Finally have a pickup worth sharing. First one in a while.
It's going to be a bit long, and I'm deliberately burying the lead
A local auction had items from the estate of a Briggs family member, Yes, the E97 Briggs. No, I didn't score a boxful of E97s.
But I did get a travelling salesmans case with Briggs samples.
They had it listed as being from the late 50's, but I think that was based on a high school paper written by the guy about the history of the company. He only got a B because he didn't have enough sources.....
A bit of looking up and it seems they were competitors to Necco on wafers and sold a lot of candy to amusement parks and carnivals. OH, and Hospital brand cough drops, which they sold into at least the 60's despite having been in trouble with the feds over the name in the mid 40's. Apparently the brand could cause confusion about them being approved or recommended by hospitals.
Anyway, they
Really did well with jellies.
Many of the boxes and extra boxes were samples of Jellies.
I figure the box and samples were maybe from the 1930's.
No, those aren't fake candy samples, that's actual Briggs candies from about 90 years ago.
One of the boxes held sample wafers Neccos direct competitor, and they sued each other over this exact packaging in the early 1920's
I knew about most of this from the typical iffy auction pictures.
One of the boxes held mostly wafer samples, with the first really cool thing.
Samples of what's labeled as 3/1 baseball. Generic baseball themed wafers. A pretty cool thing, and probably an unknown "set" of sorts.
Then the real prize I wanted the box for. This box of samples
Containing _ A wafer set with generic images but Player names.
And underneath A few sample packs of various things including "sport wafers"
It does not show any visible on the ends, so I don't know if it's full of baseball, or just random wafers in the sports wrapper.
It's come open, enough that if I decide to extract the samples from the package portion I can find out. For now I think the checklist would be complete at 13 subjects.
To me this is a new unknown set, but of exactly what? For sure not cards? Or are they?
Both my wife and I searched for any existing info and found nothing.
My wife thinks they didn't sell at all, which makes some sense because the package is much smaller than the regular wafer packs.
It's also possible that any that did sell were simply eaten.
Either way I'm pretty happy to have that stuff.
It also came along with a little bit of later ephemera from Briggs. The oldest thing being in the 20's and the rest probably 50's