1947 BOND BREAD and its "imposters"....show us your cards ?

abctoo · #1 05-19-2020, 04:22 AM

Thanks, David. I could see no better when I tried to blow up those box pictures. Perhaps, someone out there who has a box or other picture of the indicia would help us out by posting a scan? David, the Sport Star Subjects set box issues are not new to you. For example, in Posts #123 and #126 of 08-02-2016, you pictured a similar box for the "Navy Ships" set, that set and promotional material of it. Those pictures clearly show the box and promotional item are inscribed with the name of A.J. Wildman & Son of New York. It would have been easy to let it go at that. Your posts also explained why that was not the solution to identifying the Sport Star Subjects set.

I am a collector, but not just a collector of baseball cards. My analysis of what the box indicia say comes from when I was a teenager in the 1960s starting to build a postal history collection including 19th Century congressional free franking covers. I am just now in the process of selling that collection off. That meant I had to learn how to decipher many a scrawled hand- written signature that on its face appeared unreadable. I still cannot get them all, even though complete alphabetical lists and chronological lists of each two year session of Congress are readily available. Just like many of the sets and their cards lumped together under the "Bond Bread" label, we have pictures of some and descriptions of others, but that is insufficient to even adequately describe that we can hold in our hands or even see.

The next post in this thread of my articles on Bond Bread and associated sets will identify the copyright holder of the sports pictures shown in the many of those sets, and how that company not only had the facilities to reproduce 7,000 to 10,000 glossy photographs from a single negative in a day, but handled 100s, if not 1,000s of negatives daily, routinely distributing box loads of prints by train, truck and other methods. The attribution of the Team Photo Packs sold in ballparks will be made to that company based on the empirical evidence gathered, even though none of us saw what happened and we have no contracts or invoices identifying anything.

The 1948 Bowman set includes a cropped version of at least one of the pictures used in the 1947 Homogenized Bond Bread package insert set. That's 1948 Bowman #43 Bruce Edwards. Does the counter-top sign I posted yesterday which indicates each large loaf Bond Bread package would have both a Bond Bread card and bubble gum inside mean that the 1947 Homogenized Bond Bread package insert set should considered the rookie set of the Bowman Company? Even if it were the same gum as Bowman's, I don't think so. But anyone out there can help in identifying the sets by posting any information or comments they might have about the question of whether there was bubble gum inside the Bond Bread packages.

Thank you very much,

Mike

tedzan · #2 05-19-2020, 08:58 AM

Mike

The source for the images in the original 1947 BOND BREAD cards (issued Summer 1947)�.1947 TIP TOP BREAD, subsequent
similar cards (issued circa 1949), 1948 and 1949 BOWMAN cards, etc. are from the Major League (and Minor League) Stadium
issued Team Photo packs (examples shown here).
I have traced the source of these Photos to the Harry M. Stevens Publishing Co., who produced the Major (and Minor) League
Yearbooks since the early 1920's.

Some examples of the 1947 and 1948 Team Photo packs...�

Harry M. Stevens Publishing Co.

TED Z

T206 Reference
.

abctoo · #3 05-19-2020, 12:20 PM

Ted, you're are sure going in the right direction and know your stuff. In 1923, ACME Newspictures Service was founded to take over much of the Scripps' newspaper chain and syndicate's collection, processing and distribution of the newsphoto side of the business. What ACME does and how they got there is a longer story. The impact of ACME was glossed over in the discussions in other net54 ball threads about which cards of the Bond Bread Jackie Robinson special set are rookie cards. Those threads used the caption on ACME's photo pictured on one of those cards to establish it could not have been issued before 1949. For use in this thread, I am including here from one of those threads the photos of the card, the front of the ACME photo and its back which provided the details. Unfortunately, those pictures were posted before photobucket starting overprinting pictures and now have that overprint. If anyone can post them without photobucket's overprint, many of us reading this thread, as well as those engaged in the other threads, would be much appreciative. Thanks, Mike

abctoo · #4 05-20-2020, 01:40 AM

Here's some information from Wikipedia about Harry M. Stevens, the publisher of the scorecard shown two post above:

"Harry Mozley Stevens {AKA Hotdog man} (14 June 1855 � 3 May 1934) was a food concessionaire from England who has been variously attributed as the inventor of the hot dog, but has nevertheless been credited with being America's foremost ballpark concessionaire. In 1887 he founded Harry M Stevens Inc., a stadium concessions company which was based in Cranbury, New Jersey until it was acquired by Aramark on December 12, 1994. Harry Stevens was born in London in 1855 but had connections to Litchurch in Derby, England. He emigrated to Niles, Ohio in the 1880s.

"On arrival in the States, he became obsessed with baseball and quickly made his mark by designing and selling the sport's first scorecard - a design still in use to this day. By 1900, Stevens had secured contracts to supply refreshments at several Major League ballparks across the US. He also began to sell scorecards to fans with the phrase: "You can't tell the players without a scorecard."

"Stevens is credited with telling the story that at the home opener of the New York Giants on a cold April day in 1901 there was limited demand for ice cream. He decided to sell German sausages known as 'dachshund sausages.' When the staff ran out of the wax paper on which the sausages were traditionally served Stevens had one of his employees purchase some buns and had the staff place the hot dogs in the buns, creating what became known today as the hot dog. A cartoonist, recording the event, was reputed to have been unable to spell dachshund, so wrote hot dogs instead. The family has since acquired the original cartoon and has preserved it."

Before the company was sold in 1994, if any one of us walked up to any big league ballpark in the country, a hawker would try to sell us one of Stevens' scorecards. If we bought any food from a concessionaire, we bought food from the Stevens Company. Like the Coca-Cola and Cracker Jacks Stevens sold, the company did not make the Team Photo Packs. Think about it. If the 48 card Bond Bread set was based on Team Photo Packs, where did the four pictures of the boxers come from? Something to think about.

abctoo · #5 05-28-2020, 12:07 AM

The 1947 Homogenized Bond Bread inserts and Cards and Photos from the era with like and similar pictures.

APPENDIX A – Part One (Working)

The “1947 BOND BREAD and its "imposters"....show us your cards ? “ title of the net54ball thread started in 2009 by Ted Zanidakas got right to the point. At that time, numerous cards with pictures similar to the 48 cards of the 1947-48 Homogenized Bond Bread package insert card set had been misidentified as belonging to that set. The size of these other cards did not matter, nor did questions about whether they had rounded or square corners, nor did the fact that some had printed or rubber-stamped text or pictures on the back, nor did the thickness or toning of the paperstock on which they were printed. Now after a dozen years, we find that the convenience to the card marketplace for an easy identifications of can have value has fully distorted proper attribution of many of these cards. Many of them, including the cards of 1947-48 Homogenized Bond Bread package insert set, come from sets that are quite scarce, if not downright rare.

The purpose of this Appendix is not to put names on these sets. That will be done in the body of this article as its parts are posted. Rather, this Appendix is an attempt to identify all of the issues that have been attributed in someway or another as a “1947 Bond Bread “ card or set. YOUR HELP IS NEEDED! Whether you agree or disagree with what is written in this appendix, please participate by posting in the thread your comments, criticisms and especially scans of any cards not already pictured that come from any set that could be misdescribed as “Bond Bread.” You will be helping us all. Even just the posting of a scan of one of these missing cards adds to the pool of knowledge. While the quantities issued of some of these various sets may be high, few cards have survived. Please, if you can just post any picture of one of these cards (front and back) by itself, you will create a record so that others years from now won't have to start all over again when perhaps the specific card you have is no longer available.

The magnitude of the 1947-1948 Homogenized Bond Bread package insert issue demonstrates that General Baking with its Bond Bread (first baked in 1915) product promotion was no new comer to advertising. How many cards were issued can be be derived from a pre-War Bond Bread blotter promotion, which included the following blotter:

A million loafs of bread baked daily by 1940. If all loafs had one of the 48 cards of the 1947-48 Homogenized Bond Bread packet insert card, that's 1,000,000 cards used each day. At least, thirty million a month could have been inserted from about April 1947 into perhaps March 1948, with the promotion increasing the month volume of Bond Bread sales. That could be over a billion cards! Where they are? We do not know. Very few have turned up in over 70 years. Most of the known cards that can be accurately attributed are in the hands of those who took them out of the bread packages. When WWII started, the Bond Bread blotter promotion was shifted to picturing Navy Airplanes, a theme that was carried over into its then ongoing matchbook issues. Post-War, the blotter program shifted to picturing “Modern Miracles” and related topics. The 1947-1948 Homogenized Bond Bread package insert set appears to have been its next major promotion. What it did between 1948 and 1950 is not fully clear. We do know that beginning in 1947 Bond Bread began giving away the 12-13 (or more?) cards of its special Jackie Robinson set and that promotion continued to at least 1949. The Jackie Robinson 1947-48 Homogenized Bond Bread packet insert card would have been issued in 1947 to capitalize on the other Jackie Robinson giveaways and would be missed if not immediately available to fans. In 1950-1951 Bond Bread sponsored Hopalong Cassidy on the radio and issued 2x3 inch Hopalong Cassidy cards, one to each bread package like it had done with its 48 sports card set in 1947-48. Note that the bread package seal pictures Hopalong Cassidy. Over 30 bread package seals were issue, each with an individual number starting with the number "1."

To not overload an individual post, this Appendix is being split into parts, and will continue with the posting of Part Two.

Please respond with anything you might want to say or show. Such contributions will be welcomed by all of us. Posting pictures is even better.

Copyright 2020, by Michael Fried, P.O. Box 27521, Oakland, California 94602-0521

phikappapsi · #6 05-28-2020, 06:56 AM

Michael - fun to see you diving in. Can I ask a simpleton's question?

Why are you attempting to (or perhaps successfully) copyrighting message board posts? I cannot for the life of me envision a scenario where someone is going to attempt to steal your intellectual property for their own gain, on a relatively obscure 70+ year old bread/baseball crossover set.

feels a bit unnecessary. especially since most of the info you've provided has been aggregated from already publicly available documents. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the work/effort you're putting in, but we all have google (and Ted) to tell us this information.

abctoo · #7 05-28-2020, 10:05 AM

In the late 1960s, I acquired a lot of ancient holed cast coins of Korea from the estate of the grandchildren of a missionary who brought them back to the United States in the late 1870s. I spent over two years researching and identifying more than 3,700 hundred different ones. Only about 10% of them were known from the period of the several centuries they covered. I even make detailed drawings. Besides my extensive independent research, many collectors provided invaluable information and incite on the subject. I had thought we all understood that the work was soon to be published for benefit of us all, with the contributors receiving free copies of the final product. At the request of Edgar Mandel of Coral Gables, Florida, who claimed to have some significant information, I sent a near final working draft. In response, he published it as its author and offered it for sale at a high price. None of us, not even I, received a free copy for our contributions.

Copyright 2020, by Michael Fried, P.O. Box 27521, Oakland, California 94602-0521

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