How can we celebrate #NationalBubbleGumDay without starting with Fleer - the first company to make bubble gum.
Fleer Corporation was founded by Mr. Frank Fleer in 1885 as a confectionery business, and its first ever bubble gum was produced in 1906. This was called Blibber-Blubber. It blew acceptable bubbles, but it tended to burst and stick firm to the face, and so it was never sold to the public.
Fleer first issued baseball cards in 1923 in a range of sweets called "Bobs and Fruit Hearts". They are very similar to strip cards, but have an advert for the company on the reverse and were cut out individually before inserting them in the packs.
Then, in 1928, an employee, Walter Diemer, either came across the 1906 paperwork or by lucky accident started working on making a gum that could be blown into a bubble. It worked, but the colour, grey, was a bit uninspiring, until another experiment led him to add some red food dye to the mixture, and that made it pink. He called the product "DubbleBubble", and the word "bubble" became forever linked with "gum"
So, first things first, how do we know that this was 1961 when the same sticker, with the plain blue "YANKEES" is often seen offered as 1964. The answer is on the reverse, for ours has the "DoubleBubble" packet at the top, and the 1964 version is all text and has a large number at the bottom.
These nineteen Team Logo stickers were actually issued as part of a set of 154 cards, which have standard backs and show players on the fronts.
Our set was a follow on from the 1960 "Baseball Greats", and, like it, showed players from the past. There was a good reason for this, that being that Topps owned the exclusive rights to showing current players, all apart from Ted Williams, who had signed exclusively with Fleer.
It was issued in two halves, cards 1-88 appearing in 1961, and cards 89-154, plus our stickers, appearing in 1962. However it is. confusingly, known as Baseball Greats 1961.