Significant New Info on 1960 Post Cereal Set

[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

[toppcat]

Originally Posted by 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

PM me me your email and I'll send it to you Mike

[Kenmarks]

If you have not seen, the REA auction has started recently and there are 9 complete 1960 Post Cereal Grape Nuts Flakes boxes with the different players all in one lot. Believe likely these are the same boxes that were sold roughly 10 years ago at a Mastro auction. What a nice lot. Been trying, so far unsuccessfully, to get a read on the production codes at the bottom of those boxes to verify exactly when the boxes were produced in 1960. Anyway, just thought I would point out this lot.

[Kenmarks]

I think we figured out when the 1960 Post Cereal sports-card promotion boxes were issued. Fred McKie worked with Robert Edwards Auction (REA) and obtained the cereal packaging date codes for each of the 9 1960 Post Cereal sports-card boxes that they are auctioning in their current auction. These dates are all in the same general time frame that Kirk Robinson's box is. Those dates were:

Kirk's Johnny Unitas Box January 20, 1960 (small Grape Nuts Flakes box)

REA boxes:

Johnny Unitas January 21, 1960 (small box)
Al Kaline January 26, 1960 (small box)
Don Drysdale January 8, 1960 (small box)
Frank Gifford January 21, 1960 (small box)
Bob Cousy January 21, 1960 (small box)
Frank Gifford January 21, 1960 (small box)

Mickey Mantle March 9, 1960 (large box)
Harmon Killebrew December 1, 1959 (large box)
Bob Pettit December 1, 1959 (large box)

So based on these cereal production dates, believe we can say with a high degree of certainty that these cards came out around the beginning of 1960.

[skil55voy]

Great info Ken.

[Kenmarks]

Got my SCD today (Jan 4th issue) and was so pleased to see the magazine had published an article about the 1960 Post Cereal findings of our group.