Wirt Gammon remembers T206 and T205 in 1971

[trdcrdkid]

Here's a fun little item. Longtime hobby writer Wirt Gammon, who wrote for almost as many hobby publications as Lionel Carter did, had a column in The Ballcard Collector called "Gammon's Corner". In issue 58 (January 1971), Gammon wrote a column (scanned below) responding to fellow columnist John Stirling's suggestion in the previous issue that tobacco companies should start issuing baseball cards again, since cigarette advertising was about to be banned on TV starting January 1, 1971. Gammon, who was born in 1905, writes a bit about the history of cigarette insert cards before reminiscing about the popularity of T206 and T205, which came out when he was a child. He remembers finding T206s discarded in the street, and the excitement when the first T205s appeared. It's interesting that Gammon remembers that the cards "began to appear everywhere" when he was 7, which would have been in 1912; I suspect he is slightly misremembering his age at the time, though I'm sure there were still plenty of T206s and T205s around in 1912. Then he mentions somebody recently coming to him with a bunch of stuff from his attic that included several thousand T206s, plus some E254s (Colgan's Chips), T210s, and T330-2s. Oh, to have been around in those days with enough money to buy such finds.