Newsletter - 2025-10-31

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Pro Set [trade/commercial : cards : O/S - Dallas, Texas] "Les Cartes des Pros du Hockey" (1991) 341/615

Today in 1959 saw the first use of a face mask in ice hockey, by Joseph Jacques Omer Plante, goalkeeper for the Montreal Canadiens.

He was born on January the 17th, 1929, on a farm in Quebec, the first child, though he would go on to have ten siblings. It is said that he was playing hockey at the age of three, but that seems doubtful, but when he was five he fell from a ladder and landed awkwardly, breaking his hand, and it did not heal properly, in fact he only had it mended as an adult. That made it hard for him to hold a hockey stick, and led to him playing in goal, where no stick was required.

We know he first played on a proper team when he was twelve, and that by the time he was fifteen he was playing on five teams. He was first paid when he was not much older - fifty cents a game. Later on he was offered the sum of eighty dollars a week, by three teams, but his parents wanted him to stay in school, and he graduated with honours in 1947. However, the only job he could find was a clerk, which he took whllst waiting for better things. And they came within the month, an offer from the Quebec Citadelles hockey team, for eighty-five dollars a week.

At this point we must speak of his "Rookie" card. This is always said to be one of the "Bee Hive" hockey photos, over a thousand of them, which were issued in three groups through golden syrup for twenty years, starting in 1934 and ending in 1968. However you will often see it being sold as dating from 1934, and that is way too early for our man, who did not begin to play with the Quebec Citadelles until 1947 - plus, the uniform on the card is not theirs, it is for his next team, the Montreal Canadiens, whom he may have joined in 1949, but for whom he did not start to play until 1953, after their standard goaltender fractured his jaw.

Maybe because of this, Mr. Plante seems to have been very safety conscious, and he had been working on making the perfect protective mask for some time. There was already a mask available, made of plastic, but it was not popular, mainly because the efforts involved in sport caused sweat and steam to fog the mask. One of Mr. Plante`s first attempts at improving it was to cut a hole in the mask for the eyes, but also to release the steam that comes up the side of the nose. However he still had not made it work when, in April 1958, he was hit square in the forehead by a fast travelling puck. 

Coincidentally a salesman for Fibreglass Canada was at the game, and watched the events, and probably sat with nothing to do but think, during the forty-five minutes that the game was delayed whilst Mr. Plante was removed from the rink and worked on behind the scenes. He came up with the idea of making a mask out of fibreglass, it would only take a mould of the wearer`s face, and for them to have the patience and the bravery to sit whilst it was applied, and wait whilst it dried. The very next day he wrote to Mr. Plante and outlined his idea, but there was no reply, not for a long time. Maybe he was thinking too, or maybe he was trying not to think about hockey at all, but suddenly he got in touch and said yes. 

His face was moulded in late 1959, under medical supervision at the Montreal General Hospital. He wore a nylon stocking first, then gypsum was applied on top. That made the mould for the actual mask, which was made from strips of fibreglass and polyester resin. 

The team coach was not as keen, he thought it would make him less able to see, and so he would not let him wear a mask in a game, though he wore it all the time in practise. But in November 1959 Mr. Plante had another incident, he was hit in the nose and mouth. And when he came back on the rink after treatment he was wearing the mask.

He was actually advised by the doctor that he ought not to play for several games, but the team had no other goalkeeper, and so a compromise was reached, our man agreed to play if he wore the mask. until his face was healed. And so he played. However he played on in the mask a while after that, and when he did agree to take it off, the team`s sudden run of luck came to an abrupt end - so the mask stayed on thenceforth. 

Now we must say that he was not the first goalkeeper to wear a face mask, that honour goes to Clint Benedict of the Montreal Maroons, in 1930, who wore a leather mask to protect his broken nose, but our man popularised it. 

He retired in 1965, but was tempted back three years later by the St Louis Bruins. He stayed there for two years and then was actually traded off to the Toronto Maple Leafs, followed, three years after that, by a spell with the Boston Bruins. Shortly after that came a change, for he joined the World Hockey Association as manager and coach of the Quebec Nordiques, but it seems he found that tiresome, he wanted to be back on the ice, and in 1974, when he was forty-five years old, he turns up doing just that, as goal keeper for the Edmonton Oilers. However he seems to have found that harder than he imagined, and he retired in 1975, after which he moved to Switzerland with his second wife. And he died there, on February the 27th, 1986, just after being diagnosed with stomach cancer.  He is buried in Switzerland too. 

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MONARCH Tobacco Works [tobacco : O/S - Louisville, Kentucky., U.S.A] "American Indian Chiefs" (1890) Unnd/4 -  M126-1 : X2/570 : USA/570

Today, in 1889, North Dakota and South Dakota were both admitted to the Union.

Before that,  at least from March the second, 1861, they were joined together, as the Territory of Dakota - and before that they were the northern part of the land which was acquired from the French in 1803, and the southern part of which was pretty much ceded to the Hudsons Bay Trading Company. However the name Dakota harks back to the original inhabitants, the Dakota branch of the great Sioux tribe, whose stewardship of the lands was ended in 1858, when Missouri became a state, and the Native American lands were taken by the government, without recompense, and probably without a lot of thought. 

Therefore we chose to celebrate these original inhabitants, rather than the state which rose on their dreams - and here we have Black Hawk, born in about 1767, and earning his right to be chief by his courage in war and his loyalty to his men.

In 1812, and in 1832, he fought with the British in the hope of moving settlers away from the tribal lands, which ended badly in one way, for he was captured by the Americans and paraded as a trophy - though during his custody two interesting things happened. The first was that all the captives posed for portraits, and the second was that he was invited to tell the story of his life to a government interpreter, who had it published as a book in 1833, as "The Autobiography of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk, Embracing the Traditions of his Nation" - now it may have been slightly embellished by Black Hawk, and the interpreter, but it remains one of the very few actual and contemporary accounts of Native ways of life and beliefs, and it was the first of them all. 

On his release, he went to Iowa and lived with his people, they included him in meetings, but he seems to have lost a lot of his influence, and he was also frequently usurped by his great rival, Keokuk.

He died on October 3, 1838, after a short illness, and was buried without ceremony on a farm belonging to a settler who seems to have become his friend. The following year, though, he was dug up, quite illegally, so that his skeleton could be put on show. This was stopped by two of his sons, but they never got their father`s remains back, they were given to the governor of Iowa, who placed them with a historical society, and six years later they were amongst items that were destroyed in a massive fire. Or so the story goes, as it is thought that they were not in that place at all, but were instead given to a physician friend of the governor, who left them in turn to his partner, and then when both moved, they were found in the house by workers, thought rather creepy, and buried without ceremony somewhere in Burlington Cemetery.

When we published our original World Tobacco Issues Index in 1956 the entry for this issuer, and set, was as follows : 

                         MONARCH Tobacco Works, Louisville, Ky., U.S.A.
Cards issued about 1890

• AMERICAN INDIAN CHIEFS (A). Lg. 100 x 68. Unnd. (4 known). See X2/570. Ref USA/570 ... M126-1

The X2 link leads us to the back of the book, where the following appears : 

• X2/570  AMERICAN INDIAN CHIEFS. (A). Large size. Selection of subjects from the Allen & Ginter series under USA/2. Issued by Monarch Tobacco Works. Unnumbered. 4 known :- 
  
  1. Black Hawk - Sac & Fox
  2. Geronimo
  3. Keokuk
  4. Red Cloud

There are some changes that need to be made to this. Firstly Black Hawk`s name is not followed by "Sac & Fox", as we show here it says "Dakota Sioux". The "Sac & Fox" actually belongs to Keokuk, and Geronimo`s card says "Apache". And presumably Red Cloud`s is followed by "Dakota Sioux", as on the Allen & Ginter version. 

By the time of our updated World Tobacco Issues Index, published in the year 2000, there has been a bit of a change, and the entry now reads 

                         MONARCH Tobacco Works, Louisville, Ky., U.S.A.
Cards issued about 1890

• AMERICAN INDIAN CHIEFS (A). Lg. 100 x 68. Unnd. (4 known). Ref USA/570 ... M789-150
   
• THE SEASONS. Lg. 108 x 60. Girls, without captions. Unnd (12). Ref USA/561

The one thing which puzzles me is why these four alone were chosen - and it seems unlikely that any more are out there, or they would have turned up by now. In addition none of the tribes featured ever lived in Kentucky. 

As for Monarch Tobacco, that was started by three brothers, Basil, John, and Marcus Doerhoefer, plus E.J. Coggeshall who had just left the National Tobacco Works, it being unclear whether he left for another reason, or whether he was tempted away to join the brothers. There was also a man called dePauw, who had connections with lots of tobacco companies, which greased the company`s wheels very smoothly right from the start. They started by making "plug" chewing tobacco in 1901, ending up with a four storey building at the corner of West 30th and Madison Streets, which encompassed offices, stores, stripping and processing units, wrapping and pressing lines, and going on up to the top floor where the materials were laid on long table to dry out naturally.

Their top selling brands were “Kickapoo,” as on our card, plus “Wineberry,” "Lucky Dream,” and “Premium Fig.” Fig is also mentioned on our card, and it is still used today in the making of tobacco, though only for scent, which adds a sweet, fruity, and exotic tone. This is not why they mention it though, for when this card was issued it was the leaves of a plant called the flddle-leaf fig which were dried and used as the wrapping around the tobacco to make the cigars. As for "Kickapoo", they were Native Americans too, but from Wisconsin and Illinois, not Kentucky. 

The company ended rather abruptly, and sadly, in 1910, after a lawsuit, two years earlier, which was started by Monarch Tobacco in response to their belief that the Mengel Box Company was artificially inflating the price charged for the tobacco boxes they supplied. This led to the discovery that the box company was partially controlled by the American Tobacco Company. Now I have not been able to find out what the result of that suit was, but in November 1910 the Monarch Tobacco Company went into receivership, and was bought by American Tobacco. They did keep the name, briefly, incorporating it into the rather awkward "American Tobacco Monarch", but then used the premises only for storage, until they built a larger warehouse in Louisville, Kentucky. 

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Figurine Panini [trade/commercial : cards and stickers : O/S - Italy] "Antique Cars" (1992) 6/100 

Today in 1911, two more brothers, Louis Joseph, and his older brother Arthur Chevrolet, plus the founder of General Motors, William Crapo Durant, ( who was unsurprisingly known as "Billy"),  started a company called the Chevrolet Motor Car Company. They also had partners, car maker William Little and Dr. Edwin R. Campbell, Durant`s son-in-law of Durant.

Our card starts the tale of very well, as it tells us that "Louis Chevrolet immigrated to the United States from Switzerland in 1900". He was then aged twenty-two. However he had already moved several times, once, with his father, a watchmaker, to Burgundy in France, where he became enormously interested in bicycle racing and the sciences behind it - but it was his invention of a mechanical wine pump, built with the components from a broken one cylinder motor and a tricycle, which started him on the route to developing cars and engines. Then he moved to Paris, and worked at several mechanics in and around the area.

In 1900 he did indeed emigrate, all the way to Montreal in Quebec, but he then moved on to New York, eventually working for the French car manufacturer de Dion Bouton. It was here that he started racing, in a Fiat, then moved to a Buick, and this is where Mr. Durant enters the picture, for he owned Buick at that time. And he liked our man a lot, asking him to work on many projects, in fact he is credited as one of the co-designers of the 1910 Buick 60 Special, which he also raced; there were only two ever built, and his blew a tire and rolled at Indianapolis in June of that year. It was repaired, but nobody seems to know what happened to it after that. What is supposed to be the other one, because it shows no signs of mending, does survive, and is on display at the Sloan Museum in Michigan - which is named after a long serving C.E.O. of General Motors, Alfred P. Sloan.

After the race cracks started to appear in the friendship between our man and Mr. Durant, though it is not thought to be as a result of that race. Eventually things had got so bad that our man sold Mr. Durant all his shares and walked away. He kept racing, and created a new car, the Cornelian. which he drove in the 1915 Indianapolis 500. He then went off and founded the Frontenac Motor Corporation in order to make parts which would basically convert a Model T Ford into a racing car - and he drove one of those cars to victory at Indianapolis in 1920.

In 1927 he became interested in aircraft, and designed an engine, starting a company called Chevrolair, but it was not a great success and killed forever by the Great Depression. Then, in 1941 he had a heart attack, and died, but he was already in a bad way, having had a leg amputated due to a complication of arteriosclerosis, in which fats and cholesterol clog the arteries and stop the blood from completing its assigned course about the body.

Our set was issued in Canada, and billed as a chance to "Discover the World`s first cars and the innovative spirit of those who brought them to us."

There was also a kind of promo card which, if you got one, allowed you to select ten free cards to complete your collection, but you had to return the card and it does not appear you got it back, or maybe because you filled it out with the numbers you wanted and the details of your name and address it was simply discarded on return. Either way they are scarce. 

There were also two checklists, which reveal that the set was divided into sections. These covered cards 1-45 and cards 46-100. The first ten cards are "The Innovators", company heads, Gianni Agnelli of Fiat, Henry Ford, Enzo Ferrari, Karl Benz, Ettore Bugatti, Louis Chevrolet, Charles Stuart Rolls and Henry Royce, Walter Owen Bentley, Frederick and August Duesenberg, and Gottlieb Daimler. It then goes through the years, in date order. starting with the Benz Tricycle of 1886, one of six "First Real Automobiles" and ending that checklist with "The Great Depression" and card 45, the Bentley 8 Liter of 1931. The second checklist continues with "The Great Depression" and the Packard 840 Big Eight, also of 1931.

If there is a fault with the set is demonstrated here, as after 1938 it is rather rushed, cars of "The Second World War" being just twelve, from cards 85 to 96, and cars of "The Post War World" numbering only four, and ending with the Ferrari 166 Mille Miglia Barchetta of 1950. I would rather they had expanded the pre-war cars to fill the entire checklists, and had a second set covering the cars of 1939 to the date of issue. But for all that it is a very attractive set. 

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Suchard [trade : chocolate : O/S Switzerland] "Cuisiniers" / cooks - series 298 (19??) Un/6 

So I have at last abandoned the Newport Rising, for now (too much researching and no cards) and am going to bring you a blast from the past, but hopefully not literally. 

You see today, in 1963, a children`s toy, made by Kenner, and called "The Easy Bake Oven" went on sale. There was a choice of colours, yellow (Harvest Gold) or blue, and every one they made was sold out by the end of that Christmas, so in 1964 they made three times as many, and also added a popcorn popping attachment which enhanced any ovens sold last year. 

Before I gallop on, yes, this was a working oven, on a smaller scale. It had a pair of incandescent light bulbs for the heating source, and it came with pans and cake mix. Cake mix was also available separately. You had to add only water, and put the pan into the oven through a slot - and after cooking a cake comes out the other end. If you don`t believe me, check out YouTube, where there are loads of people demonstrating theirs. (Barry Lewis` is especially funny)

This was, of course, not the first ever child`s oven, they had been made since Victorian times, and not all of them were safe -  there was one sold by Lionel in the 1930s, which had two electric burners, and in the 1950s many contained fibreglass. However our one was an amazing success, seeing none other than Betty Crocker providing special cake mixes for it, and even Jim Henson designing a special Muppet style character for it. By 1971 it was available in four colours, sunshine yellow, lime green, sky blue and burnt orange and by the end of the decade poppy red was also available. By the end of the 1970s the design was very different though, and it was reflecting the shift to microwave style ovens. 

Once Kenner was bought by Hasbro in 1991 the oven continued to be made, and improved, slowly turning it into more of a microwave. However, there were a lot of problems in the early 2000s, concerning a new model, which saw complaints of crush injuries, involving the front loading door, and burns. It was given an age advisory of only for children over eight years old, and all those models which had already been sold were offered a retrofitting kit, a plastic grate which prevented small fingers entering the oven. However in July 2007 the complaints were still coming in - and almost a hundred thousand ovens had to be recalled. After that, the ovens were re-designed, and the light bulbs replaced by a heating element. And these are still made today, though you can also find the originals online, and at fairs and markets. 

This set also features children cooking, with proper ovens. It is usually known as "Les Cuisiniers" or the cooks, and look at that battery of pans on the reverse side.

The cards in the set are quite elusive, but so far I know of : 

1.  
2.  
3.  
4.  L`Omelette (omelettes) - girl
5.  Les Crepes (pancakes) - boy
6.  L`Oeuf a la coque (boiled eggs) - girl
7.  
8.  
9.  
10.  
11.  Le Cafe (coffee) - boy
12.  

In fact when I started I thought it a set of six, but then found card eleven, so I added another six numbers. 

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Cinemagazine Edition [trade : magazines : O/S - Paris, France] "Film Star Postcards" (1925) 390/2100+

Onwards and upwards, and today in 1925 saw the release of one of the most highly rated silent films ever, "The Big Parade" starring John Gilbert and our featured star Renee Adoree

She was born Jeanne de la Fonte  in Lille, France, on the 30th of September 1898, to parents who were circus performers. She followed them, becoming skilled at acrobatics and dancing, and eventually as a bareback rider, and they toured throughout Europe. However during a tour of Belgium the family were caught up in the First World War.

It is unclear what happened after that, but she is next heard of after the war, in Australia, touring with a vaudeville act which were not her parents. From that she went into movies, a film called "£500 Reward", directed, written by, and starring Claude Flemming. It was his fourth film and her first. She is actually billed as "Rene Adoree (of the Magleys)", which was the troupe that she was touring with. However this disproves the theory that the Fox Studio changed her name only in 1920. 

This led her to New York, and a vaudeville musical, on stage, which started out as "Oh Uncle" and segued into "Oh What a Girl". In 1920 she had an offer of another film, "The Strongest", which saw her joining the Fox Studio. This led her to meeting and marrying Tom Moore, and the two co-starring in her second American film, "Made in Heaven". However the marriage was not, and they divorced in 1924. 

Less than a year later, she filmed "The Big Parade",  regarded as her greatest role ever, in which she plays a French girl who falls in love with a soldier, played by John Gilbert, who is traumatised by what he has seen. She seems to have connected with John Gilbert in many ways, and they starred together in eight further films, but though he married four times it was never to her.  In fact there is a strong rumour that they were engaged in 1927, after he had given up on ever marrying Greta Garbo, and she forced his hand by saying she was to marry William Sherman Gill. As he did not respond she did indeed get married, but two years later they were divorced, it becoming final on the third of March, 1929. And sadly, she found John Gilbert was already in a relationship with Ina Claire, who he would marry on the ninth of May 1929. 

Her health was never good, a combination of the circus life, the touring, and the cold of the nights out in a caravan beneath the stars. And we will probably never know what happened during the time she was caught up in the First World War. She frequently suffered with chest infection, and by the time she started to film a talkie with Ramon Novarro, called "Call of the Flesh", in 1930, she had been diagnosed with tuberculosis. Her doctor actually advised that she quit the picture, but she insisted on fulfilling her contract, and that made the situation worse. She left the set and went straight to Arizona, where she was in a sanitarium for two years. This was thought to have restored her, and she left in April 1933, but she quickly relapsed and died on the 5th of October, just a few days after her thirty-fifth birthday 

Our card is not her "Rookie" card, not by a long way, that honour goes to the American Caramel Company set of "Movie Stars" (E.123), issued in 1921, in conjunction with her second film, "Made in Heaven", and we know that because the card cites her as "Star in Goldwyn Pictures",  and they produced that film in that year.

To close, you may be thinking that this item is not even cartophilic, it is just a postcards, but wait ...  for if you look, this is the original, full size, image, from which her picture , as used on the set of Societe Job "Film Stars", was derived.

And you can see that for yourself at the Trading Card Database/RASJ. Where, if you look closer still, along the arm of her dress, you will see it credits "Cinemagazine" in small white letters.

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Pokemon/Nintendo [trade/commercial : cards : O/S] "Pokemon characters" (2003) 88/97

For our penultimate card of the week, I am going to introduce you to Nancy Wiggington, the first female BBC national news reader, though on screen she was billed as Nan Winton.

She is also a centenary lady, as she was born today in 1925, in Portsmouth.

When she was just fifteen her mother died, and she had to leave school to run the house. This did not last too long and she joined the Land Army - which makes it sound rather like she ran away. The Land Army girls introduced her to the theatre, which she loved, and she managed to find a spot on a touring company which entertained the troops, and took her out to Italy. That only lasted for a short while after the war had come to an end so someone suggested she apply to the the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She did, and was accepted. This led to all kinds of interesting things, including a short stint as a demonstrator at the Ideal Home Exhibition. Whilst there she was spotted by the BBC, who employed her behind the scenes.

She may have stayed there, if it were not for ITV, which started in 1955, and, as just one of its attractions, offered a female newsreader, Barbara Mandrell. Not to be outdone, BBC started out with Armine Sandford, on BBC West in 1957, and, when that was not decried, they asked Nancy Wiggington. She first sat at the news desk on screen on the twentieth of June 1960, but there were lots of internal rumblings and she was removed in March 1961. At that time the BBC said that she was unpopular with the public, but she recalled having nothing but warm messages and friendly support from them, it was the BBC themselves who were prone to be snippy. However, it was their loss, as she moved to ITV, where they welcomed her, as a news reporter and interviewer, with open arms. 

She moved to Dorset after her retirement, and died on the eleventh of May, 2019, after a fall.

I had the worst time trying to find a card of a lady reporter, but then one of my contacts mentioned they had one, and here it is. I did not, however, expect it to be a Japanese card. But in Pokemon some of the trainers are indeed young women who are working as television reporters, who first started to appear in 2006 with the Generation IV games. They went on to specialise in the training of Pokemon who either flew, or conducted electricity. 

And. in another nod to our original story, if you have a card of a cameraman and a card of a reporter, they make a pair, and the reporter is renamed, to an interviewer. 

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Fritz Homann A.G. [trade : margarine : O/S - Dissen, Germany] "1000 Jahre Deutscher Geschicte" / a thousand years of German history (1934) 182/200

Well I have to say I never thought I would get here by today, but here I am, with some gaps in the card gen and codes, and still lacking five pictures. But hey its only 6 p.m. on Friday night, that ought to be do-able...

I also took a long time to confirm this date, and only did so by looking at the original letter, online, which proved it to be true. 

So we can close with another centenary, the announcement that the French were to unearth and repatriate the body of the Red Baron to his native Germany.

You see, after the crash in which he died, his body had been taken into the care of the Allied Forces, and been given a full military funeral at a cemetery near Amiens. In the early 1920s, a new military cemetery was opened at Fricourt, to where the body was removed, but this created some flak amongst the locals, and it was decided to move the Germans back home. So within the month his youngest brother had been advised that the body was ready for collection. He hoped that he could bury it at Schweidnitz, with several other relatives including his father, but the German government stepped in and wanted it buried at the Invalidenfriedhof Cemetery in Berlin, amongst the military heroes and past leaders, and the family agreed, especially as the body would in that way receive a state funeral.

Despite this it did not rest in peace. During the Second World War a huge new tombstone was levered into place, marking Richthofen as a hero of the Third Reich, and during the Cold War this was not only vandalised but frequently caught in the crossfire between the military and people hoping to flee East Germany through the graveyard.

Finally, in 1975, the body was again moved, to Wiesbaden, where other members of the family were interred.

This card is another by Fritz Homann, who you can read much more about with our Card of the Day for the 24th of November 2024.

And it shows our man doing what he loved best, flying with supreme skill amongst the clouds, and evading his pursuers, which ultimately he failed to do...