Tip Top bread engaged in prolific promotions.  They offered cardboard jigsaw puzzles, toy guns, and most of all trading cards, sometimes in the loaf and sometimes mailed with proof of purchase.

The very obvious trading cards were baseball cards.

But other sports as well:

Curly Neal of the Harlem Globetrotters!  How quirky is that????   And buttons:

Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle we remember, but Eddie Shore?  Hockey fans will.  I didn’t.  But he was Tip Top great in his day.  As was Eddie Conn, light heavyweight champion.

And then oh so much more than just sports.

In 1942 there came a series of combat cards, some of which are shown below.

 Oh Pancho!   Oh Ceeesco!

 In 1976 the country got crazy about CB radio.  Music.  Dictionaries.  Lunch boxes.  And – Tip Top cards:

I showed these photos to my friend with some reluctance.  I feared that the trading cards would trigger a huge retreat into one of his collections, most of which were created by and gifted to him by Gabby.  I came back in a few minutes, leaving him time to digest the photos.  He had been inspired by the Atomic Gun:

He hadn’t stayed on the Red Ryder ad, but was lost in memories looking at this photo from his files.

Connie Mack stadium.  Philadelphia.  He is not from Philadelphia, but had visited several times before we met.  He could tell you a lot about the Whiz Kids.  The baseball cards had clearly launched him in this direction.

I prodded him.  What does he think of the promotions images?