Vintage Racing?

[Bored5000]

Originally Posted by brian1961

Eddie, I'll check my Encyclopedia of Auto Racing Greats, by Robert Cutter, to see if there's any reason given why Freddie retired for the first time at 32.

Funny, I used an excellent story in Mr. Cutter's book to illustrate a point in my newly-released book on postwar regional / food issues, NEVER CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN. Yep, there was a story about early Ferraris that helped me with the key chapter on the 1953 Stahl-Meyer Franks Mickey Mantle!

I would have liked to do a chapter on the Lummis Peanut Butter Phillies. For the same reason you mention I decided against it. If it could be determined precisely how they were issued, I might have done one. What we needed was some former youngster from Philly who back in the day was "nuts about them" and made a lot of lifetime memories collecting them one-by-one to try to build a set. I never found such a person. Eddie, you know, there's a decent chance that the Lummis cards were available via both peanut butter containers and movie theater "free prize". Simply to get the word out to BUY MORE DELICIOUS LUMMIS PEANUT BUTTER!

Getting verbose again. Bye. ---Brian Powell

Great post, Brian. Maybe there was something else at play with regard to Fred Lorenzen's initial retirement, but i have read in the past that he was distraught at the death of close friend Fireball Roberts in 1964. Lorenzen ran only five races in 1967 and 11 races in '66 before retiring for the first time..

Author Art Garner came out with an amazing book in 2014 about the tragic 1964 Indianapolis 500 entitled "Black Noon: The Year They Stopped the Indy 500." The book is as good as the Amazon reviews would have one believe. One thing I did not realize until reading Garner's book was that the fiery crash at Charlotte that eventually claimed the life of Fireball Roberts occurred just six days before the Indy inferno that claimed the lives of Eddie Sachs and Dave MacDonald. Fireball Roberts clung to life for some two months after his crash at Charlotte.

During the final two months of his life, Roberts would occasionally have days during which he was relatively lucid. On such days, he repeatedly asked his wife and doctors who won the Indy 500 that year. Roberts' wife and doctors repeatedly told him that A.J. Foyt won Indy, but they never revealed to him that the race was marred by a massive fire or that Sachs and MacDonald perished in the race.

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Noon-Ye.../dp/1250017777

Retiring young was not completely unheard of among Cup drivers in the 1960s. Ned Jarrett was just 34 when he retired. I have seen various interviews with Jarrett over the years in which he expressed regret at retiring so young. At the time, many drivers believed that 35 was old for a racer just like it was for players in the stick and ball sports. Jarrett has said many times over the years that he wished he would have known that racers could still be competitive in their 40s and even their 50s.

I don't know if you saw this, but REA actually has a full set of Lummis Peanut Butter cards at auction right now. I figure those had to be assembled in 1949 and not in the decades that followed. PSA's population report only lists 13 total Lummis cards among all 12 players. I bought my Lummis Peanut Butter card (which used to be in Leon's collection) from long-time collector John Rumirez. As I exchanged PMs with Rumirez, he wrote me that he has been collecting for 40 years and still only has 9/12 cards in the Lummis Peanut Butter set.

There was a Lummis thread on here in the past in which a poster either remembered or was told many decades ago that the cards were distributed as a movie theater giveaway at the very least.

Last year's REA auction included a Richie Ashburn Lummis card (which is a rookie card for Ashburn). That card, while nicer than the Ashburn included in the set currently at REA, sold for $5,000 as a single card. I am interested to see where the REA set closes this year. Maybe I am way high or way low, but I'm guessing $10,000 for the set.

Lummis Peanut Butter Cards are rare as hell, but at least they are somewhat attainable to small-time collectors when they do show up. Felin's Franks cards are another great Philadelphia rarity, and they are completely out of my price range when they do show up. Huggins and Scott had a raw Felin's Franks card of Bobby Morgan that sold for $2,868 last year. REA currently has a Bobby Morgan Felin's Franks card at auction that is already at $1,200 with the buyer's premium. As I said earlier in the thread, that is one of the reasons I like chasing legendary rarities of racing cards or other non baseball cards.