By Brian Joura December 31, 2020
In the second half of
the 1970s, there was another major baseball card set distributed nationally
available to collectors. These were the Hostess Baseball Cards, which were
issued in both individual size and in three-panel formats if you bought a box
of Ding Dongs or Twinkies. These were officially licensed, too, so you had the
full logos and no airbrushed caps. There were good selections of players in
these sets, produced from 1975-1979.
By the time these came
out, it was well known that the Post cereal cards from the 1960s were more
valuable if you had the entire panel, rather than cutting them out along the
dotted lines. Still, the panels came with those same cut lines if you just
simply had to have them at a normal card size.
My collection includes
a bunch of panels from the initial set, yet fewer as the decade grew on. Not
sure why this is. Maybe they were traded for other cards. Or maybe Hostess
products got more expensive and mom started buying No Frills stuff, instead.
And that was ultimately the issue with collecting these Hostess cards – if you
were a child of the 70s, you had to depend on mom to buy these for you. Kids
would go to the store and buy packs of cards. But generally we didn’t go to
Shop Rite, Pathmark or the A & P and buy a whole box of Suzy Qs to get
three baseball cards.
I can remember going
to Mary’s department store, the only place in town that sold rack packs. And
even though it was a cramped little store, and even though those rack packs
were right by the register, I would look through them all to see the cards that
were on the top and the bottom, looking for Mets cards or cards that were
needed to complete my set.
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