Significant New Info on 1960 Post Cereal Set

[toppcat]

This 7/8/83 article from SCD may be of some interest:

[Kenmarks]

Very interesting. Thank you Dave. I had seen this article earlier, perhaps maybe Fred or one or the other team members found it when surveying folks when we were trying to collect information. Maybe, or perhaps probably, you were the one who supplied the article back a year and a half ago. It seems like the three cards that were seen that day so long ago all come from the large size GNF boxes (two for sure, and would imagine Gifford did also just because likely the person buying the cereal that generated the cards probably regularly bought the same size box.) One thing I don’t think I noted in the Net54 posting was that throughout the various Post Cereal Cards Promotions of the 60s, cards from the larger GNF boxes are tougher to find than those from the smaller GNF boxes. So in my mind, besides the nice fine that day, each of those cards were among the tougher ones to acquire of the 1960 Post Cereal cards. Hey, thanks for sharing. Very much appreciated.

[whiteymet]

Hi Guys:

I am at The National. If anyone is interested in getting the "other" Gifford" you don't have LMK which you have.

I know I saw one and maybe two here at the show. Don't know which variation/version they were, but will be glad to check for you.

PM me with which you have and I will see if the one you need is here at the show.

Best,

Fred

[brian1961]

Bravo, guys, bravo!!!!!!!!!!! I am so proud of you.

As I wrote in NEVER CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN, the set was released right after the 1960 baseball season. With NFL football in full swing, it would make sense that if six small /four large boxes fit best on their printing press, selecting a football player to be on both sizes would ostensibly make sense. Johnny Unitas was the game face star, but Gif played for New York, and the General Foods' corporate offices were in White Plains, NY, so Frank would have been chosen over Johnny U. The New York market towers over Baltimore. I KNOW this is pure speculation, but I hope you give it some consideration.

Foremost, would any of you gentleman confirm or enlighten me about the brief, specific window of time during 1960 when these Post Cereal Sports Stars appeared on their Grape Nuts Flakes boxes?

Again, kudos to youse guys for your tenacity at joining forces on the Net to present the hobby with some new information.

Best regards to you all. --- Brian Powell

[Kenmarks]

Hi Brian--hope you are doing well. In going through your book several years ago, probably focused on other areas of it (Jell-Os) and missed I guess the notation of when these cards were issued. Great information. In fact today, I was thinking that the next effort should be trying to figure out when the cards might have been issued (and was guessing baseball season given the predominance of baseball stars and a couple of other minor reasons--sounds like I was wrong). Thanks for sharing!!!

[Kenmarks]

Looking for a little help from anyone who might have a 1960 Post Cereal Sports Card Panel that still has the bottom part of the cereal box. Recognize this is a bit of a needle in a haystack request, but there must be a few of these out there in collector land.

Background: In early summer Fred McKie posed a question to a number of us Post Cereal card collectors as to what the embossed 4 number code (not printed in ink, just dented into the cardboard) meant on the Post Tens trays coming from the 1961 baseball card promotion. Robin Pauls kind of took that question and ran with it. With the help from collectors including Bill Rothney, Terry Faulk, Mike Tiry, Dan Mabey, Dave Worley, Mike Skiles, David Charles, Fred and myself, Robin built a matrix of embossed numbers tied to the various years of the various cereal flavors for both the Baseball (1961-63) and Football (1962) promotions for boxes that we had in our possession. What was eventually determined was that this code was the production date of the various Post cereals. The code is embossed on the bottom of the box. The four-digit code had the first digit showing the year (so 1961 was “1”, 1962 was “2”, and 1963 was “3”), and the next three digits showing the Julian date (so January 1st was “001” and January 2nd was “002” and so forth). Thus a box of Post Cereal that was produced on say February 25, 1962 would be coded 2056. Codes could not be found on all boxes, but certainly a decent number of them. It was easy to see that the codes aligned perfectly with the upcoming sport’s season with Baseball card boxes being produced in January, February, and March and Football card boxes being produced in August, September, and October in the data Robin collected. It was a really good collaborative effort that also showed the Jell-O baseball card boxes of that era also contained the same processing coding.

So related to the reason for this Net54 post, Brian Powell and myself are trying to determine when the 1960 Post Cereal Sports Cards were issued. There was a thought in the hobby that this occurred at the end of baseball season as the football season was beginning. But this may not be true as Kirk Robinson has a 1960 Post Cereal Johnny Unitas box with a Julian date stamp of 0021 on the bottom part of the box which would seem to indicate a production date of January 21, 1960 for that box. We are hoping that we might be able to find a few other 1960 Post Cereal boxes with embossed Julian date stamps on the bottom of the cereal box to be able to say without question that the 1960 Post Cereal Sports Card production only occurred in the early part of 1960. Any collector out there have a bottom panel of a 1960 Post Sports Card box with a Julian date stamp??

[skil55voy]

Does anyone have the SCD article posted by Dave (Topcat) in this thread in a PDF file? I would like a copy to add to my history files regarding Post Cereal and Jello cards. Thanks, Mike