Card of the Day - 2023-07-04

National Chicle Diamond Stars
National Chicle Gum Company [trade ; chewing gum : O/S : USA] "Diamond Stars" (1935) /108 - R.327

Here we have Jimmie Dykes, though this is wrong, for his name was James Joseph Dykes, and he abbreviated it to Jimmy. He was born in 1896 and made his debut for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1918, staying with them until 1931, then moving to the Chicago White Sox, whose stadium, Comiskey Park, was used to host the 1933 All Stars game. He was third baseman here, but had also played second base, and he would go on to become a coach and a manager. In fact he is featured on the 1951 set of Bowman Gum "Baseball Picture Cards" - card 226 - in his managerial role for the Philadelphia Athletics, though he also, first, managed the Chicago White Sox, winning just one short of nine hundred games. 

The Trading Card Database / Jimmy Dykes has almost a hundred and fifty cards of him, starting in 1921. And you will notice that several cards make the same spelling error with his name.

National Chicle Gum Company were based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but the "chicle" part of their name has a very long history, for it is Spanish for Gum, and was manufactured from special trees that grew in South and Central America. Funnily, the word chicle does not mean chewing gum specifically, but any sticky substance. However the production and chewing of this chicle was well known to both the Aztec and the Maya as a breath freshener.

This set is lengthy for its time, and it was issued gradually over three years, 1934 to 1936. However there has been some research done at dating the statistics on the reverse, and this has led to dates being recorded for each card, which is how we get 1935 for this one. There are also quite a lot of cards with different coloured text, for some reason, maybe to denote reprints, and so purists call this a set of 170 not 108. 

The cards are slightly off square, at 2 3/8" x 2 7/8", and are very well drawn. In addition they are shots of players in action rather than the portraits which often appear for sports stars. They must have appealed greatly to small boys, and so they are hard to find in mint condition.