1962 Post Cereal

As my '67 Topps chase reached the point where I was looking at only needing the high number SPs, I figured I could take up an oddball-ish set just for grins. I happened upon a Net54 member looking to dump a nice, big starter set of 1962 Post Cereal cards at a bargain price. Right up my alley.

I had a lot of these back in the day. In '62 my siblings were just about the age where they would want cereal for breakfast and I, as a pre-teen, loved the stuff. (Honey Comb and Alpha bits were my favored Post offerings) Add in the fact that there was a family down the street with about six boys junior high age and younger, and there were plenty of these floating around my block.

My goal here is just to collect the cards. I don't care at all whether or not they were cut straight, folded, or have kids' names written in the blank backs. These were trimmed from box backs with blunt, dull scissors for the most part and I think that adds to their charm.

The lot I bought was mostly American Leaguers. And there were plenty of stars in it.

I also found quite a few more at a card seller's store online and grabbed more cheap ones. That bunch got me this mantle.

I had a Pierce in my BP collection but I needed one for this binder so for a buck I grabbed this one. 

I also found some of the last inexpensive '67s that I needed and those will get posted soon. 

Charley Maxwell, aka Paw Paw...aka The Yankee Killer. He sure resembles some TV personality but I can't quite figure out who it is.

Anyway, I'll have a wantlist up and if you have any of these that are collecting dust, I'd be happy to swap for 'em.

Great Plains Greats set

I bought the Chief Bender card out of the 1975-76 Great Plains Greats set a month or so ago at one of the hotel card shows. Oddball sets can be fun and I got curious about the set and dug around online. I found a "complete" set cheap and bought it on a whim. It's full of Hall of Fame players and other big names. All the pics used are black and white.

Here's that Bender:
 

The seller (and a lot of other online sellers) list the set at 24 cards. But that's not technically correct. Hence the quotation marks around 'complete' in the first paragraph.

But first here is a look at some of the cards that I received. They come in groups of eight with each group in a different color, both front, and back. The artwork that is printed behind the players' name is different for each color as well.

The Allie Reynolds and Bob Feller appear to be different shades of blue but I think that's just a quirk of the printing process.

Carl Hubbell, star of the 1934 All-Star Game.

Walter Johnson and Dave Bancroft. Two very serious guys.

The green group has three of my favorite photos in it. Yogi, Cool Papa Bell, and Roger Maris.

The backs have a few brief essentials and a write-up, brief stats and an ad for the set's sponsor, Sheraton Hotels. Each color group has a different Sheraton. The back colors are a variation of the fronts..the red cards have purple-ish reverse accents.

Green fronts got a darker shade on the back...

Blue fronts got a lighter shade...

One eBay seller says the cards were distributed mostly in Iowa. But the Sheraton hotels listed in the ads were in Omaha, Nebraska and Wichita, Kansas, so who knows? These cards are larger than standard modern cards which will make storing them a problem. They are only a whisper wider than the pre-57 cards from Topps so I may try using the 8-pocket pages. Here's one with a standard card for comparison.

I mentioned that sets are usually listed as complete at 24 but there were two groups of nine cards each that were also distributed which brings the total to 42 players. The additional 18 cards were not Sheraton sponsored but carry an ad for NU SASH windows, a company that now seems to be active across the MidWest.

There are also some that I have found with a promo blurb for the Great Plains Sports Collectors Association. I can't find any reference to that group now and I'm also unsure of which cards carried the back promoting it. I'm fairly certain it was the last two (highest numbered) groups but that's just a guess. That grouping also contains the Mickey Mantle card. I might dig around on eBay and COMC and try to puzzle it all out but I'm not sure it's a big deal.

Here is the 42 card checklist. I've coded them in the colors that are found on the front.

1 Bob Feller             
2 Carl Hubbell             
3 Jocko Conlan             
4 Hal Trosky             
5 Allie Reynolds            
6 Burleigh Grimes            
7 Jake Beckley            
8 Al Simmons           
9 Paul Waner            
10 Chief Bender            
11 Fred Clarke            
12 Jim Bottomley            
13 Dave Bancroft            
14 Bing Miller            
15 Walter Johnson            
16 Grover Alexander            
17 Bob Johnson            
18 Roger Maris           
19 Ken Keltner            
20 Red Faber            
21 Cool Papa Bell            
22 Yogi Berra            
23 Fred Lindstrom            
24 Ray Schalk              
25 Lloyd Waner            
26 John Hopp            
27 Mel Harder            
28 Dutch Leonard            
29 Bob O'Farrell            
30 Cap Anson            
31 Dazzy Vance            
32 Red Schoendienst            
33 George Pipgras          
34 Harvey Kuenn            
35 Red Ruffing            
36 Roy Sievers            
37 Ken Boyer            
38 Al Smith            
39 Casey Stengel            
40 Bob Gibson
41 Mickey Mantle
42 Denny McLain

There are also two unnumbered checklists that cover only the #s 1-24. They can be found in either red or blue.

Here (scan from TCD) is what the checklists look like. The back had a 'Buy the set' coupon:

And from COMC and The Trading Card Database comes scans for the alternate(?) backs. I found a couple with the club promo...

....but mostly I see them with the NU SASH advertising back.

If I could find the #25-42 cards as a group I might be inclined to go after them but as singles, with the Mantle going for $10 or so, I'll pass for now.

The Pause That Refreshes

Taking a quick break at the halfway mark of my 10 things posts. I finished off this page in my 1961 binder over the weekend when the Yogi card arrived. An interesting (to me) page. Lots of yellow/red name/team blocks here. With a bit of blue and an orange outlier thrown in. Also lots of star power here with Kaline and Maz in addition to Berra who is at Yankee Stadium as is Turk Lown.

Lown was nearing the end of an 11-year career, mostly as a reliever and it was one of his better ones. Dick Ellsworth had a handful of very good seasons in a rollercoaster career. This pic was used again for his 1962 card.

I had never really associated the Ray Barker in this set with the 'Buddy' Barker on the Yankees when I lived up there in the late 60s. Same guy. He had a long minor league career and had a short stint with the Orioles in 1960 before re-appearing with the Yanks later in the decade. My original copy was extremely miscut so I recently upgraded it to this one.

Looks like Maz was photographed in Wrigley. Stobbs as well (he was with the Cards in '58 so it's possible). Stobbs pitched 15 seasons, mostly for the Red Sox and Senators. Coot Veal's name was always worth a second look as a kid. His real name is Orville Inman Veal.


The Braves team card is in the spot it would have been had Topps not messed up and mis-numbered it. They gave it #426 on the checklist but the back has #463 as does Jack Fisher's card. Sticking it in the 'correct' slot was a simple solution for me.

Those team card backs with pitchers W-L versus the other teams provided me with hours of entertainment. I'd wonder why Spahn could have such good results against the league but go 1-5 against the Pirates. Bob Buhl beat the Bucs four times but the rest of the staff could only win five? Then I'd probably remember that the Pirates won the pennant and I'd go look at the rest of the NL team cards I had to see how they fared against the champs. A great time to be a kid with your cards.

'61 All Stars....Done

I've been off the grid for a week or so. Attending to real world things can be hard.

But while that was going on some 'stuff' came in the mail and I'll try to post it over the next week or so. First up, the last two cards from Topps' 1961 MVP subset. Yogi Berra's card was one of the more costly of the bunch and I bid on more than a few before I picked this one up. I like how the photo is cropped so that his jersey sort of resembles the point of home plate at the bottom. I'm sure that was unintentional but it's sort of cool nonetheless.

Yogi's recent passing brought him into the news quite a bit and a lot of the stories centered around his personality and his always quotable tongue. But he won THREE MVP awards in the '50s. Here is a portion of Yogi's page on the Hall of Fame's website:

In addition to his colorful persona, what made Yogi so great was that he was one of the most feared hitters the game had ever seen. Teammate Hector Lopez said “Yogi had the fastest bat I ever saw. He could hit a ball late, that was already past him, and take it out of the park. The pitchers were afraid of him because he'd hit anything, so they didn't know what to throw. Yogi had them psyched out and he wasn't even trying to psych them out”. What was even more amazing was that when he donned the “tools of ignorance”, he had a reputation as being one of the best in the business behind the plate as well, as his manager Casey Stengel praised “Why has our pitching been so great? Our catcher that's why. He looks cumbersome but he's quick as a cat”.

When I picked up the Berra card I thought the subset was complete. But I soon realized that I had crossed Phil Rizzuto off the checklist but his card was missing from the binder. I was 99.9999% sure that I had bought one early on in my pursuit of the set but I sure couldn't find it. I went thru every box I could lay my hands on and then remembered that checking my purchase histories on various sites was a lot easier than shuffling thru stacks of cards. No Rizzuto purchases appeared so I wrote it off to loss of brain cells and picked one up cheap on COMC.

I never saw Rizzuto play but his prime was right in my Dad's wheelhouse as a fan and he was always talking Rizzuto up. I knew him as the Yankees' broadcaster and I always enjoyed him. He had a lot of stories and sometimes the game we were watching took a back seat to some tale of a Joe DiMaggio hit or something.

He played eleven full seasons as the Yankee shortstop. Prior to a three year service hitch during WWII he hit .304 and .284 in two seasons the Bronx. When he returned his only year to hit above .275 was his MVP year of 1950 when he hit .324 with a .418 OBP. That's sixty points above his career batting average.

With the '61 MVP subset done I'm in the market for another goal but I may wait until I clean up the 1960 set. I'm nearing the end of that one.