Acetate Trip

Well a whole lotta 1968 Topps Mod Generation production materials have been showing up on eBay of late-boy howdy!  This trove of original paste-ups and acetate overlays shows how tough the original set is to find examples from-I have seen more production materials (dozens of subjects) than original stickers (2) since I started tracking this set in earnest 7 or 8 years ago.

Here is Jimmy's original art and black acetate overlay.  You needed rubber cement, white-out, an Exact-o knife and a steady hand to make a set back in the 60's:

Groovy man-dig those elephant flares! Note that we have seen these acetate overlays before-it was how things were done into the 1970's before a different, albeit somewhat similar process that involved more color layers, became the norm before digital layouts were even a glimmer in Ben Solomon's eye.  Here's how they looked once stacked:

 Not far out enough for you?  Check this dude out:

George has really got some threads, I mean wow!

Probstein always has a bunch of Mod Generation proofs up on the 'bay but these are not part of his offerings.  He has enough out there that I may be able to eventually use the process of elimination to determine what name belongs to this image:

You can see it's a short name but all the pasted on bits have been lost. I'll take a whack at it when I have a little down time and update if I find anything.  It's not Ann though:

Those earrings would have hurt in real life!  And who's this happy couple?

Why it's me and my wife!  I had this framed up for our 30th Anniversary a little while back.  Sorry about the glare!

Do The Nasty

Well campers, I picked up a pack of 1971's Nasty Valentine Notes off eBay the other day and was able to do a bit more sleuthing now that I have it in hand.  I've posted about this set in context with other Topps Valentine sets (click the link in the Labels at right to see) but having an example to look at closely is always better than relying upon fuzzy scans lifted from various corners on the interwebs.

Where to start, where to start?  How about with the pack itself:

Art Spiegelman drew that kids.  He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for his graphic novel Maus and that is just mind-bending.  The back has the usual instructions for an interactive Topps set and a contents description that clearly states "cards" in the plural, although I only pulled a single valentine. The flaps were actually unsealed but I don't think the contents were futzed with.

Compare this to 1967's Nasty Notes pack:

You can't really see it but the top line has a Brooklyn address and not Duryea, whcih matches the Brooklyn in the penultimate line and the illustration is identical on both versions, down to the "Nasty Notes" reference.

Here is an unfurled wrapper:

As for the Nasty Valentine Note proper, it appears to work two ways:

The "payoff" side is very colorful:

I am toying with the idea the set is so hard to find due to its being sold in head shops. I'm really not sure about that and the various Topps Valentine's and Hallowe'en themed sets are always tougher than most, as are the paper sets and the metamorphic sets, etc but these are really hard to find and not a lot of people know about them, not even some very advanced non-sports collectors.  A full set would be very difficult to put together in my estimation and on the scarcity scale, it's almost test-issue like, although we know it wasn't.

Stain Stick

I'll be posting a large number of real juicy scans of 1968 Giant Stand Ups soon thanks to a phalanx of JPEG's received from Friend o'the Archive Keith Olbermann but wanted to highlight something specific about the set today.

Despite extant (empty) retail boxes and (full) packs, the retail issuance of this set has been questioned by some as it's just so hard to find.  So what then does it mean when PSA has graded only 22 examples from this issue,wrongly ID'd as from 1967 to boot, inclusive of proofs? I think it means:

a) test issues are tough and;

b) any type of set that could be played with, punched out, peeled, scratched off or stood up is a lot harder to find in an otherwise apples-to-apples comparison than one that isn't and;

c) the set tested poorly.

There's some SGC slabs out there too but I can't make heads or tails of their pop report other than to note they have four Frank Howard examples graded (one is mine). But really, no matter how you slice it, not many of these things exists in the wild.

So anyhoo, take a gander at this Frank Robinson from the Olbermann collection:

Frank always seemed to be smiling! He's doing so here even though his reverse is gum stained:

So how did that stain get there if the set wasn't issued at some retail level?  And for that matter, how did poor Jim Fregosi get gum stained on the front:

Issued set, 1968.  Now, where did all those furshlugginer proofs come from?!

What Year Is It?

Dating of certain Topps issues can be tricky, especially from about 1965 through the start of reliable real-time hobby press monitoring around 1980-81. Once they started gushing forth an unrelenting river of test issues and products around the time they moved from Brooklyn to Duryea (Winter of 1965-66), which seemingly coincided with Woody Gelman attaining huge artistic street cred with his brief hiring of Robert Crumb (also 1965), the confusion really started.

Prior to mid 1966, when they started the commodity code (and later "T" numbered test) system most of their testing was done with what became issued product, although sometimes tested in wrapper variants.  Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins is doing some fantastic work deciphering all the codes and I am not going to step on his work but every once in a while a piece pops up that makes one reconsider an issue date.  I don't know why some of us obsess over the fact whether a card set came out in one year vs. the next year but we do. In reality, some issues would span two years or more while three "seasons" (Valentines Day, Hallowee'n, Christmas) would be defined by staccato bursts of issues, themed ones for the first and second and then a combination of rebagged, rewrapped and bulk product for the second and third. The one constant in this all, without full access to a run of Topps product catalogs, is that all evidence must be examined to come up with a proper date.

Take Comic Book Heroes. Now there's no artistic vision here at all and in fact it may be the most poorly illustrated set Topps ever issued outside of some tattoo issues. Featuring DC Comics superheroes mixed in with usual goofy array of subjects found in such sets, these cards also feature perhaps the worst rendition ever of Babe Ruth:

See?  Heinous. But note the 1966 copyright.  here's the other side which is actually the front:

This set is identified as being issued in 1966 in most guides.  But look the box bottom shows it's a 1967 release:

Here's a closeup of the commodity code:

The wrapper shows the 1966 copyright for the DC characters but no code.  It's a hybrid (or a mutant if you will):

Same 1966 copyright (hard to see but it's there) and no other dating information.  I suspect the wrapper design predated the introduction of the commodity codes and further that the set was probably intended to come out in 1966.  For some reason a delay occurred and it came out the following year.  That commodity code font on the box bottom is a little funky as well, so Topps was still tweaking things in 1966-67.

And not to leave you all hanging, here's some more box art, which is slightly nicer than what was on the cards:

Dearth Of A Salesman

Yonks ago, when I made two posts (here and here) about the old salesman's sample strips Topps used to print up and send to their wholesalers and the like, there were four strips I could not find scans of.  And yes, I know that I ended that last sentence with a preposition and, also, that a lot of the scans on those old posts are fuzzy as can be. I'll probably amend those fuzzballs someday but for now, will have to be content with filling in some of the missing examples.

The 1958 looks to have very much set the tone for 1959's model.  Check this bad boy out, courtesy of Friend o'the Archive Don Johnson:

That's a killer shot of Billy Hoeft by the way.  Now, look at this back, which is also red, red, red:

Now compare that to this 1959 sample reverse:

It appears that Topps could manipulate the reverses to allow an area for an address to be added, so these samples were used in a couple of different ways at least.

As previously noted, the last sample was produced in 1967:

I always liked that shot of Earl Battey in his windbreaker.  Reverse-wise, while the authenticity of the autographs is dubious, someone at Topps clearly loved the idea:

So that example was for a jobber (wholesaler).  In 1967 they probably had as many orders as they could handle. Now, take a look at that illustration of the Dodgers player.  It must have been drawn by the same hand that did the 1965 Topps Transfers:

I'll hopefully have the other missing samples (from 1953 & 1956) up shortly.  And if I can get a few more scans, I'll show the larger, "4x4" and "8x8" versions that they issued in a couple of years in a future post.

Visit From The Turk

A visit from the Turk is a phrase I associate with roster cut downs in pro football, namely one that does not result in a good outcome for the player visited.  The origin of the phrase is murky at best but the Turk was a team employee who knocked on a player's dorm room door in training camp and told him he had been cut from the team. Fun job.

A different Turk who did a lot of work for Topps, namely Ameen (Turk) Karam, was a scout for the Cubs, Yankees and Dodgers and it was he who signed a lot of baseball players to Topps contracts beginning  (I think) in 1950 while he was still scouting for the Bums.  Turk had access to the clubhouses and was a hard worker at getting players to sign with Topps.

An article from the Berkshire Eagle on August 7, 1952 mentioned he did most of his signings between June 15 and July 15 but would soon change his methods to something ultra-modern!

Quite interesting but to me not even the most interesting tidbit from the article, which read:

I had never heard of Topps planning a 1952 NFL set until I read the article.  Things must have changed rather quickly as we know they released no such product and would not have a real NFL set until 1956, after they had bought out Bowman. So I'm thinking Bowman got wind of it and squashed it. I am further thinking Bowman then decided they needed to bring their 1952 Football cards up in size to something approximating the Giant Size cards Topps introduced in 1952 as a result. Hence the small and large sized offerings from Bowman.

This is Turk:

That picture is taken from the 1962 Topps Rookie Banquet program.  Turk was only 54 years old when he died on May 29th the following year of a heart attack, which occurred in the Topps offices at Bush Terminal.

A New Freight City

I have no idea why but I started thinking about Bush Terminal this morning and decided to poke around a few of the more esoteric corners of the internet accordingly.


Bush Terminal was, as I've noted previously, quite a forward thinking idea for companies looking for a turnkey intermodal solution to ship out goods, back when the Port of New York was the biggest one in the land prior to containerization taking over in the 50's and 60's. Founded in 1902, this 1910 advertisement showed Irving T. Bush's grand idea in it's full glory:

The main part of the terminal was usually referred to as the Brooklyn Army Terminal while the eventual Topps offices and production facilities were housed in two of the buildings above the main complex, as seen in the upper left quadrant, in an area called Industry City:

 The two right-most buildings of the three shown in this detail, housed Topps, although they only had one when the moved in to the complex on June 1, 1946, a 237 37 St address, which is the right most building of this trio. Those shots are from the New York City Municipal Archives, although I nicked them from www.trainweb.org where the rail features are of interest.  See how they snake between the buildings?

This bucolic scene is from 1923. From The Brooklyn Public Library collection although I found it over at The Weekly Nabe site/blog.  You can see the Bush Terminal complex in the upper right:

1940 brought this view of things, with the Gowanus Expressway viaduct, apparently under construction, in focus:

Here's a look at the same stretch, albeit with a different orientation and widened considerably, from 2002, running right by the old Topps buildings. Thank you www.nycroads.com:

Woody Gelman and his carpool used to park under the viaduct. He probably walked in the front door here thousands of times. Fancy, huh?

Sorry, I don't recall who sent me that shot but it's of Mark Newgarden!  Looks like the sign uses the same Franklin Gothic Condensed inspired font used by Topps back in the day.

A concise early history of Bush Terminal can be found here if you are interested.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE BLOG-10 years ago yesterday I made the first post here. Crazy!