the original post, it seems pretty common.

This certificate expired on March 31, 1947 and so far it is the largest one I have seen, 3" x 5" in size.



The reverse has some household goods and a pipe available but suggests looking at the Premium Merchandise Folder for more goodies.



This certificate, expiring 1/31/50, is the same as one I showed in my prior post but with a blue framing border scroll on front. As it turns out, the color of the scroll on front looks like it matches the color of the ink used on the reverse. This one has the "gams" back, which seems to be the most common one from this era.



Here's the one I showed last time, for comparison:



Interestingly, certificates were issued without the little sidebar. I thought this one might have had it cut off, or that maybe perforations had been used but it just seems like it's a "shorty", otherwise it looks mostly like the others of this ilk. It is also possible the sidebars disappeared around mid 1952 (1/31/52 expiry on the one below) as Topps started to concentrate on bubble gum and not mint gum. The Bazooka branding is becoming more prominent by now.



Also of note is a smaller certificate, printed on appealing (not) salmon colored paper. It too has the "gams" back. Bazooka grows in stature yet again (1/31/54 expiry):



I am beginning to think Topps could not produce anything without introducing a variation or two.

Certifiable

Topps did not climb to the top of the confectionery ladder in the 1950's by accident. They had advertising and sales departments that were very, very good at doing their jobs and left nothing to chance. One of the first things they likely ever did to help promote sales was to include in their unopened packaging certificates that could be redeemed by a retailer for prizes. The theory was that the more the retailer ordered, the more certificates he could redeem for prizes.

The earliest certificate I have is from 1945 and was issued during World War 2. Paper and sugar during the war were rationed among the US population but businesses were also subject to quotas. Topps was able to circumvent this with an aggressive strategy of buying up struggling businesses during the war, which allowed them to assume the rationed quotas of paper and staple goods assigned to those businesses. It sounds a bit predatory but it is a sound business practice. This allowed them to keep selling gum and candy and to keep printing redemption certificates to help those sales along. Here is the '45 Certificate, or to be precise 1/2 Certificate:



The smaller portion on the right looks like a coupon but it is not. Some Topps Certificates have these "sidebars" and some don't. In this instance its really a PSA that tells how many certificates you can use to obtain $1 worth of Victory Stamps.

I'm not sure if Topps ever resided at 134 Broadway in Brooklyn. They definitely were housed in the Gretsch Building at 60 Broadway in the early to mid 1940's before they moved to Bush Terminal in the late 40's but #134 may have just been where the premiums were mailed from by a third party administrator. (UPDATE: They were indeed located there, having moved offices from 60 Broadway, which housed machinery and provided warehouse space.) It could have just been a mail drop as well. If you click the image above and blow up the scan, you can see the high quality anti-counterfeiting paper that was used. There was nothing cheap about these certificates at all; Topps considered them to be valuable.

The reverse has some nifty prizes. That coffee maker looks scary!



Here's a Certificate from a little later on (1950):



You can see that Topps Gum is still the featured brand. Bazooka was just starting to devour the market as the 50's dawned. The mail-in address has changed to a PO box.

The back is a little more interesting than last time. Check out those gams!



The introduction of photography on the reverses just shows how highly Topps valued the Certificates and the redemption program. In case you are wondering, these measure about 4 3/4" x 2 3/4".

Some of the certificates were more specific than others. You only needed five of these to get a Chef's Knife, or you could put it toward the regular premiums.



Notice how the address in 1952 is Topps HQ in Bush Terminal now. The back of this particular example is blank by the way.

I'll close out with some Geranium:



It sounds flowery, doesn't it? I'll bet in reality is was just a bunch of overstock Topps or their supplier got real cheap, or they struck an advertising deal to promote this style of dinnerware. It's probably the same stuff they used to give away in movie theaters during the Depression.

You can see from the scan that Bazooka is much more prominently featured at this point. I am not sure when Topps brand fruit and mint gum ceased to be but Bazooka Joe and the gang were in full swing by the time this Certicate was issued in 1955.

The back is boring, it's just a couple of lists:



I'll have more to say on these down the road. They were issued into the early 1980's according to that Interstate Man of Mystery, Jeff Shepherd. With that span of time to cover, there's plenty more to talk about anon.