Pins and Needles

Every once in a while I pull my riker mount cases off the wall and change out some pins. These three are new and are gonna go in my vintage pin display.

I like all things Spahn as I've noted several times. This pin was given to fans on a night honoring the great lefty. It came just two months after he took part in one of the great pitching duels in modern baseball.

I was also happy to add this small PM10 of Don Newcombe.


This Browns pin is not destined for the display, at least not yet. It'll have a spot on my St; Louis Browns cap for a while. I wore that cap to The Maple Leaf, Houston's best (only?) hockey bar last night to catch Game One of the Stanley Cup finals. I wore it to rep my best friend who is a Blues fan even though I'm not really rooting for either team. As expected it was packed and rowdy (in a fun way) last night. My boys and I enjoyed it as always.

This one, like the other two, has surface scratches but stuff like that just adds character. 


Three cheap additions to my pin collection. Now all I need is the ambition to pull down those displays.

Guy's Chips Pinbacks from the 60s

I stumbled across these things one night on eBay and did a little research. Guy's Snacks has been in business for almost 80 years. They were founded in Kansas City are still based in the area.

The pins are from a baseball promotion that lasted through the first half of the 60s. The first pins were distributed in chip bags in 1962 and all MLB teams were included. Over the course of the next five years, four different 'series' of pins were issued. They skipped 1963 (or kept distributing the '62 pins) and had different color combos each year for all big league teams in 64, '65 and '66.

No official logos or colors were used and not all the teams had pins with logos at all. A few simply stated "A (team) Fan". Others use a generic player picture and whatnot.

I was easily able to find three of the four Orioles pins. The different years had different undersides and that makes it easier to differentiate the pins than learning the funky colors for your team. The 1962 pins were blank-backed. That is the year I'm lacking for the Orioles. The one above was the first one I picked up. It's from 1966. Note the year is indicated on the back.

These things are small. Not much bigger than a dime.

Lots of the pins I found are printed with a color 'shifted' as you can see with that '66 pin.

Next, the 1964 (no year on reverse) and '65 pins.

The '64 is my favorite as the colors are (sort of) closer to the actual Orioles colors.

I've yet to see a 1962 Orioles pin. I saw an old listing for a "1962" on an auction house site and I think it was a mislabeled '64 and there was no picture of the back. I'll keep digging.

These are fun. Old, ugly, odd....right up my alley!

1922 Kolbs Bakery Bender Pin

Charles Bender loved baseball and after his major league (and Federal League) days had ended in 1917 he pitched and managed in the minors before returning to the big leagues as a coach for several organizations. Along the way, he also coached the US Naval Academy team for four years.

In 1922 he was managing the AAA International League's Reading (Pa.) Aces and took a regular turn on the mound. He threw 183 innings at the age of 38 and had some pretty impressive numbers. That same year the Kolb Baking of Philadelphia issued this small pin as part of an ongoing set that continued into 1923. The pins promoted Kolb's Mothers' Bread. 32 different pins are known and the ACC classification is PB4.

The pins are small. I took this picture to show some perspective:

Bender is not the only well-known name in the set. Al Schacht aka 'The Clown Prince of Baseball' is also included. I have problems taking glare-free pics with my phone and I'm too lazy to dig out my digital camera so I'm including a shot from an online auction of three other PB4s.

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EDIT...In the comments, Fuji asked if there was any info on how these were distributed. I had spent a bit of time poking around previously but hadn't found this until I played around with different search terms:

This is a store display item that was auctioned thru Goodwin Auctions' site in 2014. The text description implies that the pins were distributed with the packages of bread themselves. Here is the text from the auction description:

"In 1922 and 1923 Kolb’s Bakery, makers of Mother’s Bread in Reading, Pennsylvania produced a set of small discs which were included with loaves of bread as a sales premium. The Reading International League entry was known as the Aces in 1922 and changed to the Keystones in 1923. Another significant change for 1923 was the departure of Chief Bender who had served as the team’s player/manager the previous team. Thirteen of Reading’s 20 players on the 1923 roster would log time in the majors. To help promote the collectors’ disks, Kolb’s Bakery created these marvelous store displays, showing all the players in the set, while silently teasing children to get their mom’s to buy Mother’s Bread. We can only assume the promotion met with marginal success, considering the set was abandoned after a mere two years"

I Love a Mystery

Back in May I posted this little Billy Pierce pin but I had no idea at the time of what it was. 

It looked to me to be just some sort of unofficial, unauthorized junk pin and I hadn't paid it much mind since I found it in a box of other junk pins on a dealer's table. 

But since there were a couple of Pierce pins on my want list I continued to run my eBay search for 'Pierce pin' and lo and behold one day this appeared:

I bid a few dollars and I won. So it turns out to have been a Comiskey Park giveaway from 1996. As the backing 'card' shows, the Pierce was one of four given away that season. I'm happy to find out it is a more or less 'legit' collectible. 

A closer look at the 'card' shows that this particular one may have originally held the Ted Lyons pin. The info given shows 'future' giveaway dates including the Pierce pin nite. The Pierce pin pictured on the 'card' is slightly different from the finished product. The 'ribbon' is set on an angle on the real pin and it includes Pierce's full name. The photo used on the pin had the background seen on the 'card' version cropped out. 

So nothing earth shattering here but to a player collector I think it's good to know a piece has some background other than just being a random junk box artifact. And here is a scan of the backer card without the pin attached. It has the weight and feel of thick paper, about the same as those manila binder section dividers.

Billy Pierce 1952 Hawthorne Mellody pin

This item has been on my radar for a long time. I might as well call it a 'white whale' because while it really wasn't very expensive it sure didn't surface very often.

I didn't know the story of the Hawthorn-Mellody Dairy until I searched for the info and found that the company had folded in 1992 and the background of it's ending are pretty sad. The Chicago Trib laid it all out in this 1994 article.

Here is the info and a couple of interesting pictures I found on a six year old auction listing via Google:

1952 Hawthorne Mellody "Club of Champs" White Sox Players Pin Set With Beanie. In 1952 the Hawthorn-Mellody dairy company started a program for kids called the "Club of Champs." The club was known for charitably bringing inner city kids of the Midwest on field trips to the company's sports museum, their children's zoo and their dairy operations. A number of club premiums were issued, but none have proven to be as collectable as their PF7 set of 1-3/8" wide litho pins. This set included in its number ten different sepia photo pins of the top players of the Chicago White Sox, and all ten of the desirable player pins are included here, ranging in grade from VG/EX to NM, averaging EX/MT. All are still mounted to a rare example of the club's original brown beanie cap, complete with a painted imprint on the facing that reads, "Hawthorn-Mellody - Club of Champs" (EX). An 8-1/4" x 10-1/4". This is such a scarce issue you will be hard pressed to find it mentioned in any guide, indicating that these may have only been available at the museum itself, given out as souvenirs of the tour.

Alfred E. Smith 1928 campaign button

To a low level political pin collector like me a cheap and not-very-scarce pin like this one is a treasure. The real collectors deal in high level stuff while all I really want to do is pick up something from as many different presidential campaigns as possible. So something that still looks good 86 years after it was produced is pretty special.

Alfred E. "Al" Smith was the Democratic nominee in 1928. He was the four term New York governor and was known as a reformer and staunch opponent of Prohibition. As a Catholic (the first ever Catholic Presidential hopeful) he was able to gain support of the large contingent of Catholic women who had never held the right to vote previously. But this was counterbalanced by a large block of voters who distrusted him based on fears that the Pope would dictate U.S. policy if Smith was elected.

Running against Herbert Hoover in 1928, a time of national prosperity under Republican administrations, Smith was soundly defeated in the general election. Franklin Roosevelt succeeded Smith as New York governor and in 1932 as the Democratic nominee. Smith and Roosevelt, once friends and allies, fell out over Smith's criticism of Roosevelt's New Deal initiatives. Smith also resented his treatment by Roosevelt when FDR served as governor from 1929 to 1932.

Smith's opposition to FDR was so strong that he supported the Republican candidates in the presidential elections of 1936 and 1940. After he was defeated in '28 he became the president of Empire State, Inc., the corporation that built and operated the Empire State Building. He died in 1944.

Small Item, Quick Post

That's not a card (although the cropped pic makes it look like one) that's a Billy Pierce lapel pin. I found it at a show earlier this year. The dealer was one of those guys who has pins and patches and I'm a sucker for both.

I bought about half a dozen pins for $10 and this was one of them. I've seen the exact same style pin with a different player's picture on eBay. It's advertised as 'vintage' and I guess it is if you consider 2002 to be vintage. I guess it's all in your perspective.

Orioles Pinbacks

I have blogged about (and likely put people to sleep with) my collection of presidential campaign pins. I've got just about as many sports related pins and a nice display of some of them in my office. Most of them are mass produced pinbacks and buttons and probably not worth scanning and blogging about. But I do have a few that I really love and do have some value, if only sentimental.

The two pinbacks above are of the type fans used to buy at concession stands and at souvenir shops like Manny's Baseball Land in the Bronx. I can't remember where I got these two but it was likely at a long ago memorabilia show.

The bottom one contains the '1970 American League Champs' inscription which leads me to believe it was a World Series souvenir from that year. The top one doesn't have any dating but it so closely resembles the other that it almost has to be from that same time-frame  It had ribbons attached to it identical to those on the other one but they had deteriorated to the put that they crumbled nearly into dust when I took it off my display to scan.

My other treasured items in this vein are my Oriole World Series and All Star Game press pins. I've got those stashed away in a safe place and one day soon I'll pull them out and show them off.