Thought I would share some info I found that I do not believe has been covered here, related to the 1921 Haffner’s Bread cards.
The cards were distributed by Haffner’s Star Bakery of Fort Wayne, Indiana. The bakery held a contest, with prizes distributed in the end to the kids who turned in the most player and manager cards with no duplicates. They were wrapped one per loaf, and although the card backs promote the company’s Big Tayto Loaf Bread, many of the newspaper ads stated the cards could also be found in their loaves of Hol-Tayto and American Maid Bread. The first ad claimed that $50.00 in various baseball gear would be awarded, but the following day’s ad promised $75.00 of such gear-- baseballs, bats, gloves and masks. A total of 43 prizes were to be awarded–they were displayed in the bakery’s Show Window throughout the promotion for the kids to see.
Here is a bullet point summary about the bakery's advertising– I will attach scans of some ads in a later post:
- The cards were first available on August 29, 1921, with the initial ad in the preceding day’s paper.
- On October 8, the bakery ad announced “The Big Baseball Prize contest will end in about two weeks”. Yet on October 22 the ad said that the “Baseball Star Campaign” was still going. Maybe the earlier ad was designed to drum up sales as kids raced to the finish line. Although the bakery advertised in the same paper throughout November, none of those ads I saw mentioned the baseball cards. In any event, the contest ended by December 1st, 1921, and the ad from that day told kids to bring in their holdings by December 3rd, after which prizes would be awarded on December 10. The ad on December 10 reaffirmed that prizes would be handed out then, and that all cards would be returned to those who submitted them, whether or not they won anything.
On a few occasions the newspaper had a blurb to announce a specific card would be appearing.
- Babe Ruth was available only one day from September 13-16, although I assume he could be found in day-old loaves.
- Ty Cobb was to be available the following week of September 19, although it’s unclear whether he too was a one day only card.
- Tris Speaker was available the following week of September 26, although again it is not clear whether he was a one day only card.
- There was a special contest for cards of John McGraw, with a prize issued on Saturday October 8, 1921 for whoever presented the most cards depicting him. The extra contest was announced in that Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday’s papers.
- Kid Gleason was not available until October 15, and perhaps only that day. On October 9, Haffner’s newspaper ads claimed that each day beginning Monday of next week, it would give a bat or ball to the boy who brought in the most pictures of the player in that day’s loaves, saying “Please note that each day will have a separate picture”. The prize was given at 5:30 p.m.
- Fred Williams’ card was inserted in loaves sold October 20, 1921.
- An ad on September 30 promised a free card the following day to “every boy” who visited the bakery, with no mention of whether every boy received the same or different players.
- Oddly, the ad on October 1, 1921 says that ‘We find that Nebraska has some enthusiastic Baseball Fans too” working on the contest. That’s a long way from Indiana.
Unfortunately, it was not stated anywhere how many different cards were available, so these ads do not tell us the set size--even though the first ad tells boys to save the pictures until they get a complete set. Still, we now have a distribution date to compare with other related sets using the E121 and W575 photos and captions.