January Pickups

[toppcat]

I have heard from kids or nephews of at least three Zabel Brothers employees as a result of my blog and all of them indicated that sheets were brought home for them to play with and that in most instances they cut them down themselves.

Here's a comment I got a while ago on my Zabel Brothers post, I have received similar message from other family members as well to this effect:

"Bowman baseball cards were printed by Zabel Brothers Co., Inc., at 5th and Columbia Avenues in Philadelphia. Later the same company printed the Topps cards. My grandfather William E. Zabel, Sr. was the President of the company and my uncle William E. Zabel, Jr., was the Vice President. The company's plant was quite large and they had maybe three dozen presses of various sizes and vintages. I seem to remember being told that it was the largest printer in Philly.

I was 8 years old in the summer of 1951 and my grandfather made a present to me of a full set of uncut sheets of the 1951 Bowman baseball cards which I thumb-tacked to my bedroom walls in our summer house in Ocean City, NJ. He gave me full sets of sheets of all Bowman cards through 1959 or 1960. I kept them in my closet along with individual cards (Bowman and Topps) that I also collected and traded with friends.

The Bowman cards were printed on a German-made multi-color press (I think it was a Heidelberg)from zinc plates, one for each of 4 ink colors. Before printing actually began. the press ran a sheet through each color, one at a time. I once had a full set of sheets of the 1953 Bowman cards of 1 color each (yellow, blue, magenta and black I think).

Like so many of us, my mother tossed all of my collection into the trash one year when I was in college, probably 1965.

In 1962, I had a summer job at the printing plant. For the most part I was relegated to compacting printers waste in a hot and humid basement room. But my uncle gave me a really dirty job going through thousands of the accumulated zinc printing plates in a HUGE basement storage area, cataloging them, and then deciding which ones to keep (for possible later reprinting) or throw out (because who would ever want to reprint them?). The plates were from maybe 20 years of all of Zabel Brothers full color jobs). I found the zinc plates of the Bowman and Topps baseball cards (one plate for each color). We decided that there would never be a reason to reprint the same sheets as the players change every year. So we threw them out. (Actually I think they were sent to a scrap metal dealer so it is possible they survived someplace, though I doubt it.) We didn't have any inkling that the value of the cards would increase over time, we just assumed old cards were worthless and kids would only want the current year's players. Not much foresight......

I can't tell you the year that Zabel Brothers took over printing of Topps cards but it would have been in the mid-to-late 50s."