Recent pickup, some cool stuff.

[steve B]

Finally have a pickup worth sharing. First one in a while.

It's going to be a bit long, and I'm deliberately burying the lead

A local auction had items from the estate of a Briggs family member, Yes, the E97 Briggs. No, I didn't score a boxful of E97s.

But I did get a travelling salesmans case with Briggs samples.




They had it listed as being from the late 50's, but I think that was based on a high school paper written by the guy about the history of the company. He only got a B because he didn't have enough sources.....

A bit of looking up and it seems they were competitors to Necco on wafers and sold a lot of candy to amusement parks and carnivals. OH, and Hospital brand cough drops, which they sold into at least the 60's despite having been in trouble with the feds over the name in the mid 40's. Apparently the brand could cause confusion about them being approved or recommended by hospitals.

Anyway, they Really did well with jellies.
Many of the boxes and extra boxes were samples of Jellies.



I figure the box and samples were maybe from the 1930's.
No, those aren't fake candy samples, that's actual Briggs candies from about 90 years ago.

One of the boxes held sample wafers Neccos direct competitor, and they sued each other over this exact packaging in the early 1920's



I knew about most of this from the typical iffy auction pictures.

One of the boxes held mostly wafer samples, with the first really cool thing.
Samples of what's labeled as 3/1 baseball. Generic baseball themed wafers. A pretty cool thing, and probably an unknown "set" of sorts.



Then the real prize I wanted the box for. This box of samples



Containing _ A wafer set with generic images but Player names.



And underneath A few sample packs of various things including "sport wafers"



It does not show any visible on the ends, so I don't know if it's full of baseball, or just random wafers in the sports wrapper.
It's come open, enough that if I decide to extract the samples from the package portion I can find out. For now I think the checklist would be complete at 13 subjects.

To me this is a new unknown set, but of exactly what? For sure not cards? Or are they?
Both my wife and I searched for any existing info and found nothing.
My wife thinks they didn't sell at all, which makes some sense because the package is much smaller than the regular wafer packs.
It's also possible that any that did sell were simply eaten.

Either way I'm pretty happy to have that stuff.

It also came along with a little bit of later ephemera from Briggs. The oldest thing being in the 20's and the rest probably 50's

[jbsports33]

Interesting Steve, very interesting - nice that some of the items are intact and some really odd items. I am sure many of these type items have not survived over the years and you have a nice collection that tells a great story - nice find!

Jimmy

[GasHouseGang]

Certainly rare, and possibly unique in the market. Definitely a niche collectible.

[ALBB]

thats a cool find, no doubt !

[D. Bergin]

Wow! Those are cool as hell, and amazing that they survived.

Whatever you do…do not soak!

[ValKehl]

Cool pickup, Steve! I've never seen anything like those baseball wafers.

[ruth-gehrig]

Now that's bad to the bone and finding stuff like this is super cool! Rare to have survived mouths and trash piles over the decades! Stuff is out there waiting to be uncovered

[Jobu]

Dang Steve, this is pretty incredible, great find. Thanks for sharing the whole group.

I love Gehrig's broken bat and Pepper Martin getting beaned.

I can definitely see these being the only examples in existence.

[Jay Wolt]

Steve fantastic haul
Love seeing stuff I've never seen before

[NiceDocter]

How do they taste????

[Leon]

Very cool pick up. I used to collect a lot of ancillary things to our cards and those are sure interesting... The wafers could be a set. They need to be graded LOL..

Congrats. That is awesome! Thanks for sharing.

[Webster]

Not that it’s a sure way to date the items, but what years were all 13 of those players in the majors?

[MikeGarcia]

Originally Posted by Webster

Not that it’s a sure way to date the items, but what years were all 13 of those players in the majors?

I'm leaning towards late 1933 or 1934. Martin was famously beaned in May of 1933. He hit for the cycle anyway.

[4815162342]

Amazing find! The preservatives in those wafers are also amazing!

[tiger8mush]

That is soooooo cool Steve!! Are you tempted to sample any of the samples?

"I felt it in my bones" haha!

Congrats and thanks for sharing!

[steve B]

Thanks Guys.

There's a box of what look like filled chocolates.... I've been eyeing them as they look perfect. No, I won't eat them.
My daughters reaction was that just looking at them felt like a tv show we used to watch where the two guys ate very old food. Like corn flakes from the 50's and stuff like that.

The wafers are probably like Neccos, Sugar Gelatin and vegetable gums the last two to bind the sugar together.
Barring contamination, sugar lasts pretty much until it clumps and even then it's a quality issue rather than it becoming inedible.

None of the Jellies look good in any way.

I haven't looked at the dates the players were all in the majors, but the Pepper beaning putting it in 33-34 makes sense.

Whoever was selling the licensing for player names and images in 33-34 in the Boston area did an amazing job. So many sets in that same time from many companies, some of them sort of related.