Started with the 1951 issues, as a seven-year-old in an upstate NY town. My father was an avid bowler and took my brother and me with him to the alleys on Friday nights, giving us a buck each to amuse ourselves for several hours. Rather than hang out in the smokey, beer drenched lanes - yep, authorities unconcerned in those days - bro and I spent hours in the dark little mom&pop store next door. There, we mostly pored over comics, but the proprietor had what seemed like mountains of '51 Topps Redback panels and CMAS cards selling for two cents a pack with the stick of nasty caramel. For some reason, he had no Bowman product - maybe a Topps rep talked him into taking an order and he had trouble getting rid of the cards, so he passed on the Bowmans. Did not discover Bowman until the next spring when it seemed like every kid in the schoolyard had thick stacks of '51's and 52's for trade. Significantly, the only '52 Topps cards I can recall seeing were cut-down to match the smaller Bowman, so that the stack would be uniform. Intrigued by those few oddities, I spent that summer searching for Topps in local outlets, which all carried plenty of Bowman, but with no success. I have to think now that Topps may have had difficulty moving its initial offerings upstate and did not make a strong push there until 1953. That year, the competition really picked up, and I bought many packs of both company's product. The '53 Bowman were definitely more attractive and strongly preferred among my peers, although I think the '53 Topps were more plentiful in stores and their gum may have been better. As a Braves fan, I scoured stores that summer trying to find more '53 Bowmans, since I had only commons and never did unwrap a Spahn or Matthews - until some 30 years later. I think the '53 Bowmans for the most part disappeared from store counters in my town by mid-summer, prefiguring the downturn to come. And, by the next year, 1954, the Bowmans were much harder to find, while it seemed Topps was everywhere. Just my recollection from a limited perspective - I'm sure conditions may have been different in other areas, especially in the large cities.
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