Babe Ruth General Gum Sign/Display

[nolemmings]

Although I guess this could be a fantasy piece in the sense that this specific display was never used in 1934, I find it less and less believable that the product itself did not exist (Baseball Gum), and that the baseball pictures currently catalogued as R310s were not sold with that product. There is an undeniable tie between General Gum and Curtiss Candy–the addresses used for the plant and general offices/HQ both match up. It seems far-fetched to me that someone completely made up a display piece thinking it would be clever to make this connection in hopes that it would be discovered by savvy collectors down the road and falsely used to support claims of authenticity. I suppose it’s possible that Curtiss Candy initially thought to distribute the R310 pictures through its gum affiliate and that it generated prototype advertising that never hit the stores, opting instead to tie the pictures to its Butterfinger candy bars and only those candy bars. If so, I guess that could be construed as a “fantasy” piece in the same vein as phantom World Series tickets– actually from the period and real but never put into commerce.

Gary, while I appreciate your mock-ups and understand your point, these are not particularly persuasive to me. Your re-creation of how the display would appear, assuming it to be accurate, still shows the emphasized portion of the ad. All that seems “cut off” from my view is the second reference to the price of the gum at 1 cent, and the price is already shown prominently front and center, so there is no confusion there. The Ruth premium ad is fully visible. Some small amount of graphics is wasted I suppose, but you are assuming that the piece was only intended to be used as you constructed it. It easily could have been hung or displayed in other ways–there even appear to be staple holes in this example.

It is now known that “Baseball Gum” had some relationship to the distribution of these same pictures in Canada, through O-Pee-Chee. That was not learned until 1997--more than a half century after the fact. It was established by the discovery of one, flimsy, rather non-descript envelope wrapper, which made an offer very similar to the one present in this piece– gum and a picture for a penny. I say that to show that it doesn’t always take much to alter the hobby’s understanding of set origins, and people don’t necessarily bat an eye when information surfaces decades later. So the find of a possible display piece for R310 only this century is not that suspicious, to me anyway.

It is also known that there was a commonality or relationship between General Gum and OPC at the time, as they both issued the magic tricks non-sport set in the early 1930s. In addition, it is known that General Gum issued movie star cards with a mail-in offer for larger photos in 1933. The only thing I see missing is a direct correlation between Baseball Gum and the General Gum Inc., and that link is supplied by this display piece. Unless of course you believe that someone made it out of whole cloth (cardboard) with intent to deceive, and it’s just coincidence that all of these other facts align.