[sreader3]

1909.

The year ATC introduced the baseball men and the frying sized kids went wild.

The launch of T206 in the early days of summer of 1909 set-off a veritable frenzy among American boys. An August 9, 1909 article entitled “The Small Boy’s Mania” in the Charlotte Observer bore the subtitle “Pictures of ‘Baseball Men’ More Sought after than Gold,” and went on to describe the T206 craze thusly:

The amount of interest displayed by the small boys of the community over the pictures of National and American League baseball players that come, one in every pack, of Piedmont cigarettes, is remarkable. Since the beginning of summer, when the American Tobacco Company commenced putting the pictures in their packages of cigarettes, the small boy has been more or less of a nuisance by stopping young and old men as they walked along the street begging for “baseball men.” The collections have become a mania. Whenever a new shipment of cigarettes is opened, the small boy congregates around the stand and every purchaser is besieged, and not allowed to leave until the picture has been forced from him. Saturday, a frying-sized kid purchased $1 worth of cigarettes, and after securing the desired pictures, peddled the smokeables to the passers on the street. Often two packages of cigarettes were offered for five cents, but the pictures had already been extracted. The children match one another for the picture and the winner walks away exultant with the entire collection of his friends in his hands. The gambling amounts to guesswork. While the picture is flying in the air one of the boys calls the side it will fall on, face up or down. If in his guess he is correct, the picture goes to him, otherwise he has lost one of his own pictures.
More especially are the likenesses of Ty Cobb and Hans Wagner desired, and until a week ago only a few pictures of Cob [sic] had been found, two of these being in the possession of the Buford Hotel cigar stand. Last Thursday in a new shipment of cigarettes received at the Wilson Drug Store, on East Trade street, 13 pictures of Cobb were found in the first installment opened. The boys of the street went wild. Securing money from every available source they began purchasing from the W. L. Hand Drug Store. Before night over 3,000 cigarettes had been sold by one firm and on the streets 5-cent packages of cigarettes were being sold for as little as a cent apiece.