Sweet Caporal question- how did you know what you were getting?

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Posted By: Todd (nolemmings)

Maybe everyone else knows this, but I sure don't.

It's 1911, and you go to the corner store to buy a pack of your favorite smokes-Sweet Caporals. You're also kind of into the white bordered baseball cards, and want to add to your collection. You buy a pack, and doh!, it's a gold bordered card--cool but not what you're after. Buy another pack--Doh!! it's a pin with a baseball player on it-careful kid, you'll put your eye out. One more time--Doh, its a disk with a picture of a domino on one side.

As I understand it, all of these were inserted in Sweet Cap packs in 1911. Were the packs marked, sized or in any any way differentiated so that you knew what was going to be inside?

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Posted By: Richard Dwyer

Make sure the tax stamp has 1909-1911 on it. Also check for overprinting. Should be 1910 or 1911 overprinting. The following info tells you what to look for on the pack & tax stamp overprinting:

150 SERIES Factory 25 2nd District VA
150 SERIES Factory 30 2nd District NY
150 SERIES Factory 649 1st District NY
350 SERIES Factory 25 2nd District VA
350 SERIES Factory 30 2nd District NY
350/460 SERIES Factory 25 2nd District VA
350/460 SERIES Factory 30 2nd District NY
350/460 SERIES Factory 42 4th District NC

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Posted By: Todd (nolemmings)

but I don't know if that tells me what to expect inside the pack--a card (t205 or t206), disk or coin, once I've determined that the pack is authentic and properly dated.

(Also, I really was trying to put myself back to 1911, when the packs were fresh, so you really didn't need to worry if they were from the right era).

Your list sparked a thought however. Looking at a half-dozen or so P2 pins here at work, I see they are all from Factory 42, NC, except for the Large Letters pin, which is from Factory 25, VA. Maybe the pins were not available in the NY factory packs, although obviously, my sample size is woefully too small to tell. I'll pull out the few domino disks I have and see if similar informaion is available on them---- I see from Lipset's book and the SCD guide that the backs state a NY factory. Maybe disks in NY and pins elsewhere.

Can any advanced collectors of these issues offer any info?

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Posted By: Richard Dwyer

The only Sweet Caporal boxes that had T205's were from Factory 25, 2nd. District VA; and Factory 42, 4th. District NC. You're right about the P2 factories. Domino discs were distributed in a four year period 1909-1912. No way to tell what is in a 1911 box unless it's a T206 factory number that T205 didn't come in.

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Posted By: The other One (Julie)

for the cigarettes...with perhaps some mild curiosity about what else you might find inside.

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Posted By: Richard Dwyer

http://www.oldbaseball.com/refs/factory.html

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Posted By: The other One (Julie)

..........(It not being 1911 anymore..)

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Posted By: brian p

To approach the question from a 1910 era customer perspective, I would assume that there might have been some sort of promotional display info that would have informed the customer what freebie they would be recieving.

Then again, I don't remember seeing any surviving examples of this...anyone seen anything like this?

Brian

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Posted By: The other One (Julie)

to see who was inside seems to have a lot of tradition behind it. If they didn't do it for us, why would they have dome it for them?

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Posted By: Jon Canfield

I'm a little late responding to this post as I was returning to NYC for another year of law school however... when writing the book and talking to many members of the board here, I left out the pins and discs for 2 reasons. #1, I couldn't figure out a way to tell what pack they would have appeared in. #2, I wasn't really sure they were ever packaged inside a pack. A large portion of us have seen the 1911 era slide/shell boxes. Now, can you imagine a pin fitting in there along with the 10 cigs and not crushing them?