[Kenmarks]

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??