The 1947 Homogenized Bond Bread inserts and Cards and Photos from the era with like and similar pictures.
PART TWO – Like and Similar Pictures on the Different Card Sets
Post #48 (June 8, 2009) of the net54baseball.com thread, “1947 BOND BREAD and its "imposters"....show us your cards ?,” shows the fronts of 12 square cornered cards. Eleven of these cards are pictures of either a movie star or cowboy(s), with the last, the sole sports card pictured, of golf and other sports champion Babe Zaharias. Also shown are two different card backs, each with printed words and parts of words, that when appropriately placed side-by-side (as was done in the post) display a full text reading across the two cards in 4 lines: “46 / TRADING CARDS / ASSORTED SUBJECTS / SPORTS – HOLLYWOOD – COWBOYS.” The right card back is rubber stamped “HESS SHOES.” The left back has no rubber stamping. The left card back has printed in small type near its bottom, an illegible name which this discussion and subsequent post will explain. Along the same line of text as the small printed name on the left card back, the right card back has printed the abbreviation “No.” followed by a not discernible 4 digit number. Though HESS SHOES is still a large shoe manufacturing company and had many stores scattered around the country at the time, the rubber stamping of “HESS SHOES” appears not dissimilar from rubber stamps not too frequently found on the blank backs of cards from many sets of the 1930s and 1940s. In those cases, the rubber stamp was applied to piggyback onto a larger card release of others as promotion of the rubber stampers' personal interests. For example, the name of an individual service station can be infrequently found rubber stamped on the back of a card from a general card issue of one gasoline brand or another.
The key that led me to identifying the source of the pictures printed on all of these card sets, as well as the photographs in the Team Photo Packs sold at the time in ballparks, was the similarity of the picture and design of the Babe Zaharias card to many of the cards in the 1947 Homogenized Bond Bread insert set, cards of other sets, and the glossy photos in Team Photo Sets. Unfortunately, of yet I have been unable to locate any images of the other sports cards in the 46 Trading Card set identified in Post #48.
I searched the internet for Babe Zaharias pictures and found that by 1947 this multi-sport champion had already been a sports news feature for more than 15 years.
BABE ZAHARIAS
Mildred Ella “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias: (1911-1956) excelled in golf, basketball, baseball and track and field. Her her first job from High School (she dropped out) was with the Employers' Casualty Insurance of Dallas, Texas, and though designated a “secretary,” she was solely employed to play basketball as amateur on the company's “industrial team.” She led it to win the AAU Basketball Championship in 1931. At the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, she three top medals in Track and Field - 2 gold medals (80-meter hurdles and javelin) and 1 silver (high jump). After the 1932 Olympics, she performed on the vaudeville circuit and traveled playing basketball including with Babe Dikrikson's All-American basketball team and the bearded House of David (commune).
On March 20, 1934, Didrikson pitched one inning in a major league baseball spring training exhibition game for the Philadelphia Athletics against the Brooklyn Dodgers. She gave up one walk and no hits. Two days later, on March 22, 1934, Didrikson pitched the first inning of a major league baseball exhibition game for the St. Louis Cardinals against the Boston Red Sox. It was reported that "Under tutelage of Burleigh Grimes, Dizzy Dean, and others she has learned to stand on the rubber, wind up like a big leaguer and throw a rather fair curve." The Red Sox scored three runs against Didrikson in the inning before she got Boston third baseman Bucky Walters to fly out to future Hall of Famer Joe Medwick in left field to end the inning. Didrikson was relieved at the start of the second inning by Cardinal pitcher Bill Hallahan. 400 fans were in attendance. Three days later, on March 25, 1934, she played for the New Orleans Pelicans against the Cleveland Indians, pitching two scoreless innings and lining out in her only plate appearance. Didrikson is still recognized as the world record holder for the farthest baseball throw by a woman. She also participated in multi-day straight pool matches.
By 1935, Didrikson began to play golf, a latecomer to the sport in which she became best known. Shortly thereafter, she was denied amateur status, and so, in January 1938, she competed in the Los Angeles Open, a PGA (Professional Golfers' Association) tournament. No other woman had competed against men in this tournament until Annika Sörenstam, Suzy Whaley, Michelle Wie and Brittany Lincicome almost six decades later. She shot 81 and 84, and missed the cut. In the tournament, she was teamed with George Zaharias, whom she married eleven months later. Babe Didrikson Zaharias became America's first female golf celebrity and the leading player of the 1940s and early 1950s. In order to regain amateur status in the sport, she could compete in no other sports for three years. She gained back her amateur status in 1942. In 1945, she had participated in three more PGA Tour events, missing the second cut of the first of them, and making the cut of the other two. As of 2018, she remains the only woman to have achieved this. Zaharias won the 1946 U.S. Women's Amateur Golf Championship. On June 13, 1947, she became the first American to win the British Ladies Amateur Championship, and that year (1947) won the Women's Western Opens.
Formally turning professional in 1947, Didrikson dominated the Women's Professional Golf Association and later the Ladies Professional Golf Association, of which she was a founding member. Zaharias had her greatest year in 1950 when she completed the Grand Slam of the three women's majors of the day: the U.S. Open, the Titleholders Championship, and the Women's Western Open, a feat that made her the leader on the money list that year. Also that year, she reached 10 wins faster than any other LPGA golfer, doing so in one year and 20 days, a record that still stands. She was the leading money-winner again in 1951, and in 1952 took another major with a Titleholders victory, but cancer prevented her from playing a full schedule in 1952–53. This did not stop her from becoming the fastest player to reach 20 wins (two years and four months). In remission, she continued to win, but reoccurrance of the cancer in 1955 led to her death in 1956.
ZAHARIAS PHOTO ON CARD
Of the numerous pictures and newspaper clipping photographs I viewed, the posed picture of Zaharias shown on the card in Post #48 is the best photograph of her to appear during the over 25 years she had been a multi-sport champion before her death. I located that posed Babe Zaharias picture on the website of the Smithsonian Institute. The picture is also in the New York Public Library's collection. The glossy photograph comes in 8” x 10” and 8” x 12½” (the extra 2½” is a blank, white space extension from one of the the short sides of the photo). Glossy photos can be found without Babe's name imprinted and printed in the same typeface as on the card in Post #48. Reprints are being offered on eBay and elsewhere for around $20.00 each.
The Smithsonian describes the picture as: (1) Title: Mildred 'Babe' Didrickson Zaharias, full-length portrait, facing front, swinging golf club, (2) Date Created/Published: 1947, and (3) Notes: Acme Photo, New York World-Telegraph and Sun Newspapers Photograph Collection No. 806457. The Smithsonian's New York World-Telegraph and Sun Newspapers Collection contains 1,000,000 photographs and negatives and was acquired in the middle to late 1950s after those publications went defunct.
In Post #199, member Jeremy W caught the copyright notice placed at the bottom of my May 7, 2020 Post #198. The following quote from the Smithsonian's website related to the 1947 ACME photo of Babe Zaharias clarifies a reason why many vintage cards have defied full identification. As the world's biggest collector of things, the Smithsonian says:
“Publication and other forms of distribution: May be restricted. The ACME archives was bought by CORBIS, which controlled the copying of ACME images physically housed in its archives in New York City. In 2016, CORBIS was, in turn, sold to Visual China Group (VCG), which arranged to have Getty Images be the exclusive distributor of CORBIS images outside of China.
“Neither VCG nor Getty Images controls the copying of ACME images housed in the Library of Congress. However, any copyright held by ACME that is still current would now be owned by VCG, administered by Getty Images. Getty Images can be contacted at:
http://gettyimages.com/customer-support
“In an attempt to determine if ACME registered any copyrights and if those copyrights were renewed, Specialists in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress searched the Copyright Office files. It was found that only a few images were registered for copyright and those copyrights were not renewed. However, the Library’s legal office has advised the Division that photographs published with proper copyright notices 95 years ago or less up until 1963 may be protected if the copyright was properly renewed, while works published after 1963 and unpublished photographs in the collection may be protected even if they were not registered with the Copyright Office.”
“Reproduction (photocopying, hand-held camera copying, photoduplication and other forms of copying allowed by "fair use") . . ..” The New York Public Library's website has a similar notice about ACME.
The 1947 Babe Zaharias picture appeared in the Decca Battery advertisement in the August 12, 1950 edition of “Saturday Evening Post.” That year (1950) was Babe Zaharias' best year, with the triple crown of women's golf added to her extensive record of victories.
A highly cropped version of the 1947 Babe Zaharias picture is on the 1990 Sports Illustrated for Kids, Series 1 Card #211.
Much more about the 1947 Homogenized Bond Bread 48 card bread package insert set and other sets with like and similar pictures will be posted shortly. Those discussions will not only explain what ACME is, but why some pictures on cards are darker than others and why others may appear more deteriorated. We are organizing the extensive amount of information obtained into a logical order and other additional information about the manufacturers, publishers and years of issue will be presented. “We” is the editorial “we.”
Copyright 2020, by Michael Fried, P.O. Box 27521, Oakland, California 94602-0521