Significant New Info on 1960 Post Cereal Set
 

In 1960 Post Cereal issued a set of sports cards on the back of cereal that were a precursor to their ambitious efforts in 1961-1963 with baseball and football card sets. The 1960 cards were very large in size and included players from three sports: Baseball (Mickey Mantle, Don Drysdale, Al Kaline, Harmon Killebrew, Ed Mathews), Football (John Unitas, Frank Gifford), and Basketball (Bob Pettit, Bob Cousy). While the cards are attractive, just a small segment of the hobby industry collects these cards. Generally little is known about the cards with the exceptions of what price guides indicate which is there are nine cards in the set and they came on packages of Grape Nuts Flakes (GNF). Early versions of price guides had incorrectly identified the cereal as Grape Nuts.

So a little story if I might related to this card issue and the discovery of information to better understand it. Fast forward to last year. I was down in Lodi (CA) with Kirk Robinson, an early pioneer in the research into understanding the 1962 Post Cereal Football Card Set. He had made a nice acquisition of primarily Post Cereal material and I was visiting him just kind of perusing his stuff, with a little trading going on. One of the things he had picked up were two 1960 Post Cereal cards that were cut with the entire back panel showing. While just sitting there towards the end of the day, we noticed that the layout of these two panels were just a bit different. While the card size was the same on both panels, the narrative outside the card was not exactly the same, both in display and size. Clearly these two panels seemingly had come off two different size packages of GNFs. We confirmed this that day by placing Kirk’s panels over 12 oz. and 16 oz. GNF’s front panels with the sizes being a perfect match. That was a bit eye opening.

One of the things that immediately came to mind was that this was possibly the reason why some of the 1960 Post Cereal Cards are much harder to find than others. For example it had always seemed to me that the Bob Pettit and Harmon Killebrew cards were the toughest to find and I just figured they were the less popular—thus fewer survived over the last almost 60 years. But perhaps not. That night when I got home, I called Dave Worley who also heavily researches the Post Cereal sports card promotions just to make sure that it was not common knowledge that 1960 Post Cereal cards came on two sizes of GNF cereal. He too indicated he had never seen anything about that.

Given what we had learned that day, it seemed it would be nice to figure out which cards came off which size boxes. Since no one has a ton of this material, especially complete boxes or even full back panels with the narrative on the back panel still showing beyond the card itself, this seemed like a project for a group of serious Post Cereal collectors to collaboratively delve into. A group of collectors was formed to research and see how much could be learned of the 1960 promotion. The group included Kirk, Dave, Fred McKie, Dan Mabey, Kelvin Soladat, Mike Skiles, Mike Tiry and myself. Together we sent pictures and thoughts to each other as we all shared our material over the internet. After piecing everything together, we all believe we have a much better understanding of the promotion and wanted to share with anyone interested. One key item of the analysis was the discovery that the packaging adhesive on the back of the panels was different depending upon which size cereal box a card came from. Cards cut from the small 12 oz. boxes will generally have adhesive markings running vertically on the left and right sides of the card. Cards from the larger 16 oz. size boxes will have no adhesive markings on the card at all (adhesive markings on these back panels run horizontally at the top of the panel and above the actual card itself. (This is consistent with adhesive markings for all GNF back panels for all the 1961-1963 Post Baseball and Football panels.)

Our conclusion was that the 1960 Post Cereal Set had six cards coming from panels of the 12 oz. GNF boxes (Cousy, Drysdale, Kaline, Mathews, Unitas, and Gifford). The set had 4 cards that came from 16 oz. GNF boxes (Mantle, Killebrew, Pettit, and Gifford). This pattern of 6 different card panels from the smaller GNF boxes and 4 different card panels from the larger sized GNF boxes continued into future plans for all the various 60s Post Cereal American card promotions. There was only one player who was on both sized boxes—Frank Gifford—and as such is the only player who has a resulting variation in his card. If one looks carefully, you can see the two variations consisting of minor picture cropping differences and the facsimile signature in a different position on the card (and of course the different packaging adhesive on the back side of his card). The easiest differences one can use to identify a Gifford card variations are:
12 oz. Gifford cards will normally have two vertical packaging adhesive markings on the sides of the back of those cards. The Gifford portion of the signature on the front of the card will have the “G” and “I” portions completely on the white portion of Gifford’s uniform with the bottom tail of first “f” in the Gifford portion of the signature also being written in the same white portion of Gifford’s uniform.
16 oz. Gifford cards will have no packaging adhesive markings on the back sides of those cards. Also most of the “G” and all of the “I” and first “f” in the Gifford portion of the signature on the front of the card will be on top of the red number 1 on Gifford’s uniform.
We thought we would share this information and I guess if you are a Master Set collector, you now need ten cards in this set to complete a 1960 Post Cereal Master Set.

Photos of the 1960 Post Gifford Variations Ken mentions above
 

Hi Gang:

Ken, and I along with other advanced Post Cereal collectors have been doing research on the 1960 Post Cereal set for quite awhile. Ken laid out all the findings in the above post.

We feel it is very significant that a new variation has been found in the set. The fact that the Gifford was the only "card" issued on both size boxes of Grape Nut Flakes caused the variation Ken described.

Below are links to scans of both versions. I am having trouble attaching scans to this post. If that changes I will update.

Note the location of his signature.

Fred
https://www.flickr.com/photos/601863...posted-public/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/601863...posted-public/

Previous Thread
 

FYI, there was a previous thread here on Net54 where we started to discuss the 1960 Post set. See:

http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=232964

Gifford Photos
 

Here are the two different Gifford 1960 Post Cereal. Note location of the signature.

12 oz. box on top

16 oz. box below

Awesome research guys.

Thank you for sharing
 

Pretty cool stuff!

Thanks for the information. I just picked up the Kaline. I really like this set and also think it very under rated.

A big thanks to you all for all the time and effort you have put into researching not only this set but others. It takes an amazing passion for something that can be so tedious and time consuming. THIS is what keeps the hobby going and many will benefit from your efforts for years to come, long after any of us are around. Again, thank you!

Interesting stuff. I always appreciate these types of posts. Good job & thanks guys.

Z

This 7/8/83 article from SCD may be of some interest:

Thanks
 

Very interesting. Thank you Dave. I had seen this article earlier, perhaps maybe Fred or one or the other team members found it when surveying folks when we were trying to collect information. Maybe, or perhaps probably, you were the one who supplied the article back a year and a half ago. It seems like the three cards that were seen that day so long ago all come from the large size GNF boxes (two for sure, and would imagine Gifford did also just because likely the person buying the cereal that generated the cards probably regularly bought the same size box.) One thing I don’t think I noted in the Net54 posting was that throughout the various Post Cereal Cards Promotions of the 60s, cards from the larger GNF boxes are tougher to find than those from the smaller GNF boxes. So in my mind, besides the nice fine that day, each of those cards were among the tougher ones to acquire of the 1960 Post Cereal cards. Hey, thanks for sharing. Very much appreciated.

Hi Guys:

I am at The National. If anyone is interested in getting the "other" Gifford" you don't have LMK which you have.

I know I saw one and maybe two here at the show. Don't know which variation/version they were, but will be glad to check for you.

PM me with which you have and I will see if the one you need is here at the show.

Best,

Fred

Bravo, guys, bravo!!!!!!!!!!! I am so proud of you.

As I wrote in NEVER CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN, the set was released right after the 1960 baseball season. With NFL football in full swing, it would make sense that if six small /four large boxes fit best on their printing press, selecting a football player to be on both sizes would ostensibly make sense. Johnny Unitas was the game face star, but Gif played for New York, and the General Foods' corporate offices were in White Plains, NY, so Frank would have been chosen over Johnny U. The New York market towers over Baltimore. I KNOW this is pure speculation, but I hope you give it some consideration.

Foremost, would any of you gentleman confirm or enlighten me about the brief, specific window of time during 1960 when these Post Cereal Sports Stars appeared on their Grape Nuts Flakes boxes?

Again, kudos to youse guys for your tenacity at joining forces on the Net to present the hobby with some new information.

Best regards to you all.:) --- Brian Powell

Thanks For The Info
 

Hi Brian--hope you are doing well. In going through your book several years ago, probably focused on other areas of it (Jell-Os) and missed I guess the notation of when these cards were issued. Great information. In fact today, I was thinking that the next effort should be trying to figure out when the cards might have been issued (and was guessing baseball season given the predominance of baseball stars and a couple of other minor reasons--sounds like I was wrong). Thanks for sharing!!!

Anyone with a 1960 Post Cereal Box??
 

Looking for a little help from anyone who might have a 1960 Post Cereal Sports Card Panel that still has the bottom part of the cereal box. Recognize this is a bit of a needle in a haystack request, but there must be a few of these out there in collector land.

Background: In early summer Fred McKie posed a question to a number of us Post Cereal card collectors as to what the embossed 4 number code (not printed in ink, just dented into the cardboard) meant on the Post Tens trays coming from the 1961 baseball card promotion. Robin Pauls kind of took that question and ran with it. With the help from collectors including Bill Rothney, Terry Faulk, Mike Tiry, Dan Mabey, Dave Worley, Mike Skiles, David Charles, Fred and myself, Robin built a matrix of embossed numbers tied to the various years of the various cereal flavors for both the Baseball (1961-63) and Football (1962) promotions for boxes that we had in our possession. What was eventually determined was that this code was the production date of the various Post cereals. The code is embossed on the bottom of the box. The four-digit code had the first digit showing the year (so 1961 was “1”, 1962 was “2”, and 1963 was “3”), and the next three digits showing the Julian date (so January 1st was “001” and January 2nd was “002” and so forth). Thus a box of Post Cereal that was produced on say February 25, 1962 would be coded 2056. Codes could not be found on all boxes, but certainly a decent number of them. It was easy to see that the codes aligned perfectly with the upcoming sport’s season with Baseball card boxes being produced in January, February, and March and Football card boxes being produced in August, September, and October in the data Robin collected. It was a really good collaborative effort that also showed the Jell-O baseball card boxes of that era also contained the same processing coding.

So related to the reason for this Net54 post, Brian Powell and myself are trying to determine when the 1960 Post Cereal Sports Cards were issued. There was a thought in the hobby that this occurred at the end of baseball season as the football season was beginning. But this may not be true as Kirk Robinson has a 1960 Post Cereal Johnny Unitas box with a Julian date stamp of 0021 on the bottom part of the box which would seem to indicate a production date of January 21, 1960 for that box. We are hoping that we might be able to find a few other 1960 Post Cereal boxes with embossed Julian date stamps on the bottom of the cereal box to be able to say without question that the 1960 Post Cereal Sports Card production only occurred in the early part of 1960. Any collector out there have a bottom panel of a 1960 Post Sports Card box with a Julian date stamp??

SCD Article
 

Does anyone have the SCD article posted by Dave (Topcat) in this thread in a PDF file? I would like a copy to add to my history files regarding Post Cereal and Jello cards. Thanks, Mike

PM me me your email and I'll send it to you Mike

Set of 1960 Post Boxes
 

If you have not seen, the REA auction has started recently and there are 9 complete 1960 Post Cereal Grape Nuts Flakes boxes with the different players all in one lot. Believe likely these are the same boxes that were sold roughly 10 years ago at a Mastro auction. What a nice lot. Been trying, so far unsuccessfully, to get a read on the production codes at the bottom of those boxes to verify exactly when the boxes were produced in 1960. Anyway, just thought I would point out this lot.

Promotion Timing
 

I think we figured out when the 1960 Post Cereal sports-card promotion boxes were issued. Fred McKie worked with Robert Edwards Auction (REA) and obtained the cereal packaging date codes for each of the 9 1960 Post Cereal sports-card boxes that they are auctioning in their current auction. These dates are all in the same general time frame that Kirk Robinson's box is. Those dates were:

Kirk's Johnny Unitas Box January 20, 1960 (small Grape Nuts Flakes box)

REA boxes:

Johnny Unitas January 21, 1960 (small box)
Al Kaline January 26, 1960 (small box)
Don Drysdale January 8, 1960 (small box)
Frank Gifford January 21, 1960 (small box)
Bob Cousy January 21, 1960 (small box)
Frank Gifford January 21, 1960 (small box)

Mickey Mantle March 9, 1960 (large box)
Harmon Killebrew December 1, 1959 (large box)
Bob Pettit December 1, 1959 (large box)

So based on these cereal production dates, believe we can say with a high degree of certainty that these cards came out around the beginning of 1960.

Production Dates
 

Great info Ken.

Scd article
 

Got my SCD today (Jan 4th issue) and was so pleased to see the magazine had published an article about the 1960 Post Cereal findings of our group.