Cocktail TIme

Every once in a while I like to bring Bowman into the mix here since its been a Topps brand since 1956.  The name didn't really get much use after the acquisition until a set of Baseball cards using the brand was released in 1989 and eventually became a big hit for Topps.  The Blony bubble gum brand was also put into various uses by Topps through some time in the early Seventies. But I'm not here to talk about all that, instead I'd like to look at some older Bowman gum products.

Warren Bowman was a very interesting man who had already worked at a number of professions by the time he was 30. In 1927 he moved his fledgling confectionery company from Lansing, Michigan to Philadelphia after introducing a chewing gum called Ju-Ce-Kiss.  I managed to find a scan of a wrapper but it's a rare one:

(Courtesy www.wave.rozhlas.cz)

I really like that $50,000 tagline!

While I don't plan to look at Blony for this post, as I have covered it somewhat previously and plan to do a much deeper dive at some point, Warren Bowman had it in the marketplace not long after moving to the City of Brotherly Love and in May of 1932 had formed and capitalized Gum, Inc. who had a decade long run as the premier manufacturer of bubble gum cards before World War 2.  Blony was introduced around this time as well.

Bowman had his ups-and-downs, even at his own firm but kept cranking out bubble gum until the war throttled his sugar allotments.  He rebranded as Bowman Gum, Inc. in August of 1943 and pivoted to "adult" gums under the "Warren's" name as the conflict raged. In 1943 he came up with Cin-A-Mint, intended primarily as a post-smoke palate and breath cleanser.:

You can see corn syrup and artificial flavors were in use:

The same year saw "Fruit" Cocktail gum, another wartime mélange:

Then 1947 saw a Mint Cocktail gum introduced:

Breathtaking was only one superlative:

Bowman also re-established his bubble gum line in 1947, with Bub:

All sorts of ingredients in this one!

1948, of course saw the reintroduction of Bowman's trading cards, as the U.S. returned to a normal manufacturing footing.  Bub was around for a bit and in 1950 saw this particular combo offered:

Nice marketing idea:

I hope to delve into the many vagaries of Bub at some point down the road as well but will leave off for now.

Warren Bowman exited his company in 1951 and moved to Florida to develop real estate and work on various food products and packaging innovations before passing away in 1962 at the age of 67.

I'm With Stupid

So we have seen the last of several spectacular auctions of material from the Andy Yanchus collection that were held over the past couple of years.  Yanchus was a former designer for Aurora Plastics during the heyday of their iconic Universal Monster model kits and then worked as a colorist for Marvel Comics.  Along the way he amassed a stunning collection of comics, toys and cards.  In April of this year (2024 if you are reading this in the future) his trading cards and related ephemera were offered by Bruneau & Co. Auctioneers, of Cranston, Rhode Island. Within those varied lots were some real gems and very, very big surprises as Yanchus was a massive collector of rare Topps test issues, among many other things.

There will be more on this collection's holdings here but today I want to look at an obscure Topps issue from 1971 called Stupid Scratch-Offs.  Prior to this auction, the set was pretty much a total mystery and it wasn't even clear, at least to me, that is had even been tested.  Well, it certainly did see a test:

The set name perfectly describes these suckers and the format is Q&A:

These match to the questions above:

There is some very nice Wally Wood and Wood Studio artwork in the set.  Here's some more:

I know the cards say there are 44 but Yanchus had 16 different (I think) and in Topps Test Land, partial, skip-numbered releases are legion and it's possible only twenty-two were made up at first.

More stupid answers:

Might as well show the rest!

As below, "Turkey & Greece" appears to be missing a color pass compared to the above example:

Aren't these great?!  I can add one more subject, from an old scan where I'm not sure of the source:

Oof:

I'd like to get the attributed date of 1971 locked in if possible, as it seems to me it could be slightly earlier.

Swann Song

Further to some recent posts about the quite nicely-done Topps Sports Club News, Friend o'the Archive John Moran sent along scans of all six pages of what I believe is the final issue, Volume 2, Number 2, released for the Fall of 1976. As surmised last time out, Lynn Swann was the Guest Columnist du jour and the subject of the color 8"x 10" insert for this issue.

Here then, is the last of it:

Yup, Herb Goren gets another byline and I still suspect he pretty much wrote most of the content. The 1976 Football set preview kicks off what was a mostly mundane half-decade for Topps sports card design.  

Page two is all continuity:

Fun and games abound on page three plus book reviews that cover all four major sports.  Give the talent available to Topps in their stable of freelance artists and in-house in 1976, I have to say the illustrations continue to underwhelm, remaining the one really weak area in the whole publication:

The collecting network continues to network on page four:

There some inside dope on various athletes on page five.  Always a popular feature in the sports mags of the day, so why not here?

More underwhelming artwork with "Hot Dog: and some quiz/crossword answers.  

And that was that. As I've mentioned, the Sports Club seemed like a pretty good idea, with a clean, professional look.  The ride-along extras though, were what really made this a sweet deal for the audience it reached. It sure seems like fun while it lasted!

Blankety Blanks

I had long thought the saga of the 1971 Topps Winners Cards (OK, technically they hail from 1972 but no one refers to them that way) was concluded here but as it turns out I was, wrong about that.  Oh, the set's subject count remains complete at 19 and we know all about the original distribution and populations of these cards but the one thing that has eluded study has been the entry blank.

The special retail box that promoted the contest was only released in select areas for a limited time.  It's not clear why Topps elected to limit this promotion but the geographical array of contest winners certainly indicates only a select few locales had any chance of entering the contest.  To refresh your collective memories, this was the box in question:

It was plain to see that you had to ask the "storekeeper" for an entry blank and it's assumed they resided inside the box when first delivered, with instructions.  (UPDATE 6/10/24: They were stuck to the box top-see below for further details.) Thanks to a recently online auction, we can finally show said blank:

Sorry for the kludgy "watermark" but so it goes....

So you had to either send in your entry with five Baseball wrappers or just print the word "Topps" on an index card. Interestingly, there was both an upper (15) and lower (6) age limit for entrants:

No clue on what the poster would be and that 350 commodity code doesn't seem to marry up with the wax box or wrapper codes.  The "regular" codes I've found are:

1-401-37-01-1 (wax box advertising "Extra! Real Metal Coins"))

1-402-37-01-1 (wax box advertising "Collect All The Top Stars)

0-402-09-01-1 (wax wrapper with "Collect All The Top Stars" slug)

0-402-90-01-1 (wax wrapper with "Extra Insert in Each Pack" slug

1-368-15-01-1 (small blue box that held a cello pack of 30 cards)

The wax retail box hawking the contest had this code:

1-347-37-01-1

Topps tracked expenses for each issue using the codes so 347 clearly is a misfit in the 401/402 wax box/wrapper sequence.  I suspect the 350 code was assigned to track expenses for the firm that tabulated the results but the initiating 4 is curious. I hope to investigate all this further at some point and welcome any comments about the 347 and 350 codes.

Update 6/10/24: Lonnie Cummins advises the forms were in a pad that was stuck to the display box.  He further notes: "The reason the forms pad might have had a beginning ‘4’ is because that was normally the commodity for a sticker uncut sheet and if there was a sticker on the back of the form pad, then, there you go" Makes sense to me, thanks Lonnie!  He sent a nice scan as well to illustrate:

If I had enough brain cells left, I would have recalled the Baseball Card Exchange wrapped boxes from last year's National!  Nice price if you can get it! Lonnie also found the name of the firm that coordinated the contest: D.L. Blair, which was founded in 1959 and closed in 2016. They may have carried on as an advertising consultant based out of Long Island. So Blair of Blair!

Berry Bad

So I've quite inadvertently compounded a longstanding mystery, thanks to a couple of wayward scans I stumbled upon back in April on eBay.  Perhaps only the nerdiest among us recall my posts concerning 1971 Topps Rocks O'Gum and 1972 Topps Grape Gum Berries way back in 2017. There were also Raspberry Gum Berries offered, which I've not touched upon (until now). 

Well one of the perplexing things about the colorful set of 55 humorous lids that were used, so I thought, to top off the little Dixie Cup that held these three related products was that the Rocks O'Gum lids often showed up in years past as complete sets and pretty much mint ones at that, while the Grape and Raspberry lids are very hard to find. In fact, I still need an example of the Grape lid and since my want list for Topps type cards is pretty much down to the scarcest of subjects, I have to think I'll be looking for awhile. 

Some Rocks O'Gum lids do show signs of use but the majority of examples I've seen and owned over the years never topped a container, such as this one featuring Topps Creative Director Woody Gelman:

Not an exact likeness LOL. The outside has the ingredients and some added flair:

Rob Lifson unearthed a sell sheet some time back, it's pretty groovy:

You get a very good idea of the packaging from the sheet but for reasons we'll get to in a minute, I don't think the gum looked like actual little berries. First though, two more fruity lids, Raspberry first:

This too has the cartoon underside:

And while I only have a topside scan featuring a proof, I'm sure the Grape version also sports a cartoon underneath:

You will note both of these flavor variants come with the ingredients prominently displayed.  Which makes these next two scans quite perplexing:

OK, there is a clear plastic lid sitting on top, which thinking about it, is not all that odd.  Then there is this image:

I doubt it was placed over a cardboard lid as it contains the ingredients, just as they do. Which begs the question then: what are we looking at?  Is it a test or a redesign?  I lean toward the former and tend to reject the latter but as it turns out, Topps supposedly stopped making the little gum nuggets that came in these containers in 1974 due to their shape and a rather far-out development, so there could be more to the story on the clear lid. (Same day update-there is, Mark Newgarden recalls seeing the clear lid version around the Topps offices in the 80's and it indeed seems like it could have been a "reboot" test.)

What happened was their Block Buster, Bazooka Bits, Presto and Gumniks brands also deployed candy-coated gum in this small shape (the latter brand was key to developments) and, I am not making this up, Topps succumbed to a concerned mother in Florida, who complained that her kids, who were carrying the little gum nuggets around in a medicine bottle, were treating them like drugs. Furthermore, pharmacists had told her that the gum resembled brightly colored amphetamines and barbiturates!  Putting aside the mom of the year that let the kids put the gum in used pill bottles in the first place, this seems really, really dumb and also really, really staged. But I digress.

Remember Gumniks?  The colors, man...

Anyway, here's the lowdown from the Orlando Sentinel, February 8, 1974.  Oddly her name is not Karen, although I express no surprise this happened in Florida:

No matter, a Topps spokesman at the time indicated they would change their little bits o'gum into something closer to a jellybean but acknowledged that it was "almost impossible to make candy that doesn't in some form or other represent a pharmaceutical." 

This pressure campaign may explain why the Grape and Raspberry lids are so hard to find and possibly too the use of a clear plastic lid as Topps, being Topps, would have almost certainly sold off any remaining "drug gum" still in their warehouse. But maybe they decided to show what was in the container before killing the brand. Or maybe it was already dead as I suspect these...

...were just repurposed Grape Gum Berries they were possibly burning off as well.  Aye, more mysteries!