Wouldn't It Be Nice

Some more white wax test packs and wrappers today kids!  I'm really just scratching the surface but dig the look of these.

Captain Nice debuted and was cancelled by NBC, all in 1967.  Created by Buck Henry (Get Smart), the show, which always struck me as having a certain Don Martin-esque inspiration, never gained traction with viewers despite a pretty good cast (William Daniels, Amy Prentiss, Alice Ghostley).  A mid-season replacement show, fifteen episodes came and went in the span of four months, in a time slot that competed with The Lucy Show.  Topps tested a 30 card set based upon the show and it seems possible they just pulled the plug when it was clear it would not be renewed.  It's a tough test issue as such things go; I can't even find an unopened pack scan, just a wrapper:

Note how translucent the wrapper is, especially when you look at the left panel where the ingredients label is affixed. I suspect Topps could have burned off excess stock of these cards in 1967's Hallowe'en Fun Packs given the relative lack of wrappers out there.  Black and white images probably didn't help matters:

There was a little comic strip on the reverse that's far more colorful than the obverse's subject matter:

Speaking comic strip reverses, Topps tested a set of 55 cards in 1968 based upon the Irwin Allen TV series Land of the Giants.  I've covered these before but today's theme begs a repeat of sorts:

As noted above, the white test wrappers were fairly translucent, nicely evidenced here on the reverse of the pack (which is missing the ingredients label, a fairly common occurrence on surviving test pack examples of any flavor):

The cards were just as ridiculous as the show, where the premise was seven passengers on a commuter spaceship called the "Spindrift" went awry and crashed in a land of, well, giants with a decided mean streak:

The show was designed with all sorts of size-related gimmicks taking center stage. The first 44 cards had a comic strip on the reverse, just like Captain Nice:

All the online and print set checklists I can find indicate the next ten cards had a puzzle back and the final card had a checklist, possibly just of the comic strip backs but I've never seen any of those that I can recall; it's another really-hard-to-find test issue for sure. PSA pop reports don't indicate the last 11 cards are more difficult but it's kinda weird as the highest count of any card in the set over there is 10.  I wonder why LOTG got a 55 card tryout vs. only 30 for Captain Nice?  Perhaps there were licensing issues for certain actors in the latter?

The show and set were not a big hit here - it did better than Captain Nice though, lasting two full seasons from 1968-70 -  but A&BC released the series in the UK as a regular issue. The US test cards are scarce and have indicia with a USA printing notation.  The UK indicia references A&BC and are slightly smaller in size.

A year later, 1969 brought Baseball Mini Stickers, 25 in number with four stickers per card yielding 100 subjects.  These are hotly pursued by collectors today and while there are about five times as many overall compared to Land of the Giants, they are tough:

The random selection of stickers, which replicated the regular issue cards, could be bizarre:

More often than not, these are referred to as 4 on 1 Stickers and I've covered these extensively here. I think they look great but it seems they didn't test well.  Go figure...

Getting Testy

Going to lay some eye candy on you today kids, in the form of some Topps test packs.

Topps was infamous for running very brief tests of products in at least four ways: lab testing with kids and the product in a controlled setting, handing out test items at local schools, giving distributors and salesmen a few samples to see the enthusiasm level among their buyers, and throwing a box or two of boxes on select retail store counters and gauging the public's response. The latter method is by far the most well known today and many test products, especially those from the 1966-74 period are rare and expensive (especially if sports related) these days. Before 1966, well it's not easy to to tell how tests were conducted at the retail level.

The retail test packaging that is known today mostly was created using plain white wax wrappers, with a product sticker on the front sans price and, if the product was being tested with a confectionery item within, a small ingredients label on the back that also served to "seal" the pack.  These, it is said, often resided in a generic white box and that's presumably where the pack price was displayed as these were never marked as to cost. Around 1974 this started being supplanted by different mediums and Topps also started doing more specific tests, such as using two price points. Almost all Topps products, except their recurring annual sports issues were tested in one or more forms and almost always at the retail level. Many products failed their tests and never made it to a full blown release.  Others were designed for a regional sales campaign, or promoted from test status for such a purpose, and are often found in greater numbers than those that were just tested at retail.

Test packaging is not always extant for certain issues and of course some sets are legendary rarities.  One such set is the 1966 Baseball Punchboards where the wrapper is not even known, just a bare description of it, from Rob Lifson:

Topps designed and proofed a retail box for the set:

Great cards, almost impossible to find!

It's possible the full checklist for this set is not complete.  In 2009 14 two card panels out of what I speculated were a set of 18 were known.  I don't believe the count has changed since then.  These are among the hardest-to-find tests Topps ever created and some of the Hall of Famers can go for staggering sums.

1966 (that date may not be firm, I suspect it's a little later) also brought a tough Non-Sports test, Fold-A-Roos.  This pack illustrates how typical stickers on both front and back look:

That front may not match up with this back and at least a couple of packs are known to have survived:

It's a tough set and not may people know about it. Being metamorphic makes it very unlikely many of these are still around:

Examples of a regional test or limited issue are well-known to baseball collectors.  These two 1967 sticker sets appear to have been a test AND a regional issue. You can actually find these in the wild:

If there's a test wrapper with sticker, it may replicate the above two pack fronts. Also on display the retail box which is not plain white:

The Pirates box is known in proof form:

That product code on the reverse eliminates this as a test box proof.  The stickers look great BTW, with 33 per team, so 66 across both sets:

Topps thought about a similar pin issue as well that featured just San Francisco Giants but it never launched in any form except as a proof.

Here's one more for today, from perhaps the most popular of all the test issues, 1968's 3-D Baseball:

Sorry but I can't find an ingredients sticker, maybe someone will send me one and I'll pop it in here.

Back with more tests next week!

The Write Stuff

Some serious odds 'n' sods examination today buckaroos as we take a look at various ballpoint pens issued, or not, by Topps.

Leading off, here's an Ron Oser ad for some Topps ballpoint pens from the July 1, 1994 issue of Sports Collectors Digest.  There were only two subjects indicated, with three of each available:

Another ad from the September 30, 1994 issue of SCD offers what would be the same pens, one each of Mays and Killebrew:

Did Brian Morris win that Oser auction?! I have never seen one of these in the wild but I did find a recent sale of a Killebrew pen on eBay that I think is the same as the ones from these ads:

I can't find Topps indicia but at a guess they were a mockup and I assume they are legit as Brian Morris was a well-known dealer out of New Jersey back in the day but until I can see something definitively tying them to Topps, I reserve the right to be cautious!

The only vintage Topps pens I am aware of are promotional in nature and don't have specific players adorning them:

Based upon the Topps logos, I'd estimate those as early to mid-60's. A later version (80's I'd say) exists as well and I'm sure more were produced over the years.  It's a no-brainer to hand these out with order slips, at least when such things existed.  Today what do you hand out, a thumb drive or mouse pad?

If you like non-vintage, there were some Wacky Packages writing instruments produced quite a bit later (2006):

GAAP Year

I've been going over some previously trod ground with a keener eye of late when it comes to Bowman and its various corporate reshufflings from 1951-56, much of it involving John Connelly, who assumed control then sold the company in fairly short order. One thing that I noticed doing this was the low figure offered by Bowman for its 1953 baseball card sales, which are described in some of their legal proceedings against Topps.  Bowman's overall sales and those of their "baseball gum" look like they would have peaked in 1951 at $3,050,000 and $973,000 respectively (no prior figures are available but it makes sense given the large size of the 1951 set vs. 1950).  There were probably some vending and cello sales as well but I doubt they approached even 5% of the baseball card sales figures overall.

In 1952, no doubt affected by the new Giant Size Baseball cards issued by Topps, sales trended down a little at $2,750,000 overall and $731,000 in respect of baseball gum.  The decline in overall sales was $300,000 which seems almost entirely driven by their baseball cards dropping off by $242,000.  Then in 1953 the bottom blew out with a thud.  $2,140,000 in overall sales reflected only $301,000 worth of baseball product. The $610,000 drop in sales year over year is massive, almost 25%!  Baseball gum was down $430,000 all on its own, so 70% of the loss in 1953 was related to that specific category. 

It seems odd and the Bowman color cards were gorgeous of course, so why didn't they sell?

(courtesy Robert Edward Auctions)

Well, I'm not sure they were marketed as they should have been. As it turned out, Bowman's parent company, Haelan Laboratories, mentioned in their annual report, which slightly refined some of the numbers from their lawsuit, that they lost $116,440 in 1952 due to "necessary and realistic adjustments preparatory to our entrance into newer and more profitable fields... inventory write-downs were substantial." The profit in 1952, despite better sales all around, was only $22,000, so there were two consecutive years of considerable "meh" going on for sure. 

Cash flow woes may certainly have played a part in all of this since a write down occurs when your inventory drops below its book value.  It seems to me then (and I am very much not a person who understands Generally Accepted Accounting Principles that well) that they couldn't sell their 1953 cards and the problem had a knock on effect throughout all their lines and businesses in 1953.  Some of that may have been due to almost 30 percent of their baseball product being issued in black and white. I don't have the actual report, only a small excerpt, but assuming the write down represents what they could have sold at wholesale (58 to 60% of the retail price if they operated like Topps) and using the overall write down of $116,440, that projects to around $80,000 or so of unsold baseball gum inventory. And I'd say that's the minimum possible loss given the sales drop off for the baseball cards..

So that's something like 125,000 boxes of cards (over 5,000 cases, assuming five cent packs) that never sold and was probably the best case scenario. But it doesn't explain the enormity of their overall loss - remember the provided figures were representative of sales, not profits - or the loss on baseball gum in '53 and it's strange for sure. It may also explain how John Connelly (see last week's post) managed to get on the Haelan Laboratories board as it seems his business success was at least partially linked to theirs, especially in light of his plant burning down in January 1953. Maybe Bowman could not source enough shipping cartons, even as Connelly got his plant back up to speed?

What I'm not seeing in any of these numbers how this inventory boondoggle is related to the oft-repeated story that production expenses manufacturing the color cards drove Bowman's demise, unless those losses extended to royalty payments. But there were certainly other issues going on that went well beyond their trading card lines. In fact, I think it bolsters my theory that they dropped the color cards in order to avoid paying royalties to Joe DiMaggio, their spokesman for the color set, shown on this five cent wrapper over at Wax Pack Gods:

Joltin' Joe was on the color display box too and there were also ads featuring him:

(courtesy Robert Edward Auctions)

Compare these to the Black & White set's livery on this one cent pack:

The wrapper is more colorful than both the color version's wrapper and also the cards within! As is the box:

(courtesy Robert Edward Auctions)

If Joe. D was promised royalties based upon sales and Bowman was having financial problems, it sure makes sense to they would have made the switch. It also suggests that John Connelly was able to impose some degree of influence as he was a master belt-tightener in times of turmoil but I need to dig into that a bit more to be sure. I have to think the young purchasers of Play Ball, a brand last used by predecessor company Gum Inc. in 1942, did not in the least like getting black and white cards after Bowman took their Kodachrome away.

Bowman sales did bounce back quite a bit in 1954, overall they were at $2,480,000 that year and baseball gum amounted to $602,000 of that.  I can't find sales figures for baseball gum in 1955, presumably due to the Topps buyout rendering the need for them to be provided to the court moot, but a short blurb in a contemporary financial publication indicates overall Haelan Laboratories sales were was about the same as in 1954. Haelan seems like they were rebounding quite nicely from their 1953 nadir, certainly they were not reeling in the face of competition from Topps but John Connelly was already making plans to sell Bowman off as 1955 ended and bubble gum cards were not his area of expertise and interest. He needed cash to relaize his ambitions and selling Bowman to Topps certainly gave him a lot of that.

Flame On! And On!

I've touched upon Philadelphia businessman John Connelly here previously and have been looking into his background in deeper detail as I slowly work on the second edition of my 2013 guide to the early days of Topps. I've got an almost ridiculous amount of updates and corrections to make to the book and work continues slowly apace. But I digress.

To refresh your collective memories, Connelly Containers produced the corrugated cardboard shipping cartons used by Bowman (essentially renamed Haelan Laboratories in 1952 with the old brand names retained). It's possible they produced their retail box flats as well but I've not been able to corroborate that yet.  In connection with this, BFF o'the Archive Jeff Shepherd passed along, a long, long time ago, a piece (recently rediscovered by moi) from the March 23, 1953 issue of Life magazine and indicated Connelly was about to join the Haelan board when the article came out but I've got it in my head (and book) that he did so in 1952. I need to do more research obviously, despite the dates being relatively close, but no matter for the purposes of today's post.

Early in the morning of January 24, 1953, a watchman noted a fire burning at the brand new, and still not-quite-finished Connelly Containers plant, located between 51st and 53rd Streets at Botanic Avenue in the heart of a greater-Philadelphia industrial neighborhood.  The blaze quickly engulfed the two blocks long building - no surprise given all the paper pulp and cardboard stored there - then spread to several adjacent business (including a Firestone tire factory).  Thanks to a stiff wind blowing in from the Schuylkill River that day, the fire quickly jumped some railroad tracks and engulfed four tank cars, getting perilously close to a fuel depot after an explosion took down a firewall and almost lit up a nearby ammo dump (!).  News reports described a "spectacular" fire that took took hours to get under control.  Amid suspicions of arson the FBI was called in due to Connelly doing some production work under a government contract but it ultimately turned out a vapor leak from the fuel depot had sparked the fire. It seems that absent the massive firefighter response (it was an 8 alarm fire) the entire lower part of the heavily industrialized neighborhood would have been consumed.

A huge rainstorm hit the area just after the fire was controlled (bad timing, that) and made a quagmire out of the now former factory and environs. According to several news reports, the only thing saved was a picture of Connelly's wife (I think a massive PR spin happened here!) but later that day he had already set up a temporary headquarters across the river at a local hotel and was receiving offers from heavy equipment manufacturers for replacement machinery.  Local competitors allowed already their ordered machinery to be diverted and also manufactured cartons for Connelly as he regrouped. The "all hands" response was inspiring but perhaps no surprise given John Connelly's philanthropic efforts and community support in the city over the years.

Here's some pictures of the carnage:

Despite all the water from fighting the fire and the storm that hit later, there were still smoldering pockets scattered throughout the area that required an around the clock fire watch for weeks-yikes! Damages to Connelly's plant and equipment were ultimately determined to be $3,000,000.

John Connelly, unhesitatingly, quickly bought an old Carnegie Steel plant, known locally as the Pencoyd Iron Works, at the foot of Righters Ferry Road for $500,000, several miles north of the old location. Quite impressively, it was up and running on March 3rd, less than two months after the fire.  Connelly though, wasn't to stay there long.  Following his acquisition of Haelan Laboratories in 1955 he moved his company from the Pencoyd works, heading further north to Bala Cynwyd, a suburb of Philadelphia and all the remaining Bowman and Haelan Labs manufacturing and packaging equipment soon followed from their old Stenton Avenue factory. 

Bowman's plant was only a mile or so away from Bala Cynwyd but the move had a lot more to it than convenience. Connelly had big plans and some Haelan products aligned with his larger vision that resulted in him ultimately taking over Crown Cork & Seal (now Crown Holdings). Prior to this he sold Bowman's remains to Topps in early 1956 while retaining a good chunk of Haelan Labs and making several interesting and inter-related business moves. He sure seems like he was a titan of industry, old school division.

As for the Pencoyd Iron Works, it is no longer old school and looks pretty swank now-check it out!

These Go To Eleven - Then Go Crazy!

Today we continue the saga of the 1970 Flags Of The World set. I've taken a couple peeks under the hood previously, with the most comprehensive look being made here back in 2017.  Some new and frankly, puzzling, developments have recently occurred with research about the set and its related insert, which I've dubbed Money of the World, after the name given it by Topps on the test wrapper. Check it out:

Ignore that penciled numbering, a long time ago a dealer used this to store cards from what was likely the first test of the 1970 series.  The best part about that is Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins advises they were just reprinted 56's (or even actual 56's; no one can tell apparently, although he's trying)! Except for the splash panel hawking the insert for 1970, the wrapper art is from 1956 too.  Said dealer could do this as the test pack was actually an envelope:

An envelope was needed as the 1956 cards were in the original Giant Size (one of the last to boot), too tall for what we now call a standard sized pack.  The envelope test pack concept was seldom used by Topps; they only did it a handful of times from what I've seen, usually when non-standard size cards or inserts were in the mix. 

The set as issued for retail consumption consisted of 82 stickers (yes, although they look more like cards): 77 Flags and 5 Dictionary "cards" made up the subject release.  The Dictionary cards were  stickers really stickers though, and each showed four phrases or words in English converted into phonetics approximating the featured language.  All 82 stickers required moisture to be applied to allow them to stick, just like 1967's inaugural Wacky Packages set. We'll get to why the Dictionary stickers were called cards in a minute; here are two of them:

The original images sent to me by another Friend o'the Archive, Michael Branigan, and while those two are a bit oblique as snapped, you can easily see from the Japanese example that the factory cuts were often abysmal. I used these as exemplars since they show a key difference between the test and retail releases. This is the reverse of a regular issue sticker for Japanese, No. 3 of 5 in the sub-series and handily doing double duty as it shows why these were, in fact, stickers:

But look at the back of this card for Chinese:

Yes, it goes to eleven!  Not only that, Chinese was sticker No. 4 of 5 in what now turns out to be its retail version, so clearly some rejiggering of the final sheet occurred.  Thing is, I'm not sure why as 77 Flags and 11 Dictionary stickers would be a classic Topps 88 array, with three full sets printed across the 264 count press sheet.

Lonnie sent me some 66 sticker finished half-slit proofs shots from 1970 that may shed a little light. Here is the front: 

Right away you can see the five Dictionary stickers are scattered throughout the array.  Two more columns should get us to the 88 sticker impressions we need for 77 Flags plus 5 Dictionary stickers, with 6 stickers being extra prints.  However, the reverse of the sheet muddies things considerably:

It's hard to make out detail so here's a partial also from Lonnie:

The five Dictionary stickers are all "x of 11" while the Flags are "x of 77" (solve for "x" LOL) which means only 61 Flags are represented. This is not unusual as 22 card/sticker proof arrays split off form the larger ones were quite common with Topps.  Often (but certainly not always) that's because the two rows they encompass were designed to be extra prints.  If you extrapolate this 66 card proof to an 88 card version, it's clear you would need the two extra columns to get enough Flags into the count of 77, 16 to be exact.  Add in 6 more Dictionary stickers and the math works out perfectly for an 88 sticker set (77+5+6).  So what happened?

Well, I am guessing that the set was indeed planned to be 88 subjects in length, using both flavors of sticker to get to that marker but with 6 more countries added to the Flags. Then after the test marketing was done and work commenced on the larger retail set, a mistake occurred that "corrected" the regular issue and nobody at Topps HQ figured out they were off by 6 until it was too late. Lonnie's sheet's reverse math is plainly obvious: 77 +11 to equal 88 once the full array was composed makes a ton of sense. From what I know of it, Topps printed the backs of their cards (stickers here) first so when they were shipped out and then later matched to the fronts, someone must have noticed the numbering mismatch at some very late stage in the proofing ("whaddya mean there's not 11 Dictionary stickers?!"). There was some renumbering of the Dictionary stickers of course to compensate obviously but it's a lot easier to correct five reverses than seventy-seven. 

One of the central questions for test issues of this era is how do you tell the test from the regular issue?  Most 60's and 70's issues have some type of slight difference if a full release followed a successful test.  Topps would sometimes take two rows, or columns (of 11) - depending upon the orientation but you get the idea - from a proposed sheet array, which often resulted in skip-numbering of a test issue, as they used two rows for the test printing.  These, for reasons that I've never really understood, were not necessarily the cards or stickers from the commonly-encountered two "extra print" rows. Generally the minor difference in was that the indicia on the card's reverse would be changed (from T.C.G. for the test to Topps Chewing Gum for example) but in the case of Flags of The World, T.C.G. remained onboard.

So as for the Dictionary stickers, no one has ever seen any languages beyond the five shown here. Which means you can only ID the test stickers if they have the "x of 11" numbering, i.e. the difference is on the Dictionary stickers only. There were only 77 Flags designed it would seem, and Topps just went with six double prints to fill the Dictionary gap, which I'll get to below.

That should be the end of it, right?  Well, no.....as there was also a more "cloth-like" version of the stickers tested in 1973!  I actually have one, but it's in the Topps capsule used for their online Vault sales, although close examination does reveal some slight fuzziness (and die cutting):

Note the front indicia that was added for '73.  The reverse is just blank cardboard, numbering be damned!

It's T-5 in the test numbering scheme used by Topps at the time which, thanks to Lonnie's research, we know was chronological and covers at least 126 tested products, not all of them cards or stickers.  These range from T-1 in 1973 (Emergency! - Adam 12) through T-126 in 1980 (a Baseball blister pack). Topps got their own dating wrong on their COA  (not uncommon) as below, with apologies for the cock-eyed scan (my cert is presently MIA) but the sheet used to produce these has a date on it of July 31, 1973.  

Here's the 1973 sheet, which is has 44 Flags and is flimsy since it was probably sticker stock:

You will note this sheet covers the first four columns of the 1970 proof sheet with the notable exception of three Dictionary stickers, which were replaced by Flags in 1973:

    1970                                        1973

Dictionary    Row    Column       Flag

Spanish          R4          C3         Italy

Italian             R8           C1        Sweden

Japanese       R10        C4        Jamaica

There was very random placement on the Dictionary stickers in 1970.  But their replacements in 1973 all were in the fifth column in 1970, so were a bit more orderly:

Italy: Row 2

Sweden: Row 5

Jamaica: Row 7

And take note of the six Flags running down the last column of the 1973 array, starting in row 2 and ending in row 7 (United Nations through United States). These turned out to be the double printed subjects from 1970:

• United Nations
• Brazil
• China
• Greece
• Netherlands 
• United States

Yes, six of them, as Topps "corrected" for the missing Flags! You can see them on this 1970 half sheet; the run from rows 2 through 7 in column 2 and repeat in rows 6 though 11 of column 5 (yes, it's fuzzy but just key on the American flag):

Switching gears, here's the dating and test code from the 1973 sheet:

I'm not sure the 1973 cloth test stickers ever hit retail, although Lonnie thinks the presence of a T-Code means it probably did.  Maybe someone out there can show me one that was found in the wild but I've only seen them as proofs from the Topps Vault, which means they are always encapsulated by the time I eyeball them. 

Topps was very much experimenting with stock and textures at this time, so who knows what they were thinking with the 1973's? The materials may not have melded properly (a common problem for their cloth and sticker experiments in the early and mid-70's) or perhaps the juggernaut 1973 Wacky Packages issue just overwhelmed any thought of putting these out.  Or the test could simply have failed.

At some point reasonably soon I'll tackle the currency inserts, which are yet another tangled web courtesy of Topps!