The Post War Cards Newsletter #4
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🍪 A 1952 Mother's Cookies Ad
The 1952 and 1953 Mother's Cookies sets are amongst the most popular regional minor league sets ever issued, featuring 64 and 63 Pacific Coast League players, respectively. Interestingly, as Sports Collectors Daily pointed out, "Both sets are cataloged as D357 — the 1952 issue is cataloged as D357-1 while the 1953 set is D357-2." That said, the '52s are generally scarcer than the '53s, and design differences exist between the sets.
With a bit of patience, though, you can complete them both. However, one item will be a little tougher to track down. I'm sure there are other examples, but I've only seen this one example of a 1952 Mother's Cookies ad.
✍️ Great Hobby Writing
SABR's Baseball Cards Research Committee: 2005 Donruss Studio: Portraits, Patterns, and Pandemonium
A Peny Sleeve For Your Thoughts: My Playing Days Are Nearing An End
Pre-War Collector: Why Not Both? Finding a Second Milton Bradley Aviation Set Featuring Amelia Earhart
Cardboard Catastrophes: 1961 Fleer Autograph Project - Part 43
1939 Bruins: Johnny Wynne Mail Day
Nine Pockets: From the Favorites Box: Carlton Fisk, 1982 Topps #111
Sports Collectors Daily: For Most Collectors, the 4 Ty Cobb Cards are the Pinnacle of the T206 Set
The Collective Mind: Adios El Tiante (part 1) and Adios El Tiante (part 2)
The Topps Archives: Hopped Up
Sports Collectors Daily: Wheaties Treaties: Topps Images Aplenty in 1964 All-Star Baseball Stamp Album
Baseball Cards Come to Life!: 1963 Pepsi Tulsa Oilers
Hobby News Daily: 1969 Junior Mints: Influencers - All That Flitters is Not Always Gold
📦 Unopened Item Of The Week - A 1952 Topps Baseball Wax Box
Just after BBCE Auctions sold a 1952 Topps PSA-graded wax pack for $91k on September 15th, 2024, cllct wrote an article about it and then went into a bit of the history of a full box of 1952 Topps that Mastro sold in 2004, including some info from the current owner.
Some folks may be concerned that Mastro sold the box. Now, he was known for a lot of things, including the trimmed PSA 8 T206 Wagner and ultimately being sentenced to 20 months in prison for his role in schill bidding via his auction house. But that's not to say every item he sold was fake, including that 1952 Topps wax box and the incredible collection of unopened items offered in that 2004 catalog.
But the story about the box's origin published in Mastro's catalog, which is repeated in cllct's article, isn't really true. The auction contained OPC's archives (so many vintage PSA packs are crossovers from this catalog).
You can actually see the '52 box in this YouTube video (~19:40 in) from a show produced by Canada's The Sports Network in the early '90s.
As Rovell wrote in the cllct article, the box was sold again a few months after the Mastro auction. Here's a scan of the lot when Lelands offered it that second time at the All-Star Game Auction held in July 2004.
One thing is still a little weird to me, though. The Mastro lot included 24 GAI-graded packs with a 5th/6th Series designation, plus they offered the pack that was opened, but then the Lelands auction included 23 GAI-graded packs plus the opened one. The lot's descriptions differ by a GAI-7 wax pack. Now, Mastro did offer a single GAI-7 wax pack, with the 5th/6th Series designation, individually, later in the catalog, as lot 473. But I'm still confused about there being 25 packs from a 24-pack box, but who knows what OPC had in their archives; one collector who has a lot of insight into the OPC archives told me that they likely had more than a single box of packs.
📝 On The Blog
October 10, 2024: Hobby Help Needed - Richard Gelmen's 4 Color Cardboard Storage Boxes
October 11, 2024: 1977 Indianapolis Indians Team Issue Baseball Cards
October 12, 2024: 1970 Topps Super Baseball Assortment of 429 Cards
October 13, 2024: 1977 Tom Daniels Burleigh Grimes Baseball Cards
October 14, 2024: 1951 Bowman Baseball Unopened Products
October 15, 2024: 1977 Tucson Toros Baseball Cards
October 15, 2024: The 1939 Play Ball Baseball Set and its Three Ted Williams Rookie Card Variations
October 16, 2024: 36 1959 Topps Football Cello Packs
October 17, 2024: Mickey Mantle and the 1956 Topps White and Gray Backs
🏈 Card Show History - Super Bowl IV Reunion at the 1996 Kansas City Tri-Star Collectors Show
Here's a show that any football fan would want to time travel back to visit: the October 1996 Kansas City Tri-Star Collectors Show, which featured a Super Bowl IV Chiefs reunion!
Super Bowl IV was the final AFL-NFL Championship game, featuring the NFL's Minnesota Vikings against the AFL's Kansas City Chiefs. Despite being 13.5-point favorites, the Vikings fell 23-7 to Kansas City, whose defense included six future Hall of Famers, including Bobby Bell and Willie Lanier, who were scheduled to attend the show.
The show also featured Frank Robinson, Ray Guy, and Jim Brown!
⛴️ In The Hobby Library - The 1952 Topps Baseball Card Ocean Dump in Sy Berger's Own Words
Following our look at pricey 1952 Topps baseball unopened products earlier in the newsletter, I thought I'd share the story of how many of these iconic cards ended up in the ocean, in Sy Berger's own words.
Greg Ambrosius interviewed Berger in a piece that Sports Card Magazinepublished in August 1994.
The article's format isn't conducive to pasting as an image here in the newsletter, so I'll include the text. However, if anyone wants a scan of it, just shoot me an email.
Sports Cards Magazine (SC): When you talk about the early '50s cards, you didn't sell them out every year did you? I mean, there's rumors that Topps had to put barges out in the ocean and there went all the '50s cards in the ocean just to get rid of them.
Sy Berger (SB): No, no, no. I will tell you the story and let me clarify it for you. The cards that were dumped in the ocean were dumped in the ocean by me. We had such great success with the 1952 series, the first series, cards 1 through 310. I discussed it with Mr. Shorin, J.E. Shorin, and he said, well okay, let's do another series. And I worked on the series and we came out with 311 through 407. But you must realize that this is the first time we had a great success with a picture card item, a success of this magnitude. We were really neophytes, and by the time the cards came out it was the football season, it was World Series time. We learned very quickly that World Series time is the time for football not baseball cards, and we couldn't sell them too well. But we had a lot of cards and I went so far as to try to sell them to carnival guys — you know, guys who give you the little trinkets when you knock the bottles down — and I offered them I think as many as 10 for a penny. They looked at me as if I was crazy.
SC: And that's series two you're talking about?
SB: Yeah, series two, number 311 is Mickey Mantle, the most valuable modern day card.
SC: And they're in the ocean?
SB: Sometime around 1960, maybe give or take a year or two, we decided they were cluttering up the warehouse and we wondered what we were going to do with these things. We put them on two garbage trucks, we drove just a couple of blocks to the river, which is near our offices and our plant at that time, and we loaded them on a garbage scat. It's like four planks around a big hull and there's like a drop in it in the center. I went along and it was tugged by a tugboat to the Atlantic Ocean, opposite Atlantic Highlands in Jersey. And the tugboat guy says this is a good place to drop it. I said okay and all of a sudden he takes this big iron thing and he pulls it and the bottom of the hull opens up and everything in there falls down in the ocean.
SC: Is that the only time you did that?
SB: That was the only time we did it. We wanted to make sure everything was disposed of properly because in those days we used to have some coupons you could send in. We used to incinerate those, but I found out that sometimes when you dump the stuff into the incinerator, it wasn't on fire. Guys would pick up the coupons that didn't burn. We wanted to make sure these cards went.