January Toy show: For the "Educator's" out there!

 Do you remember that toy show I attended or at least mentioned it 5 weeks ago? Well, I am finally to the point I can start posting some of the acquisitions. Some of you may know that I collect more than just baseball cards. I collect a lot of different things one of which is Coca-Cola or rather soda pop stuff. The majority being Coke which says a lot as my last divorce (2006) took out the really good stuff (in her defense) I was collecting the Coke items for her as I am a Pepsi product guy (Mountain Dew baby!). That was one of the trade off's for my baseball card collection. I also collected John Elway cards for her too which I did get in the divorce well 99% of it anyways. She snagged some stuff she wasn't supposed too. No big deal and I haven't actively pursued his cards since. I do get a few here and there from old friends. I haven't updated that list on TCDB in over a decade. That was the first thing I did on TCDB. At that point I was #3 with just over 1500 unique cards/items. I'm sure it is somewhere around 2K now, but again that collection is absolutely the very last thing I think about. I probably should get rid of it while the card market is HOT, lol.

Now for a little griping. 2024 Topps series 1 is on shelves. No I haven't gotten any. I'll wait to get the cards for free :). However, let me gripe.

902 Braves! base card plus 29 parallels. Dodgers have less than 700, and the World Series Champions have less than 800. What is this garbage. Birds, flowers, eggs, watering can, true photo, rabbits, on and on. Lord, someone at Topps needs to get with the program.

Enough with the background and griping, let's get back to the Coca-Cola items I picked up at that toy show. You see along with the toy show was a postcard/paper show just as big. After I made my initial walk through on the toy side (looking for baseball cards and Star Wars stuff) I ventured over to the other side. WOW! I have never seen so many postcards in one place. I had no idea that that was a world of it's own. Needless to say I gave it a walk through and stumbled on a few baseball cards and other VINTAGE cards. I will be posting them all, but tonight is the Coke cards. Yes.... cards. I may even throw in a one of the others.

From 1929-1933 Coke produced these educational "nature study cards" to help with the then newly idea of visual study guides. There were a total of 8 series each having 12 cards in each. They were sent to educator's across the country. A reprint set was supposedly produced in 1960, but I haven't seen any of those. These are obviously originals, but I had never seen any of these before and was unaware of their existence. 

I was captivated and dug through an entire shoe box filled with misc. vintage cards in let's say beater condition. I probably missed the few that I am missing for the complete run. I bet they were in the box. 

When I got back home I did my research on them. I also found a complete mint set still in the original packaging that I could have got for slightly more than I paid for these. That sucks, but hey it was already done at that point. 

I'm sure eventually I will track down the few cards I am missing. 

Now that the education portion of tonight's post is over how about another little fun vintage set. Say a 1934 Whitman Dick Tracy card game/set. 

There was also a set very similar produced by Whitman in 1937 (in fact sold them through 1941). Pretty sure mine are 1934. There are also "replacement" cards available out there (reproductions). 

Nearly the entire set, missing just a couple. I hope you enjoyed the educational venture tonight with the Coke cards as that was the intention way back when they were produced. 

Have a great night and come back tomorrow for some more from this show.