Mug Shot

eBay ain't what it used to be but sometimes things pop up and I've just landed a strange item that looks like some kind of internal Topps piece (but actually isn't).  Check out this this bad boy:

I originally thought the the "bad" theme related to some type of internal initiative at Topps but as we'll see below, it's not so.  The mug itself is 3 1/4" in diameter and 3 1/16" high.  It's white as shown in the pictures above but it has a translucent, almost glowing quality to it. I think that it is made with what is called opalescent glass.

The bottom won't really scan but there is an Anchor Hocking mark with a model number: 5120 and it's noted to be oven-proof and made in the USA.

A little internet sleuthing turns up that it's actually a milk mug. Here's another from a bank in Iowa, circa 1982:

This finding didn't eliminate the possibility the mug was from a dedicated internal Topps campaign but my next search killed the idea completely.  At least a half dozen similar mugs can be found on eBay with ease, such as this:

I found others for outfits such as Roper, Travelers, Marathon Cheese and S.P.U to name a mere few and then sussed out BAD stands for "Buck A Day".  BAD was a coordinated (and apparently national) cost cutting efficiency effort to "save a buck a day". Here is more on the subject from Inc. Magazine. It would appear the Topps mug is a circa 1983 product but the BAD campaign may still be an active one.

The seller I purchased it from said it was his grandmother's and she worked at Topps Duryea plant in quality control form the 1960's to the 1990's. Even though it's not a true internal Topps item, it's still pretty cool.

What A Hoot!

Boy I go away for a week and return only to find out a 60 year old hobby mystery has been solved and that said solving was accomplished over 40 years ago...sheesh!

Mired in legal salvos with Bowman, the 1953 Topps Baseball set is infamous for having six missing high numbers.  In addition, it appears five numbers were withheld from the first series of 80 cards either by reason of court order, cease-and-desist demand or intentional skip-numbering (which could have been planned either to account for anticipated legal problems with player contracts or to keep the kiddies looking for cards that did not yet exist).

Keith Olbermann, in late July, devoted a short segment to the six missing high number cards.  In it he featured a letter from Topps mailed in 1973 to an inquiring mind wanting to know which numbers had been dropped from the fourth (and last) series. The answer was close to what I had guesstimated a while back but I got two names wrong and it turns out one of them was the subject of a painting that has not yet surfaced.

The six missing players were:

Joe Tipton
Ken Wood
Hoot Evers
Harry Brecheen
Billy Cox
Pete Castiglione

Of these, the Evers painting remains MIA.  Topps did include him in the "extended" series of their 1953 reissue but it's clear they did not have the painting in their possession:

Here is KO's amazing piece:



As you can hear, he was given the skinny by Bob Lemke, although the information is over four decades old now.  One mystery still remains, namely that of the five possible pulled subjects from series 1, resulting in skip numbering that was essentially carried through the first three series runs. Paintings of Max Lanier, Richie Ashburn and Andy Pafko are known and while Jim Suchecki is also known, non-established players were generally not first series subjects as a player needed 31 consecutive days on the roster from the start of the season to receive full pay (Lanier just made it, he was released on May 15th, Wood lasted another week in the bigs).

Looks like there is still a little legwork to be done on this set.

Best Of Luckman

You have to give Topps an A for Effort in their postwar business plan.  After perfecting Bazooka in 1947, a flurry of promotions, premiums and advertising followed in the wake of its retail debut that summer. Very early on Topps hit upon the premium as a way to boost sales and visibility of the brand. Premium offers didn't really appear on the comics until the early 1950's and Topps used small brochures to advertise their earliest premiums.

The first Bazooka packs were five cent rolls; the one cent tabs did not appear until 1949 and while I have seen separate inserts advertising premiums from the penny packs, I can't recall any from the nickel versions. They did have some small ads for the catalogs alongside some of their their first comic strip efforts, like so:

Topps also had many ads in comic books and magazines such as Boys' Life for a variety of cards and premiums and when they mailed them out a brochure tagged along. This trade ad shows the strategy:

he first brochure was a thing of simplistic beauty but you had to use your imagination to picture the premiums:

A strong military connection was a hallmark of Topps cards and premiums until the great Freedom's War debacle of 1951 when Topps temporarily derailed their association with the military after groups of mothers and veterans protested that they were glorifying combat.  There were always one or two items for the girls as well.

Their first multi-premium catalog was a huge success and they had to send out mailers to people when the first run ran out:

The window display is unrelated to the postcard, it just came along for the ride on the scan.  As noted on this file copy kept by Woody Gelman, 15,000 postcards had to be printed up to meet demand. The original Bazooka Joe was 180 degrees removed from the later, familiar character but this early iteration is from October of '47 or earlier. Some premium numbering would be changed in the years to come but the sequence locked in pretty early in the 50's.

By 1949 Topps was hoping a connection with college football would be the ticket to glory as they marketed Varsity gum. As a tie in, they started pushing letters and numbers to let the kids make up their own football jerseys (see #111 in the middle; the other inserts date a little bit later):

The biggest promotion though, possibly their biggest ever, was for college pennants (or banners, in their parlance).  Check out the bottom of this ad:

If I'm not mistaken that ad states 1800 colleges were available on a 5" x 15" pennant.  However, I think that may have been an exaggeration as this wonderful late 1940's brochure shows:

The mere 708 possibilities on the helpfully numbered brochure could be closer to reality but who knows? The pennants must have just featured generic lettering to pull this promotion off. And did you note the offers for baseball emblems and pennants?  The promise of a new catalog makes me think they also came along with other premiums delivered to the suburbs and cities of America.

The Luckman fronted brochure also came in black:

I have no idea which color came first but do see that no numbering appears on the black version.

Identifying these pennants could be tough today; I don't think they were branded like the 1950's versions but there must be quite a few out there.

Time For Three

It recently occurred to me that I have not managed to show a full cover run of the Topps Rookie Banquet Programs from 1959-66.  Given out at the annual awards banquets hosted by Topps brass every fall, the programs from these events are coveted collectibles.

I've covered all the past years but two: 1960 and 1965.  I only have a weird angle shot for the 1960 edition, which was the second banquet:

Not the best shot but it shows the trophy in great detail.

Our last missing piece is the 1965 version and it's a beauty, if slightly cut off in this scan I nicked from 4192cards.com.

The interior is fairly typical:

The venue was The Americana Hotel, which is now the Sheraton, just north of Times Square in NYC; a hotel where I have attended a few dinners myself over the years.

As noted in a previous post, these banquets turned into the Baseball Achievement Awards in 1967 and resulted in a much smaller (and cheaper) program being distributed. They still have the dinner every year from what I can tell and this will be the 55th year the rookie awards have been handed out.

Now the most famous banquet program in 1964's as Topps released a boxed card set that year.  36 oversized (3" x 5 1/4") cards came in a real snazzy foil enhanced slipcase and now go for quite impressive sums.  However, Topps also printed a program that year, it's just smaller than the other rookie banquet programs and fits in the slipcase that held the cards:

It is said the interior matches the card set with one exception - Luis Tiant, the Topps Minor League Player of the year (card 34A). I don't know if this is true or not so if anyone has the skinny, drop me a line.

Here is the slipcase for comparison:

I believe the '64 program is the toughest one of them all-it rarely seems to come with the card set and not too many have turned up over the years. The 1964 "program" is one of the great all-time Topps items IMHO.

Folding Funny

Topps test issues from the 60's are tough buggers to track down, especially when they involve metamorphic cards such as today's subject: Fold-A-Roos. Generally ascribed to 1966, the actual date of issue is not certain. What is known is that they came in a typical Topps test pack:

The curved-t Topps logo debuted in 1966 but I don't believe the little registered trademark symbol was added until 1967 nor did these style packs debut until then.  Given that and the slightly psychedelic lettering, I would place the date at 1968-69.

There are 24 known subjects, skip numbered to 36,which look like this in their folded state, as per a Legendary auction a while back:

You would unfold the "card", which was made of paper, to reveal a funny response.  For instance, the "I got up to 100 MPH in my sports car" comment is followed by "...the day I saw a fire breathing dragon, as this illustration from Chris Benjamin's The Sport Americana Guide to the Non Sports Cards shows:

I've resorted to a b&w scan as these are scarce and I don't own one. I had to clip a reverse extract from Chris Watson's Non-Sports Bible:

Yes, they are numbered and examples are known up to #36, which appears to be the end number based upon the above scan mentioning "30 of 36".  Bob Marks wrote a great article in The Wrapper #68 about the set and noted original artwork was known for both issued cards and unissued ones. The amount of unissued artwork led him to believe there were more than 12 additional subjects being planned but if the first series was to consist of 36 only, that means a second series must have been contemplated.  Marks also noted the "answer" flap was part of the reverse as issued, lightly glued down until the card was opened. It would appear the flap would be brought around to the front and cover up the previous bottom part of the card, which would also unfold downward along the center fold.

The Fold-A-Roos gimmick essentially reversed Mad magazine's Fold-Ins, drawn by the inimitable Al Jaffee. They measure about 2 1/2" x 4 11/16" in its closed state and the height increases to 3 9/16" once unfurled, according to Benjamin. They must not have tested well and may have been a bit hokey, even by the standards of the day.

Drugstore Blues And Reds

Topps' seemingly never-ending quest to dominate at all levels of the "jobber" retail trade during the baby boom era led to some pretty bizarre doings at times. Some affinity program offers in 1963 perfectly illustrate this point.

Topps was clearly looking to increase their shelf presence in the drugstores of the day by putting three small bottle of Bufferin into their 240 count Bazooka boxes. Bufferin must have sent a lot of tiny bottles to Topps to make this work:

Marketing materials also noted this curious pairing:

This is just the tip o'the iceberg though as a whole host of wellness and personal care products were inserted into Bazooka boxes in 1963.  Sore throat?  No problem:

Five o'clock shadow got you down?  Bazooka to the rescue: 

And if you cut yourself, these is relief close at hand:

And let's not forget the pompadour:

These various products seem to have had disparate owners; I was surprised when researching this post that one company did not own all these brands in 1963.

Transparent Apparent

Some sweet serendipity was at work recently as I managed to snag a series of photographic transparencies that apparently originated with Topps in the late 1950's and feature the irascible and recently deceased Don Zimmer.

The highlight of the lot was the transparency used to create his 1957 Topps card.  Here's the card, with a  typical '57 ragged cut no less:

And here is the corresponding transparency:

If you follow the white lines around the border you can see how the transparency was cropped for the issued card.  I assume those white lines are remnants of the production process.

The three other transparencies are also intriguing.  I can't help but feel I have seen this pose before, maybe on a Dodgers PC or something:

Next up is a great "action" shot: 

That is one fantastic Ebbets Field background, yowsa!  And last but not least,more Ebbets with a bit of a redshift:

All of these exhibit some signs of hand cutting and all but the transparency used for the 1957 card have black borders from the film stock.  The sizing varies quite a bit as the production transparency is a puny 1 9/16" x 2 1/4" while other portrait, without the borders, clocks in at 2 5/16" x 3 1/4". The redshifted transparency is the same size as the portrait, sans borders, while the fielding pose with Ebbets background is a whopping 4 3/4" x 3 15/16" (roughly, as the border is protruding on the sides). 

They all came in this envelope:

There are some bewildering notations on the envelope as there seem to three action poses but I can't swear what the original contents were while these were with Topps. Bob Lemke, from whom I won these on eBay, possessed these since the early 1980's and in fact on his blog has a few more things to say:

"The brown kraft file envelope in which the transparencies have been housed for decades has a number of penned and penciled notations. Besides his name and team there is written, "2 action" and "2 low fielding". Penciled notes read "Reshoot / '59" and "Used '58 / Int Ptg". Al least I think it says "Int Ptg". I have no idea what it means. Also penciled at the bottom-left of the envelope is "GUNTHER," which may be the name of the photographer."

Could "Int Ptg" mean interim or internal printing?  Perhaps that means one was used in a proof version or developmental phase before the LA Dodgers uniforms could be captured on film as Topps did not issue any inserts of ancillary sets in '58, which could also be what the abbreviation represents.  But really, who knows? The reshoot notation likely means newer photos were available in a different, newer envelope, deep in the vast recesses of the Topps filing system or, ahem, archives..

This is a really neat piece of Topps history and I am happy to be its caretaker for the forseeable future.